August 4, 2020

Lebanese Leader Condemns Prof. Rubin’s Nazis, Islamists Book; British Telegraph Disagrees

Walid Jumblatt

In his condemnation of the Israeli response to the situation in Gaza, prominent Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt has spoken out against the late Prof. Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz's latest book, Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Yale University Press:  2014). From an article in the Lebanese Daily Star: In response to the book “Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East” by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Jumblatt condemned … [Read more...]

FROM STATION Z TO JERUSALEM

Figure 1. On July 15, 1942, at his East Prussian headquarters near Rastenburg, Hitler meets the former Iraqi premier Rashid Ali al-Kailani, a member of the al-Qadiriyya brotherhood, which to-gether with seven similar Islamist organizations played a key role in Berlin’s Middle East policy from 1894 on. On May 15, 1942, al-Kailani promised Hitler in a secret letter “to fight the common enemy until final victory.”

PDF version available here Excerpted from Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Barry Rubin & Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, published February 2014 by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2014 by Barry Rubin & Wolfgang G. Schwanitz. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.   FROM STATION Z TO JERUSALEM   It began as another normal summer day in June 1942 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, the place where SS trainees were taken to … [Read more...]

Written in Gratitude, on the 70th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings of 1944.

Soldiers under fire on Queen sector of Sword Beach

A few years after I made aliyah, my parents sold the house that my sister and I had grown up in and moved to a sheltered housing facility for elderly people in north London. My mum and dad are warm and friendly people and they soon made friends with many of the other couples on the estate. Among these were a family by the name of Lamb – Ken Lamb and his wife Meeda. Ken Lamb was Devon-born, and Meeda was Welsh. Ken had worked for many years in the construction trade in London, and he and my … [Read more...]

Who Is the “Imperialist Tool” in the Middle East?

barry-rubin

Let's examine claims from the radical academia currently hegemonic in North America and Europe. What is fascinating is that a well-informed observer can easily demolish such claims. That's precisely why such people are not being trained today and those who do exist must be discredited or ignored to keep students (and the general public) relatively ignorant. To paraphrase George Santayana’s famous statement, those who fail to learn from history make fun of those who do. I know that the … [Read more...]