Monk

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Thanks to modern communications and the modern media, we are quite well informed about how Al-Qaeda perceives things. Osama bin Laden is very articulate, very lucid, and I think on the whole very honest in the way he explains things. As he sees it, and as his followers see it, there has been an ongoing struggle between the two world religions--Christianity and Islam--which began with the advent of Islam in the 7th century and has been going on ever since. The Crusades were one aspect, but there were many others. It is an ongoing struggle of attack and counter-attack, conquest and reconquest, Jihad and Crusade, ending so it seems in a final victory of the West with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire--the last of the great Muslim states--and the partition of most of the Muslim world between the Western powers. As Osama bin Laden puts it: "In this final phase of the ongoing struggle, the world of the infidels was divided between two superpowers--the United States and the Soviet Union. Now we have defeated and destroyed the more difficult and the more dangerous of the two. Dealing with the pampered and effeminate Americans will be easy."

-- Bernard Lewis

I'm glad that I had the opportunity to read some of the old, longer articles that I simply archived away with only the most cursory skimming. This relatively brief but broad and meaningful history of the Muslim world is worth the read, and it's like being on one of those hoity-toity college cruises. You feel so privileged!

Seymour Hersh's "Watching Lebanon" was also a big one on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, examining the relationship between Israel and the United States, with the battle being seen as a test run for Iran.

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