Muslim anger with the West is, on Lewis's reading, somehow unique in the modern world. "Globalization," he wrote in a November 2001 New Yorker piece that is not included here, "has become a major theme in the Arab media, and it is almost always raised in connection with American economic penetration." In fact, globalization is a "major theme" everywhere, "raised in connection with American economic penetration" in Paris as often as in Cairo, in Caracas as much as in Kuala Lumpur. There is nothing uniquely Muslim about it. The same New Yorker essay accuses Muslims of selective opposition to "imperialist aggression" and of a "muted response" to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Yet tens of thousands of Muslims joined the jihad against Soviet occupation, compared with the small number of foreign Muslims who fought against, say, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. "Ironically," Lewis continues, "it was the United States, in the end, that was left to orchestrate an Islamic response to Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan." What is ironic about the capitalist superpower organizing a response to an invasion by its Communist rival? After all, America had the experience of using the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood against the secular Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and backing the extreme Wahhabi Saudi royal family against democratic reformers in the oil kingdom.

Lewis's evident sympathy for Israel renders him impervious to any Arab interpretation of events. He condemns those in the West who occasionally fall for Arab propaganda and complains of double standards. His prime example of both is the comparative reaction, as he sees it, to two massacres in 1982--the Syrian Army's assault on the city of Hama and the killings in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by Israeli-backed Christian Phalangists. He writes:

The troubles in Hama began with an uprising headed by the radical group the Muslim Brothers in 1982. The government responded swiftly. Troops were sent, supported by armor, artillery, and aircraft, and within a very short time they had reduced a large part of the city to rubble. The number killed was estimated, by Amnesty International, at somewhere between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand. The action...did not prevent the United States from subsequently courting [Syrian President Hafez al-] Assad.

He goes on:

The massacre of seven hundred to eight hundred Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila that same year was carried out by Lebanese militiamen, led by a Lebanese commander who subsequently became a minister in the Syrian-sponsored Lebanese government, and it was seen as a reprisal for the assassination of the Lebanese President[-elect] Bashir Gemayel. Ariel Sharon, who at the time commanded the Israeli forces in Lebanon, was reprimanded by an Israeli commission of inquiry for not having foreseen and prevented the massacre, and was forced to resign from his position as Minister of Defense.

Lewis proceeds to decry the West for condemning Sharon. "It is understandable," he writes, "that the Palestinians and other Arabs should lay sole blame for the massacre on Sharon. What is puzzling is that Europeans and Americans should do the same. Some even wanted to try Sharon for crimes against humanity." What are the real differences between the two massacres? In Hama, the Muslim Brothers launched a revolt that, had it succeeded, would have led to the overthrow of the regime and the establishment of a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist republic in Damascus. The Brothers murdered Baath Party and municipal officials, and they called for pogroms against the Alawite minority, whose military elite governs the country. The army responded to the Islamic resistance much as the American armed forces did in Falluja, albeit with greater ferocity. The Hama assault produced thousands of civilian casualties, many of which could have been avoided.

Fewer people died in Sabra and Shatila, as Lewis observes, but the entire population was unarmed and undefended following the evacuation of PLO forces from Lebanon. Sharon had given his word to Philip Habib, President Reagan's envoy, that he would not invade West Beirut or attack the refugee camps. He did both. His forces delivered the Christian militias, who had a history of massacring unarmed Palestinians, to the gates of the camps and protected them while they butchered men, women and children. If the United States expressed anger at Sharon, it was because he destroyed American credibility in the Middle East. His invasion of West Beirut and the massacres he oversaw forced the United States to return the Marines, who had supervised the departure of the PLO's fighters, to Beirut to protect the camps. There, they succumbed to the biggest suicide bombing of the time. Some Americans may have courted Assad after Hama, but the US Treasury subsidized Israel's occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights despite Sabra and Shatila. Americans had reason to demand legal behavior from a state on their payroll. Moreover, Israel's Kahan Commission did not reprimand Sharon "for not having foreseen and prevented the massacre." It held him "indirectly responsible" for everything that happened. He may have resigned as defense minister, but he remained in the Cabinet. He is now prime minister, and George Bush refers to him as "a man of peace." There are double standards, but not those Lewis claims to detect.

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