At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students the above question.
When there is little doubt that it is 'hosting' both al-Qaida and the Taliban, why was Pakistan not included in the 'axis of evil,' marked for regime change? Because in Pakistan, the US effected regime change without a change of regime...
His objective is to whittle down world history, to reduce it to a primordial contest between two historical adversaries, the West and Islam. His agenda is to discover all that was and is 'wrong' with Islamic societies and to explain their decline and
Contrary to the grandiose claims made by the ideologues, the neoliberal, open-door economic regimes imposed on the Periphery by Core capital - starting in the 1980s - have produced no economic miracles.
Without Saddam, the Iraqis would still be toiling under some vapid dictatorship, like Hosni Mubarak's, allied to Israel and receiving bribes from USAID.
If, somehow, the Americans could be persuaded to take the long view, they might begin to understand that the war against Iraq is perhaps the culmination of a process that had been long in the making.
About a hundred and fifty years back, Karl Marx had proclaimed that the British have a "dual mission" in India: they were there to destroy and rebuild Indian society...
This may not be America's war at all, much less a war of the West against Islam or Islamists. Instead, could this be Israel's war against the Arabs fought through a proxy, the only proxy that can take on the Arabs?
Alas, it could, but didn't -- the dark clouds of that barbaric tragedy did not have any silver lining: Americans could not be allowed to ask the right questions because these would only generate the wrong answers.
What Went Wrong? In an earlier era, before the Zionist movement descended on the heads of unsuspecting Palestinians, the least bigoted voices in the field of Oriental studies were often those of European Jews.
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