Today's Q & A with Victor Hanson

A Reader's Question:

Q. What reading would you suggest for someone wanting to understand the historical origins of the conflicts in the Middle East, as well as general reading on the history of the Middle East.

A. I reviewed Fouad Ajami's The Foreigner's Gift for the next issue of Commentary and found it very insightful. Michael Oren's Six Days of War has valuable information well beyond the 1967 war, and, of course, Bernard Lewis's, What Went Wrong was the first really to reject the 'colonialist, racist, imperialist' mantra of the 1980s. More controversial are the more recent Londonistan by Melanie Phillips and Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroy the West from Within.

There are roughly two schools of thought: Madrid, London, Beslan, India, Manhattan, Bali, and other jihadist attacks have no connection. Radical Islam is a figment of the paranoid ethnocentric Western imagination, while the real problem is U.S. and Israeli imperialism and the rise of the police state nurtured on Islamophobia, which sums up sentiment on the European street. In contrast, most in the U.S. accept that Islamic fascism is a disease spreading, like its autocratic precursors, throughout the Middle East and offering a cheap victimization and scapegoating for mostly self-inflicted miseries. So that is the great divide in the West, and I'm afraid the appeasers seem to be winning.