Choice quotes from History in a hard land
Choice quotes from USNews.com: History in a Hard Land. Fouad Ajami believes America's challenge in Iraq is more than sectarianism and insurgency.
In Fallujah, amid the siege and the fighting, a Sunni cleric, Ali al-Juburi, gave an Arab reporter a sense of this new faith: "America is a handmaiden of Israel, a creation of the minds of Jewish rabbis. Warring against America is a duty incumbent on every Muslim man and woman." This town prided itself on the lore of tribal solidarity and the blood feud and the "unforgiving life that pleases the friend and the death that smites the enemy."
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This is not a culture that has ever been kind to those who tried to tell it verdicts it did not want to acknowledge.
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Few Arabs have dared challenge those deadly dreams of their own people. The Arabs have been living in a "false world," as a man of the business elite wrote to me in mid-April 2004. He could have added that it was both false and powerful at the same time, that reality often faltered as its bearers attempted to breach those walls of denial and illusion. That lone man urging caution in Fallujah was not about to alter age-old ways.
These quotes are originally from Ajami's book The foreigner's gift.