Emmanuel Sivan

You should read Emmanuel Sivan's Radical Islam to know that he has nothing to offer. This Israeli Orientalist reads Arabic but has nothing to offer explain summaries of what he reads. That is exactly what he did with that aforementioned book. There is not one original insight in that book. And he has an article in Haaretz: and he tells you about his ignorance about the Middle East right at the outset: "Due to the lack of reliable public opinion polls, authoritarian rule and media outlets that are trained what to say, it's not surprising that the assessments of the man on the street are so incomprehensible and based merely on impressions and gut feelings." See this section? This is classic Israeli Orientalists (Bernard Lewis does this in the beginning of every speech) to justify their ignorance and their wild generalizations about Arabs and Muslims, and their exclusive reliance on anecdotal evidence. Sivan like other Israeli Orientalists don't know that Arabs have their own public opinion surveys and notice that he only cites whatever he found to be politically convenient to prove--you guessed it--that the the thrust of Arab attitudes to Israel is anti-Semitism. That is the extent of the sophisticated analysis of this Israeli Orientalist. But notice that Israelis really enjoy Arab dictatorships because they serve Israeli without regard to Arab public opinion: "Thus, for example, more than half the respondents in Egypt and Jordan expressed a positive attitude toward Hamas, but this did not prevent President Hosni Mubarak from building an "iron wall" between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Neither he nor King Abdullah of Jordan agreed to cut off diplomatic ties with Israel during Operation Cast Lead."