I intend not to defend my book but to protest its “reviewer,” whose first responsibility—as for any reviewer—was to relate what the book is about, even chapter by chapter. But Philip Khoury betrayed the reviewer's task concerning my book The Conscience of Lebanon, choosing to use it as a foil to propagate his own Arabist and anti–Israeli political views. His was not a book review but a mean-spirited tirade. He writes, “Etienne Sakr was a minor Lebanese militia leader,” though I deal with this point myself; the review is jaundiced by repetitive labeling (“right-wing Lebanese leaders”) and vindictively vilifies my study as not a “systematic work of scholarship.”

Rather than respond in any meaningful way to the substance of my review of his recent book Arabs at the Crossroads, Hilal Khashan instead prefers to launch a series of personal attacks against me cloaked by knavish misrepresentations of my review. It is certainly true, as he repeatedly asserts, that he is older than I—although I am not at all clear about how that is relevant. In any event, it is never too late for anyone to learn the ethics of academic debate and dialogue. As to whether my interpretation of his analysis and methodological assumptions is valid or not, this I leave for readers to judge.

I would have failed in my responsibility as a reviewer had I ignored the fault lines in the pedestal that Mordechai Nisan constructed for his hero, Etienne Sakr. Readers may indeed judge for themselves. Whether they wish to buy the book is another matter.

In his review of my book Arabs at the Crossroads: Political Identity and Nationalism, the neophyte political scientist Bassel F. Salloukh attempts to instruct me on the fundamentals of research methodology. Sadly, however, his review amounts to nothing more than a brazen barrage of protestations and disapprovals. I counted about two dozen complaints and unsubstantiated criticisms in the one-and-a-half-page review, in which he summarily condemns the book for its purported “sweeping indictment of Arab failures.” Salloukh unleashes a fiery litany of pseudoacademic indignation because I found the political-culture approach and crises of identity and legitimacy relevant to the study of failed Arab political systems. The reviewer is certainly free to disagree with my approach, but professional integrity necessitates that he adopt a method more academic than screeching sophomoric objections. Rather than develop an analytical case against me, the reviewer instead opts to swing from the hip, falsely attributing to me things that I never said, such as my alleged identification of a “basic foundational dislocation that has doomed everything Arab.”