Flore, Fishawi, Shati, McNamara
All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of
Café Flore, Paris; poetry, under that of Fishawi, Jeddah or Cairo; learning under the title of the Shati Tea-and-Falafel-shop, Gaza; foreign and domestic news, you will have from
McNamara Ground Ops Lunchroom, Detroit; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from my own apartment.
From a brief glance at the specialties of the professors at Near Eastern Studies departments in the US and England, it would appear that the former emphasis on being "balanced" toward the colonial settler state that took land from the people of Palestine, has created such a tolerance for the Tel Aviv's sectarian view of Judaism that the same sectarianism is applied to the study of the contemporary monotheistic religions of the Near East. One sees more specialists in various aspects of Islam, or Eastern Christianity at Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, and Oxford than one even sees among the religious elders in the Middle East!
Students graduate from Religious studies at these great universities and then become spokespeople for defending sectarian currents, like the Muslim Bretheren in Egypt, Lybia, and Syria, or the anti-Shi'a stance of several of the Gulf States.
Of course, the defence of such sectarianism is well within the academic canon established by Bernard Lewis, and popularisers like the New York Times' Freidman, who gloated on their ability to converse with kings and princes in the parliamentary regimes of the Middle East with the same equanimity with which they met with the leaders of the colonial settler state(Israel) who had come to power through the application of terror(Dayan, Begin, etc. of the state of Israel).
Edward Said, in his book, Orientalism, predicted that the US-UK view of seeing the East through "orientalist glasses" would eventually be taught right in US-UK universities and go on into the Arab universities of the Middle East. That has happened. We had a Muslim Brethren professor, who rigged his election to president of Egypt, Mohammad Mursi. And we have MBA's in Dubai convincing the City of London that being against interest is something "Islamic" and "Shari'a." So-called Islamic Finance is just an ADOPTION of the hatred of usury that characterised the European early middle ages, not the Arab Eastern middle ages where jews had no such relation with the kings. Jews, like all other religious groups were tolerated and held a variety of professions. The Sultans did not borrow money.
Anyway, that is what we are ranting about today here in Gaza at Shati' Tea and Falafel Shop, which has the best falafel in the Middle East.
From a brief glance at the specialties of the professors at Near Eastern Studies departments in the US and England, it would appear that the former emphasis on being "balanced" toward the colonial settler state that took land from the people of Palestine, has created such a tolerance for the Tel Aviv's sectarian view of Judaism that the same sectarianism is applied to the study of the contemporary monotheistic religions of the Near East. One sees more specialists in various aspects of Islam, or Eastern Christianity at Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, and Oxford than one even sees among the religious elders in the Middle East!
Students graduate from Religious studies at these great universities and then become spokespeople for defending sectarian currents, like the Muslim Bretheren in Egypt, Lybia, and Syria, or the anti-Shi'a stance of several of the Gulf States.
Of course, the defence of such sectarianism is well within the academic canon established by Bernard Lewis, and popularisers like the New York Times' Freidman, who gloated on their ability to converse with kings and princes in the parliamentary regimes of the Middle East with the same equanimity with which they met with the leaders of the colonial settler state(Israel) who had come to power through the application of terror(Dayan, Begin, etc. of the state of Israel).
Edward Said, in his book, Orientalism, predicted that the US-UK view of seeing the East through "orientalist glasses" would eventually be taught right in US-UK universities and go on into the Arab universities of the Middle East. That has happened. We had a Muslim Brethren professor, who rigged his election to president of Egypt, Mohammad Mursi. And we have MBA's in Dubai convincing the City of London that being against interest is something "Islamic" and "Shari'a." So-called Islamic Finance is just an ADOPTION of the hatred of usury that characterised the European early middle ages, not the Arab Eastern middle ages where jews had no such relation with the kings. Jews, like all other religious groups were tolerated and held a variety of professions. The Sultans did not borrow money.
Anyway, that is what we are ranting about today here in Gaza at Shati' Tea and Falafel Shop, which has the best falafel in the Middle East.
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