It’s too bad Bernard Lewis’s writing isn’t always as punchy as this anecdote from WSJ.com – A Historian’s Take on Islam Steers U.S. in Terrorism Fight:
Bernard Lewis often tells audiences about an encounter he once had in Jordan. The Princeton University historian, author of more than 20 books on Islam and the Middle East, says he was chatting with Arab friends in Amman when one of them trotted out an argument familiar in that part of the world.‘We have time, we can wait,’ he quotes the Jordanian as saying. ‘We got rid of the Crusaders. We got rid of the Turks. We’ll get rid of the Jews.’
Hearing this claim ‘one too many times,’ Mr. Lewis says, he politely shot back, ‘Excuse me, but you’ve got your history wrong. The Turks got rid of the Crusaders. The British got rid of the Turks. The Jews got rid of the British. I wonder who is coming here next.’
Another great bit:
“The question people are asking is why they hate us. That’s the wrong question,” said Mr. Lewis on C-SPAN shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. “In a sense, they’ve been hating us for centuries, and it’s very natural that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be winning.”He continued: “More generally … you can’t be rich, strong, successful and loved, particularly by those who are not rich, not strong and not successful. So the hatred is something almost axiomatic. The question which we should be asking is why do they neither fear nor respect us?”