Since When Does A Militarily Occupied People

The Arab Rulers Are Basically Unpopular. They Are Supported By The United States Against The Wishes Of Their People. In All Of This Rather Heady Mixture Of Violence And Policies That Are Remarkably Unpopular Right Down To The Last Iota, It's Not Hard For Demagogues, Especially People Who Claim To Speak In The Name Of Religion, In This Case Islam, To Raise A Crusade Against The United States And Say That We Must Somehow Bring America Down.

This [terrorists Attacks On 9/11] Was Part Of Nothing. It Was A Leap Into Another Realm - The Realm Of Crazy Abstractions And Mythological Generalities, Involving People Who Have Hijacked Islam For Their Own Purposes. It's Important Not To Fall Into That Trap And To Try To Respond With A Metaphysical Retaliation Of Some Sort.

Look At Situations As Contingent, Not As Inevitable, Look At Them As The Result Of A Series Of Historical Choices Made By Men And Women, As Facts Of Society Made By Human Beings, And Not As Natural Or God-given, Therefore Unchangeable, Permanent, Irreversible.

The Sense Of Islam As A Threatening Other - With Muslims Depicted As Fanatical, Violent, Lustful, Irrational - Develops During The Colonial Period In What I Called Orientalism. The Study Of The Other Has A Lot To Do With The Control And Dominance Of Europe And The West Generally In The Islamic World. And It Has Persisted Because It's Based Very, Very Deeply In Religious Roots, Where Islam Is Seen As A Kind Of Competitor Of Christianity.

We Are At A Point In Our Work When We Can No Longer Ignore Empires And The Imperial Context In Our Studies. (p. 5)