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Singularity
05-23-2018, 12:42 AM
Excerpt:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/obituaries/bernard-lewis-islam-scholar-dies.html


Bernard Lewis, Influential Scholar of Islam, Is Dead at 101
Image
Bernard Lewis in his study holding a French newspaper with a picture of Saddam Hussein. Few outsiders and no academics had more influence with the Bush administration on Middle Eastern affairs than Mr. Lewis.CreditMarianne Barcellona/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
By Douglas Martin
May 21, 2018

39
Bernard Lewis, an eminent historian of Islam who traced the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to a declining Islamic civilization, a controversial view that influenced world opinion and helped shape American foreign policy under President George W. Bush, died on Saturday in Voorhees Township, N.J. He was 101.

His longtime partner, Buntzie Churchill, confirmed the death, at a retirement facility.

Few outsiders and no academics had more influence with the Bush administration on Middle Eastern affairs than Mr. Lewis. The president carried a marked-up copy of one of his articles in his briefing papers and met with him before and after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Mr. Lewis gave briefings at the White House, the residence of Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

His essential argument about Islam was that Islamic civilization had been decaying for centuries, leaving extremists like Osama bin Laden in a position to exploit Muslims’ long-festering frustration by sponsoring terrorism on an international scale. After Arab terrorists hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in a coordinated operation sanctioned by bin Laden, Mr. Lewis was immediately sought out by American policymakers.

He provided critical intellectual linkage between the religious fundamentalism of bin Laden, which he said was a response to oppressive Arab regimes, and the secular despotism of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Democracy, he said, was the solution for both. “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us,” Mr. Lewis wrote.
Though he later said he would have preferred that the United States had fomented rebellion in northern Iraq rather than invading the country, he was widely perceived to have beaten the drum for war. In an essay in The Wall Street Journal in 2002, he predicted that Iraqis would “rejoice” over an American invasion, a flawed forecast echoed by Mr. Cheney and others in the White House.

People spoke of a “Lewis doctrine” of imposing democracy on despotic regimes. His book “What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East” (2002) became a handbook for understanding what had happened on Sept. 11. (The book was at the printer when the attacks occurred.) Articles he wrote in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal were widely discussed.
On the war’s eve, Mr. Cheney mentioned Mr. Lewis on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” as someone who shared his belief that “a strong, firm U.S. response to terror and to threats to the United States would go a long way, frankly, to calming things down in that part of the world.”

In 2004, Mr. Lewis said in a PBS interview with Charlie Rose that pursuing Al Qaeda’s forces in Afghanistan was insufficient. “One had to get to the heart of the matter in the Middle East,” he said.


‘Clash of Civilizations’
Mr. Lewis long propounded his diagnosis of a sick Arab society. In a cover article in The Atlantic in 1990, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” he used the phrase “clash of civilizations” to describe what he saw as inevitable friction between the Islamic world and the West. (The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington borrowed the phrase in an influential article of his own in 1993, crediting Mr. Lewis.)
The book cover of “What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response,” by Bernard Lewis.
In his article, Mr. Lewis wrote: “Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world.

“But Islam,” he continued, “like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.”

In his view Islamic fundamentalism was at war with both secularism and modernism, as embodied by the West. Fundamentalists, he wrote, had “given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.”
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Abz2000
05-23-2018, 02:13 PM
Bernard lewis must have been very stupid.

There are two logical possibilities:

1.
He was ignorant of the events of september 11 and all of the North American foreign policy decisions leading up to and beyond that date, and he was just reading from a script penned or typed by other international crime syndicates.

2. He knew that the likelihood of the wtc towers - including wtc building number 7 (solomon brothers building) which wasn't hit by a plane - collapsing into their footprints at near freefall speed and acceleration - was near to zero and amongst the very least possible outcomes when taking other global events into account, and was involved in the global deception and criminal acts himself - and was therefore insulting his own intelligence along with that of others - especially since he was stupid enough to oppose his own Creator.

It is highly unlikely now that he will be able to search his soul and immediately find the correct answers to give to the angels who will certainly come to him for preliminary questioning.

Thank God he's dead.
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سيف الله
05-23-2018, 05:30 PM
Salaam

So the dean of orientalism has passed away. This opinion piece sums him up very well.


Do not weep for Bernard Lewis, high priest of war in the Middle East

For decades, Bernard Lewis, who has just died, provided the intellectual and moral justification for bigotry and war in the Middle East


It is customary to speak well of the dead. I refuse to observe this convention in the case of Bernard Lewis, a historian of Islam and the Middle East, who died over the weekend aged 101. I can think of no modern scholar who has perpetrated half as much harm. Lewis was intellectually a towering figure. This meant he had the ability to do great good.

Instead, he became the intellectual high priest for the calamitous wars which have caused such bloodshed across the Middle East, while doing unlimited damage to the standing of the United States.

A racist approach

Lewis's influence continues to this day. US Secretary of State and former CIA boss Mike Pompeo declared on 20 May: "I owe a great deal of my understanding of the Middle East to his work." Regime change in Iran was one of Bernard Lewis’s political projects and, inspired by his intellectual hero, Pompeo may be about to have a go at achieving it.

We have been here before. Lewis was the moral leader of the small group of intellectuals who argued for the Iraq invasion of 2003. Within days of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, he was agitating for the downfall of Saddam Hussein, expressing opinions which delighted the neoconservatives pressing for military action in the Middle East.

He later deceitfully claimed that he had been against the Iraq invasion. This is rubbish. He was directly involved. Even before 9/11 he'd pressed for regime change in Iraq, and after the attack he seized his chance. Lewis was there when the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board held its notorious meeting to consider military action against Iraq at the end of September 2001.

Lewis told the board that the United States should support so-called democratic reformers in the Middle East, "such as my friend here, Ahmed Chalabi". As one of the world's leading experts on Islam, Bernard Lewis had no excuse for falling for Chalabi, the charlatan who led the Iraqi National Congress.

Yet he did - hook line and sinker - with terrible consequences that the Middle East lives with to this day.

Lewis's mistake over Iraq was just one manifestation of a hideous world view that included a nakedly racist approach to the Middle East. He told Vice President Dick Cheney: "I believe that one of the things you've got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power."

Intellectual justification for war

Lewis expanded on this view in a series of books and lectures that painted a backwards-looking Muslim world seething with hatred against a modernising and virtuous West. It was him, and not Samuel Huntington, who coined the phrase "clash of civilisations".

"We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them," observed Lewis in 1990, adding: "This is no less than a clash of civilisations, the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both."

This view that Islam and the West are embroiled in an existential battle for survival has proved hugely influential on both sides of the Atlantic. It shapes official thinking to this day. Yet it is laden with contradictions. If the world is facing a war of civilisations, why do states remain the powerful actors in world affairs? If Islam is at war with the West, then why are the large Islamic states (Egypt, Malaysia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc) for the most part Western allies?

A propagandist against Islam

Lewis was also guilty of a disastrous intellectual reductionism. To put it mildly, the world's estimated 1.8 billion Muslims do not all think the same. Lewis often wrote as if they did. No one person can or should be blamed for all the death and destruction we are witnessing in the Middle East. But Lewis bears his share because he provided the intellectual and moral justification for bigotry and war.

Not that you would know this from reading today's newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and many other outlets carry long obituaries full of praise for one of the great sages of our age.

More than 30 years ago Lewis was engaged in a furious series of exchanges with the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said.

Both great scholars struck heavy blows in this debate, but I believe that Said was onto something important when he argued that "Lewis simply cannot deal with the diversity of Muslim, much less human life, because it is closed to him as something foreign, radically different, and other."

At the heart of Said's attack on Lewis was the assertion that he was less an objective scholar and more a propagandist against Islam and the Arab world. The controversy still rages but my guess is that history will agree that Said was right. In the meantime, as another war looms again in the Middle East, this time with Iran, Lewis's influence and standing remains as high as ever.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns...ast-1876449346
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سيف الله
05-29-2018, 06:28 PM
Salaam

More opinion.

Alas, poor Bernard Lewis, a fellow of infinite jest

On Bernard Lewis and 'his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong'.


"Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth three-and-twenty years," the gravedigger tells Hamlet. It turns out the skull is Yorick's, the king's jester.

It is here that Hamlet says his famous lines: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

I was instantly reminded of Yorick's skull and Hamlet when I heard Bernard Lewis had died. Then the lines of an Omar Khayyam poem and his unceasing awareness of the mortality of human presence ran through my mind:

"For I remember stopping by the way

To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay:

And with its all-obliterated Tongue

It murmur'd -"Gently, Brother, gently, pray!"

It is unseemly to recall the horrors of a horrible man upon his passing. But Bernard Lewis was not a regular rogue. He was instrumental in causing enormous suffering and much bloodshed in this world. He was a notorious Islamophobe who spent a long life studying Islam in order to demonise Muslims and mobilise the mighty military of what he called "the West" against them.

Just imagine: What sort of a person would spend a lifetime studying people he loathes? It is quite a bizarre proposition. But there you have it: the late Bernard Lewis did precisely that.

He was the chief ideologue of post-9/11 politics of hate towards Islam and Muslims.

"Dr. Lewis's friendship - and ideological kinship - with the Cold War hawk and Israel supporting Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.)," we are told, "opened prominent doors in the capital, eventually giving Dr. Lewis favoured status among top White House and Pentagon planners before the 2003 invasion of Iraq."

That is the most recent legacy of Bernard Lewis. The invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq.

But Lewis' affiliation with powers of death and destruction went much deeper than that. Afghanistan and Iraq are in ruins today, millions of Arabs and Muslims have been murdered, scarred for life, subjected to the indignity of military occupation and refugee camps, in no small measure because of the systemic maligning of Muslims Lewis advanced in his books and articles, and with them informed generations of imperial officers.

For them, Lewis was the source for what Islam is and who the Muslims are. When US President Donald Trump said "Islam hates us," it was Bernard Lewis speaking. When Trump's first National Security Adviser Michael Flynn said "Islam is… like cancer," it was Bernard Lewis speaking.

I was still a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania when I first encountered Lewis in person at a Princeton University conference. There was always a distance, a manufactured aloofness between him and the rest of the scholarly community.

He was more at home with heads of state, spy chiefs, military officers, intelligence communities, settler colonialists in Palestine, imperial viceroys in conquered Muslim lands.

He had power and basked in it. We detested power.

He is now showered with praise by the most powerful Zionist Islamophobes in the US and Israel. We are on the opposite side of the fence - with Palestinians, facing Israeli sharpshooters whom he favoured, enabled, encouraged, weaponized with a potent ideology of Muslim and Arab hatred.

'How abhorred in my imagination it is'

With the death of Bernard Lewis, the long saga of exchanges between him and Edward Said finally comes to an end. I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and present at their now legendary debate in Boston on 22 November 1986, during the Middle East Studies Association convention.

Long before that, like thousands of other young scholars, I followed their debates on the pages of the New York Review of Books. I was, and I remain, squarely on Said's side. But that was not, nor is it now, a merely political position; rather, it was and is a potently moral and intellectual disposition.

The difference between the two men was the difference between the politics of lucrative power and the intellectual courage to revolt.

Lewis was a historian of power and in power and for the power that ruled us all and he served happily and rewardingly. The more powerful the imperial audacity of a mode of knowledge production, the more Lewis pursued and served it.

Said was precisely on the other side of the fence, in the tradition of anticolonial struggles of Asia, Africa, and Latin America - which he theorised into our reading of Palestine.

You looked at Lewis, and you saw Lawrence of Arabia incarnate - a British colonial officer with a clumsy command over the natives' language and culture, out in the field to serve the most vicious colonial enterprise of the century. You looked at Said, and you saw him in a direct line from the most revolutionary critical thinkers of all time - alongside Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, V Y Mudimbe, Enrique Dussel, and of course Antonio Gramsci and Theodore Adorno.

Said attracted an entire generation of critical thinkers from every continent on planet earth. Lewis attracted career opportunists who, like him, wanted to be near and dear to power.

In January 2003, just a few months before Said passed away, he and I were invited to Rabat, Morocco for a conference on "Dialogue of Civilization". He could not go. He called me from Spain insisting I go.

I went to Rabat, only to learn upon my arrival that Lewis was there too. For the entire duration of the conference, while I was sitting with the late Egyptian philosopher Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and literary theorist Ferial Ghazoul discussing hermeneutics, Lewis was chaperoned by the young Noah Feldman, the legal adviser to Paul Bremer, who was the "provisional coalition administrator" of Iraq after the US invasion.

In one shot you could see how Lewis was passing the baton of service to empire to the next generation.

'The evil that men do lives after them'


The current state of opinion about Bernard Lewis, now appearing in various post-mortem reflections and obituaries, has him hated by the global left, adored by the right-wing Zionists, and in between, you have these goody-two-shoes who try to sound wise and impartial and speak "in nuances". Yes, he was a great scholar early in his career, they now say, but later his scholarship diminished, and he became too political. Such branding of Lewis, loved by some and hated by others, deeply distorts a much more serious issue.

Beyond the political and moral abhorrence for Lewis is the legacy of his mode of thinking and writing, his colonially and racially infested manner of knowledge production that was as much subservient to powers that read and enriched him as it was profoundly at odds with the critical turning point in postcolonial knowledge production.

Lewis was no scholar objectively committed to historical truth. Quite the contrary: He has left behind not a single book in which he was not cherry-picking facts and figures to demonise Muslims, dismiss and denigrate their civilisation, and subjugate them normatively, morally, and imaginatively to the colonial domination of those who he served.

His most famous recent book, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002) is not a work of scholarship. It is a manual of style, an indoctrination pamphlet, for teaching security, military, and intelligence officers in the US and Europe as to why they must seek to control the Muslim world.

Lewis was always on the wrong side of history, blinded by his hatred, animated by the most racist cliches in the trade. His reaction to the rise of Arab revolutions in 2011 is the perfect example of who Bernard Lewis was and how he thought.

"Another thing is the sexual aspect of it," he opined at the commencement of Arab revolutions, "One has to remember that in the Muslim world, casual sex, Western-style, doesn't exist. If a young man wants sex, there are only two possibilities - marriage and the brothel. You have these vast numbers of young men growing up without the money, either for the brothel or the bride price, with raging sexual desire. On the one hand, it can lead to the suicide bomber, who is attracted by the virgins of paradise - the only ones available to him. On the other hand, sheer frustration."

This is obscenity in black and white - moral, political and intellectual bankruptcy on full throttle.

His book on The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (1967), which serious scholars like Farhad Daftary later dismissed as nonsensical gibberish, was definitive to the manner he wanted to portray Muslims - as congenital murderers.

His forte was in manufacturing a cosmic divide between "Islam and the West," between Muslims and the modern world, a subject that was the staple of his writing, most condescendingly in his two books: The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982) and Islam and the West (1993).

Bernard Lewis was no scholar of Islam. He was a British colonial officer writing intelligence for his fellow officers on how to rule the Muslim world better. A Handbook of Diplomatic and Political Arabic (1947) - one of his earliest volumes - foretold his career as a colonial scribe at the service of the British and later American empires.

Today, when we think of Bernard Lewis' legacy, we think of the Islamophobic industry that has US President Donald Trump and his gang of billionaires crowned at the White House.

Today, when we think of Bernard Lewis, we think of his political progenies - John Bolton, the national security adviser of the United States, the most degenerate sabre-rattler sitting right behind the US president. Today, when we think of Bernard Lewis, we think of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a notorious bigot with a pathological hatred of Muslims. Today, when we think of Bernard Lewis, we think of Gina Haspel, the newly appointed director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, a woman who ordered the torture of Muslims.

No one was more instrumental in manufacturing the illusion of a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between "Islam and the West" than Lewis - his singular achievement that later Samuel Huntington picked up to produce The Clash of Civilizations.

This needs no further evidence and proof than looking at who is praising him after his death. "Bernard Lewis was one of the great scholars of Islam and the Middle East in our time. We will be forever grateful for his robust defense of Israel," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, himself, of course, another world-class authority on Islam and the Middle East!

"As a true scholar and a great man," chimed in newly minted US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, another topnotch scholar in the field of Islamic studies, "I owe a great deal of my understanding of the Middle East to his work [...] He was also a man who believed, as I do, that Americans must be more confident in the greatness of our country, not less. Thank you, Mr. Lewis, for your life of service."

"You simply cannot find a greater authority on Middle Eastern history," this according to Dick Cheney, the former vice president who brought us waterboarding and Abu Ghraib torture chambers and who, of course, is also a stellar authority on Islamic history and doctrine himself.

You put Netanyahu, Pompeo, and Cheney together, with their vast love and admiration for Lewis, and you can gather the company he kept, the hatred he flamed, the death and destruction he sought visited upon the people he "studied" to death.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/alas-poor-bernard-lewis-fellow-infinite-jest-180528112404489.html
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سيف الله
06-09-2018, 09:19 PM
Salaam

more comment and analysis.

Forty years of Orientalism, an eternity to go

The West's punitive civilising mission in the East shows no signs of abating 40 years after the publication of Orientalism


This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Edward Said’s celebrated text Orientalism, in which he explored various interconnected meanings of the term in question, such as "Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient".

In the preface to the 25th anniversary edition of the book, published shortly before Said's death in 2003, he took the opportunity to provide some critical updates to the Orientalist scene on account of that ongoing post-9/11 exercise in Western domination known as the War on Terror, which was to thank for, inter alia, "the illegal and unsanctioned imperial invasion and occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States" in March of that year.

The West against Arab/Muslim other


Naturally, Orientalist strategies of reductionism and demonisation had proved a boon to the war effort, with "mobilisations of fear, hatred, disgust, and resurgent self-pride and arrogance" pitting the "West" against the Arab/Muslim "Other".

Said noted the proliferation in US bookstores of "shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat, and the Muslim menace", not to mention the "omnipresent CNNs and Fox News channels of this world" as well as other media outlets regurgitating the same fabricated generalisations "so as to stir up 'America' against the foreign devil".

Indeed, one need not look very hard to discern a symbiotic relationship - between the US establishment on the one hand and peddlers of sensationalist drivel on the other - that furthers the bellicose aims of empire while also generating handsome profits for individual "terror experts" and the like.

In the meantime, America's own frequently diabolical behaviour - including the slaughter of countless Arab and Muslim civilians - is conveniently relegated to the realm of non-issues, or else is magically converted into Just One of Those Things That Happen When You’re Spreading Freedom and Democracy.

In his updated preface, Said singled out Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami (now both deceased) for their charitable scholarly contributions in helping the hawks of the George W Bush administration situate their destructive impulses in the proper Orientalist context.

Regarding Ajami, Said remarked that it seemed to him "entirely symptomatic of the precarious moment in which we are living" that, when US vice president Dick Cheney delivered an unhinged speech in August 2002 about the need to attack Iraq, he "quoted as his single Middle East 'expert'... an Arab academic who, as a paid consultant to the mass media on a nightly basis, keeps repeating his hatred of his own people and the renunciation of his background

A glance at the speech reveals that Cheney cited Ajami's prediction that "after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are 'sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans'". Speaking of which, I’ve got some oceanfront property to sell you in all three places.

Orientalist obscenity

To be sure, characters such as Ajami - who purport to provide indigenous confirmation of the inferiority of the Arabo-Islamic world and its perennial need to be set straight by Western militaries - are in high demand in foreign policy circles.

But non-indigenous ones are more than welcome, too. Take, for example, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, a former Ajami disciple who in 2001 pooh-poohed “all the nonsense written in the press” about concern for so-called “civilian casualties” in Afghanistan.

As it turned out, Friedman's unique access to the Afghan psyche had enabled him to determine that "many of those Afghan 'civilians' were praying for another dose of B-52s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not".

Taking Orientalist obscenity to even more creative levels in May 2003, Friedman proclaimed that US soldiers needed to go "house to house from Basra to Baghdad", wielding a "very big stick" and instructing Iraqis to "Suck. On. This".

And additional Friedmanian fun with metaphors took place later that year, when he observed: "Iraq is not a vase that we broke to remove the rancid water inside, and now we just need to glue it back together. We have to build a whole new vase."

While earning an apt retort from journalist Matt Taibbi - "Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a f***ing lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water?" - this particular assessment would seem to be a prime contender for evisceration by Said's analysis: "What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that 'we’ might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow."

Imperial meddling

As Said went on to note in his preface, imperial meddling in the lives of "lesser" peoples and "subject races" - be they Palestinians, Congolese, Algerians, or Iraqis - has routinely been discounted as a source of enduring relevance for afflicted populations: "Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depredations of empire is only a way of evading responsibility in the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern Orientalist."

Flash forward to May 2018, and this attitude was clearly at work following Israel’s massacre of 60 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in a single day, an event that enabled the New York Times to once again showcase its flair for dehumanising Israel’s victims while celebrating Israeli state terrorism.

Never one to pass up the chance for a good lecture, Friedman refrained in this instance from resurrecting his diagnosis that Palestinians are "gripped by collective madness" but did manage the following Orientalist annihilation of logic: "I appreciate the Gazans' sense of injustice. Why should they pay with their ancestral homes for Jewish refugees who lost theirs in Germany or Iraq?

"The only answer is that history is full of such injustices and of refugees who have reconciled with them and moved on, not passed on their refugee status to their kids and their kids' kids."

It's anyone's guess, of course, why refugees might up and decide that they are no longer refugees when they are effectively imprisoned in a besieged and blockaded coastal enclave by a US-backed entity that continues to regularly slaughter them seven decades after usurping their land.

Forty years after the publication of Orientalism, the West's punitive mission civilisatrice shows no signs of abating, but "civilisation" has proved itself vastly overrated.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/40-years-orientalism-and-eternity-go-1568470659
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