After Abu Ghraib

It is not that I want to trash all books that I read. But I seem to mention mostly books that I don't like. But I should praise books I like more often. Take this book: Shadi Mokhtari: After Abu Ghraib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East, published by Cambridge. I strongly recommend this book: quite original in its scope and treatment. And I liked that she included to include the US and the Middle East in the same book, thereby undermining the fashionable assumptions about a methodological divide between East and West. She has conducted empirical research in Yemen and Jordan but I wish that she included more on the situations there. She is very effective in undermining the US claims about human rights and the use of human rights in foreign policy. Her sketch of the American public claims of their country was very smart and on target. She has a section about Arab human rights criticisms of US human rights record: this was the most original section but it suffered from a major weakness: her lack of Arabic forced her to rely on English language newspapers in Jordan and on translations from Arabic, and she even used MEMRI BUT--to her credit--wrote a special footnote explaining the lousy partisan mission of MEMRI (p. 157). I reviewed this book for Choice and recommend it to the general reader, and to teachers and students of human rights courses.