The Long Shadow: Culture And Politics In The Middle East
Daniel Pipes has put together in one book various essays, articles and book reviews that he wrote and published in Commentary and elsewhere during the 1980s. He ties them up in five separate packages (Islam, the Persian Gulf, the Arab-Israeli conflict, terrorism and U.S. policy), and as a unifying theme cites his historian's perspective. He also takes note of cultural continuities and of a prescience at the time of writing that makes these pieces stand up today. The parts do not really make a whole, but Pipes is a talented scholar and observer, outspoken and at times controversial, always worth reading.
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In The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman argues that it is not violent Islamists who pose the greatest danger to liberal societies in the West but rather their so-called moderate cousins, such as Tariq Ramadan. Such a reading of contemporary Islamism, however, misses the many nuances of the movement and the real battles between reformers and Salafists.
As the recent fiasco with body scanners at airports demonstrated, the United States' homeland security strategy is off track. It has failed to harness two vital assets: civil society and the private sector. Washington should promote a sensible preparedness among individuals, communities, and corporations.
This article appears in the Foreign Affairs eBook, "The U.S. vs. al Qaeda: A History of the War on Terror." Now available for purchase.
Germans always knew that their foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, had been a leftist activist in the 1960s and 1970s. More controversial were recent disclosures that he had once assaulted a police officer and may have had links to terrorists. Fischer's evolution is the tale of a generation that changed Germany -- and then itself.

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