The New Arab Revolt: or the return of Bernard Lewis and his disciples

I was reading last night in the New Arab Revolt published by the Foreign Affairs journal.  Of course, I don't recommend it at all: and it is an affair about Arabs in which only Zionists are invited.  Kid you not.  You begin with the piece by Fouad Ajami.  I mean, how many time does he have to recycle himself, really.  So many times.  I never liked this guy or his politics but I must admit that I relished reading him in the 1980s.  But now?  It is so repetitive: the flowery language gets old, when it is repeated over and over again.  How many times does have have to eulogize Arab nationalism, damn it.  I could not find one insight in that piece by him on Egypt (and it is recycled from a chapter in his Arab Predicament--on which Hanna Batatu told me: there are very few insights in this book).   But the piece by Martin Indyk should be read: dont get me wrong. He has no insights about the Middle East: he never did, and his adviser for his PhD proposal in Australia (which was rejected incidentally) told me that he was so ill-prepared specialize in the Middle East and that he mistook advocacy for expertise.  But the piece should be read because it is revelatory about the making of US Middle East policies.  He makes it clear that the support of Middle East dictatorships (and it is not only Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as he states) is a matter of policy (of course, he excuses it by talking about the priority of "peace", when he means the supremacy of Israel and its occupations.)   The piece by Bernard Lewis is an old one: and I have to apologize for Fouad Ajami if I said that he recycles himself because no one has recycled himself more than Bernard Lewis since his article in the late 70s in Commentary about the "Return of Islam" (don't you like the thesis of "return of Islam"?  Like it went hunting or something).   Lewis is really really out of it.  He claims that there is no Arabic word for "citizen" (I kid you not, he said that.  Just google the word to see how many books in Arabic there are with the word citizen or citizenship etc).  And if I read one more time the distinction between freedom and equality among Arabs and Muslims (Lewis never distinguishes between the two groups), I am going to do what Sen. John Glen did in his last trip to space: throw up non-stop.   And Lewis has a bizarre section in which he maintains that the Nazis came to the Middle East during WWII and established their own orders there.  I kid you not:  this is the foremost Middle East historian.  He then concludes that the Nazi regimes in Syria in Lebanon were the ones who inspired contemporary Arab ideologies.  I now have to say this: maybe we should include the latest writings of Bernard Lewis but in a course on Middle East Political Humor (unintended).