The Nomad and the Olive Branch

There really is no such thing as bad publicity let alone checks and balances against those who promote it. However, there is such a thing as intellectual dishonesty, and such ignorance is a pox on how we conduct our affairs, and it is this same ignorance that prevents us from seeing the world through a more objective lens. Nevertheless, that humans operate the media and our sources of information only adds to the subjectivity, and there is an increasing and frightening authoritarian trend to dismiss all efforts of objectivity even from within the media sources themselves. Now, more than ever, do we need a strong and objective press, even in the face of all these allegations of "fake news", a dumbed-down, infantile, thuggish, and inane accusation lobbed to dismiss all objective yet negative depictions of certain asinine, incompetent, and unscrupulous politicians. To put things in perspective, Kant spoke of noumenal and phenomenal realities, reality impervious to our subj...

Photo by Gigi Ibrahim | CC BY 2.0 When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I stayed on a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and called themselves socialists. I liked them. One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond our perimeter. “Arabs”, they said, “nomads”.  The words were almost spat out. Israel, they said, meaning Palestine, had been mostly wasteland and one of the great feats of the Zionist enterprise was to turn the desert green. They gave as an example their crop of Jaffa oranges, which was exported to the rest of the world. What a triumph against the odds of nature and humanity’s neglect. It was the first lie. Most of the orange groves and vineyards belonged to Palestinians who had been tilling the soil and exporting oranges and grapes to Europe since the eighteenth century. The former Palestinian town of Jaffa was known by its previous inhabitants as “the place of ...

The bulk of modern history regarding the Crusades has an unashamedly Western slant to it. Even a cursory search of the word "crusade" on Amazon Books reveals a plethora of books written by authors from the U.K., the U.S., and elsewhere in the Western world, but a severe (emphasis) paucity of books from a more Arab perspective. One book that stands out is Amin Maalouf's "The Crusades through Arab Eyes", a book I believe is much-needed given the overall bias inherent in the gestalt of Western history books on this topic. The gold standard for history on the Crusades is currently the "The Oxford History of the Crusades", another book I will review in the not-so-distant future (and expect comparisons to this book given that I have completed reading it). The too-long-didn't-read version of this review is the following: if you're interested in history, buy it, read it, and keep it. Nevertheless, my full review follows. For those who are un...