SARI NUSSEIBEH--IMMODERATE MUSLIM : Efraim Karsh has a review of Nusseibeh's new book Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life. Smooth Stone summarizes the book's multiple errors that Karsh enumerates.

The other issue is the man behind the mask of the Muslim moderate--as revealed as early as 2002 in a Frontpagemag.com article. In his review, Karsh also writes about Nusseibeh's underlying extremism--and eager acceptance by the West--and Israel--as a moderate:

That this advocacy of the destruction of an established member state of the international community has hardly dented Mr. Nusseibeh's "moderate" image can be partly explained by the desperate yearning among Jews and their supporters worldwide for Palestinian and Arab peace partners, dating back to the 1920s and the '30s, despite countless setbacks and disillusionments. It is also a corollary of the narcissist and patronizing mesmerization among educated westerners with the "noble savage" in general, and the westernized native in particular.

...In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that "Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life" ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 542 pages, $27.50) has been received with alacrity. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz applauded it for casting "a fresh light on the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy," while for Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, it was "a deeply admirable book by a deeply admirable man." Though dismissing Mr. Nusseibeh's account of the 1948 war as "grotesque" and regretting his comparison of Israeli prisons to the Soviet gulag, Mr. Wieseltier insisted that "there is nothing mean or heartless in Nusseibeh's writing about Israel," as if his equating the incarceration of lawfully convicted terrorists with the arbitrary detention and extermination of tens of millions of innocent civilians is not mean or heartless enough.

Nothing good will ever come of bending over backwards to make allowances for Palestinian terrorists and their apologists.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Sari Nusseibeh and Efraim Karsh.