The Times Book Review ran a negative review yesterday of Rashid Khalidi's new book "Sowing Crisis," that offers the traditional diagnosis of Arab problems and human-rights issues, and urges Obama not to listen to the scholar:
Why has the Arab world remained largely on the sidelines of
globalization? There are, of course, many explanations offered. One of
the most striking comes from the United Nations’
Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of Arab scholars in
2002. They concluded that Arab nations suffer from a “freedom deficit,”
from pervasive gender inequality, from a weak commitment to education
and from the widespread denial of human rights. They might have added
that the experiences of colonialism and of the cold war have left much
of the Arab world with the deeply ingrained habit of blaming its
problems on outsiders.
Since Khalidi inadvertently caused
Barack Obama some grief during the presidential campaign when it came
out that Obama attended a party in 2003 for a man some Republicans
called a “terrorist professor,”the president is unlikely to display
this book in public. But he should read it, not so much to chasten his
sunny view of our recent past in the Middle East as to be reminded how
very hard it is to make progress in a region where memories are long,
and practically everything is blamed on the United States (or Israel).
