Word: margalit
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...most urgent intellectual challenge of our time. Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism (Atlantic Books; 165 pages) is the latest attempt to solve the puzzle of Islamic rage - and it is possibly the most provocative. Its authors, Ian Buruma, a respected commentator on Asian affairs, and Avishai Margalit, a professor of philosophy at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, assert that the ideas inspiring bin Laden and his fellow terrorists originally sprang from the West. The book is a belated follow-up to Orientalism, the classic 1978 work by Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, which described how Europeans have long stereotyped...
...become the most urgent intellectual challenge of our time. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies is the latest attempt to solve the puzzle of Islamic rage-and it is possibly the most provocative. Its authors, Ian Buruma, a respected commentator on Asian affairs, and Avishai Margalit, a professor of philosophy at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, assert that the ideas inspiring bin Laden and his fellow terrorists originally sprang from the West...
...Buruma and Margalit. They argue that when bin Laden and his acolytes accuse the U.S. and Europe of decadence, materialism and sexual immorality, they are largely recycling ideas and language that originated in the West. The authors point out that even as Western Europe and America began evolving into liberal democracies with capitalist economies, a countercurrent of opposition accused the newly emerging "modern" world of being devoid of spirituality. In the arts, Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Blake charged that industrialization was stripping people of their individuality and their connection to the past, while in politics, Karl Marx accused capitalism...
...Buruma and Margalit sometimes stretch the analogies between European antimodernism and Islamic fundamentalism too far-as when they compare a T.S. Eliot poem denouncing the ungodliness of modern cities to the frenzy that prompted the attack on the World Trade Center. Occidentalism might not provide a conclusive answer to the question "Why do they hate us?" But by relating how much of the rhetoric that fuels men like bin Laden came originally from the West, it makes the distinction between "them" and "us" murkier than we previously realized...
...huge memorial gathering in Tel Aviv's main square, renamed for the slain Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin's widow Leah vowed that "the silent majority" who support the Arab-Israeli peace process "will no longer be silent." Meanwhile Israeli authorities arrested Arik Schwartz, a soldier on active duty, and Margalit Har-Sheffey, a 20-year-old female university student, for suspected complicity in the assassination...