In The Islamic World, The U.s. Is

In The Islamic World, The U.s. Is Seen In Two Quite Different Ways. One View Recognizes What An Extraordinary Country The U.s. Is. Every Arab Or Muslim That I Know Is Tremendously Interested In The United States. Many Of Them Send Their Children Here For Education. Many Of Them Come Here For Vacations. They Do Business Here Or Get Their Training Here. The Other View Is Of The Official United States, The United States Of Armies And Interventions.

The Orient And Islam Have A Kind Of Extrareal, Phenomenologically Reduced Status That Puts Them Out Of Reach Of Everyone Except The Western Expert. From The Beginning Of Western Speculation About The Orient, The One Thing Th Orient Could Not Do Was To Represent Itself. Evidence Of The Orient Was Credible Only After It Had Passed Through And Been Made Firm By The Refining Fire Of The Orientalist’s Work.

The Central Fact For Me Is, I Think, That The [role Of The] Intellectual... Cannot Be Played Without A Sense Of Being Someone Whose Place It Is Publicly To Raise Embarrassing Questions, To Confront Orthodoxy And Dogma (rather Than To Produce Them), To Be Someone Who Cannot Easily Be Co-opted By Governments Or Corporations, And Whose Raison D'etre Is To Represent All Those People And Issues That Are Routinely Forgotten Or Swept Under The Rug.

The Definition Of Terrorism Has To Be More Precise, So That We Are Able To Discriminate Between, For Example, What It Is That The Palestinians Are Doing To Fight The Israeli Military Occupation And Terrorism Of The Sort That Resulted In The World Trade Center Bombing.

It's Very Hard, For Example, To Justify The Thirty-four-year Occupation Of The West Bank And Gaza. It's Very Hard To Justify 140 Israeli Settlements And Roughly 400,000 Settlers. These Actions Were Taken With The Support And Financing Of The United States.