Nation Topics - Bernard Lewis | The Nation

Reviews the book "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East," by Bernard Lewis.

Fouad Ajami is the director of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Born to Shiite parents in the remote southern Lebanese village of Arnoun and now a proud naturalized American, Ajami has become the most politically influential Arab intellectual of his generation in the United States. Ajami's unique role in American political life has been to unpack the mysteries of the Arab and Muslim world and to help sell America's wars in the region. His writing is saturated with hostility toward Sunni Arabs in general and to Palestinians in particular. Progressive Arab thinkers from Sadeq al-Azm to Adonis have issued equally bleak indictments of Arab political culture. Unlike these writers, however, Ajami has little sympathy for the people of the region. Though he remains a shrewd guide to the hypocrisies of Arab leaders, his views on foreign policy scarcely diverge from those of pro-Israel hawks in the President George W. Bush Administration. Ajami published a book entitled 'The Arab Predicament.' On the recommendation of Bernard Lewis, the British Orientalist at Princeton and a strong supporter of Israel, Ajami became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A work of lyrical nationalist mythology, Ajami's book 'The Vanished Imam' also provides a thinly veiled political memoir, recounting his disillusionment with Palestinians, Arabs and the left. The Shiite critic of the Palestinians cut an especially attractive profile in the eyes of the American media which made him a high-paid consultant in 1985. They had no idea that he was almost completely out of step with the community for which he claimed to speak. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 aroused greater outrage in Ajami than any act of aggression in the history of the Middle East. Neither Israel's invasion of Lebanon nor the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre had caused him comparable consternation.

French conscience is so uneasy about atrocities and complicity that there is an actual law in France that governs what may be said on the subject and in what tone. This statute can be employed to prosecute those who speak out of turn about crimes against humanity. Bernard Lewis, professor at Princeton University, has been arraigned under the same statute. He is one of the few scholars of any reputation who maintains that there was no genocide of Armenians in Turkey during the First World War. A group of Armenian lawyers and intellectuals in Paris has, brought civil and criminal suit against Professor Lewis, arguing that the unpunished annihilation of the Armenians was the model upon which later attempts at extirpation were consciously based.