From Philip Carl Salzman “It is time for the Iranian government to decide whether it wants to focus on the past, or whether it will make the choices that will open the door to greater opportunity, prosperity, and justice for its people.” —President Barack Obama, statement on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the […]
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Posted in Books, Culture on Sep 14th, 2009 Comments Off on ‘From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust’
MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Meir Litvak is senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and Esther Webman is a research fellow at the Moshe […]
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From Stephen Peter Rosen Understanding the reasons why Americans are more willing to wage wars than Europeans is of historical interest, but not only. It has been asserted, for example, that Americans were willing to wage war against Saddam Hussein because of the manipulation of the American political system by a lobby that was more […]
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Posted in China, Culture, Iran, Jacqueline Newmyer on May 5th, 2009 Comments Off on The China-Iran comparison
From Jacqueline Newmyer The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Islamic Republic of Iran are two of the trickiest countries with which the United States now has to deal. I’ll begin by covering two commonly discussed points of comparison and then turn to what I think are as important, the differences, before concluding with […]
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From Josef Joffe . [kml_flashembed movie=”http://youtube.com/v/rGsHUfl9xEE ” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /] . It was high time that anti-Semitism would find something hipper than those dusty Protocols of the Elders of Zion, concocted sometime between 1895 and 1902 by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski and then used by the pro-Tsarists to discredit reforms in Russia as a […]
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From Philip Carl Salzman In Israel, there is a political lobby group called “Peace Now,” as if peace were a circumstance that could be brought into being by the political will of one party. The same sentiment was expressed, somewhat less arrogantly, by Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, when he famously (or infamously) said that […]
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Posted in Counterinsurgency, Culture, Philip Carl Salzman on Sep 26th, 2008 Comments Off on Anthropology and strategic studies
From Philip Carl Salzman There is one central lesson that cultural anthropology has to offer. It is the lesson of Franz Boas, who founded American anthropology, of his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and of their intellectual descendants, such as Clifford Geertz, arguably the most influential American cultural anthropologist of the second half of […]
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