Orientalism is abroad again, revivified and hideously emboldened.

It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials…was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds…but disguised for its true intent, hastened and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on George W. Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuriesold Islamic decline… Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace…the omnipresent CNNs and Foxs of this world, plus myriad numbers of evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, plus innumerable tabloids and even middlebrow journalists, all of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up “America” against the foreign devil.