Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

I finished reading The Eagle’s Shadow last night. I picked this book out at the store because I thought it might be a sincere examination of America’s relationship with the world. The fact that one-line reviews on the cover were from Salon and New York Times didn’t deter me. I was really disappointed. Mark Hertsgaard spent a lot of travel time collecting quotes, but little else in terms of research for the book. And the quotes come from people in his social circle, regardless of country.

On occasion he mentions the things that foreigners love about the US, but….And so it goes. And many times he falls back on the “it’s all our fault” stance. We just don’t spend enough money helping everyone else in the world. We didn’t build enough child care centers in Afghanistan. We didn’t help the Arabs drive the Jews into the Sea. It all got very old. I’m sure the Barbra Streisands of the world love this book. I didn’t, and it wasn’t from any preconception.

As an antidote, today I read Why the Muslims Misjudged Us by Victor Hanson.

For all the frothing, it seems that millions of our purported enemies wish to visit, study, or (better yet) live in the United States–and this is true not just of Westernized professors or globe-trotting tycoons but of hijackers, terrorists, the children of the Taliban, the offspring of Iranian mullahs, and the spoiled teenage brats of our Gulf critics.

I intend to do a bit more research on the topic, but have to throw in just a bit right now. For all the talk of how much we owe to the Arabs in regards to science and math, it seems those who translated European texts into Arabic, and did any research during Europe’s Dark Ages, were Christian and Jewish Arabs. Not Muslim. It seems to make sense. Islam does not allow critical thought. I throw this in off the top of my head, but I remember reading about these topics in A History of the Arab Peoples. More on that later.

Two different takes, one with a focus on the Middle East, and the other on the world as a whole (although most of Hertsgaard’s examples come from the ME). Hanson’s logic is deductive, and Hartsgaard’s is inductive. I’ll side with Victor.