Mirage of Peace

David Aikman

Description

Morning headlines announce renewed violence and fresh calls for peace negotiations, while pundits on talk radio and cable TV shout conflicting opinions at anyone who will listen. Between perplexing contradictions and inflammatory rhetoric, it is often difficult to find out what's really going on in the Middle East. Former TIME magazine Jerusalem bureau chief David Aikman, who has spent decades reporting on Mid-East issues, takes a sober, balanced look at a region aflame. He brings a journalist's mind and a believer's heart to his exploration of the political and religious factors in play, and goes beyond the media's chronic oversimplification to carefully examine recent history and the leaders who have made that history. Aikman turns a critical eye on the policies of the region's prime players, resorting neither to blind pro-Israeli sentiment nor to reactionary pro-Palestinian bias. He challenges fellow Christians to a similar approach to the Middle East: respect, reason, and love, rather than unqualified tolerance on the one hand or religious crusading on the other. Discover the truth behind the headlines: God's restoring hand is at work in a region of the world torn apart by centuries of strife.  

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 31 août 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441223555
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

PRAISE FOR THE MIRAGE OF PEACE
David Aikman is a writer who is well-known around the world. I know him not only from his writings with TIME magazine and his many bestselling books but also as a friend and a man of integrity. David is a man committed to researching the backstories and understanding the spirit and the letter of the problems as well as the answers. He is truly an outstanding Christian leader in the realm of the media who writes what needs to be read. I happily commend him to you.
LOREN CUNNINGHAM Founder of Youth With a Mission International President of University of the Nations Kailua-Kona, Hawaii
There is no subject more complicated—and more distorted by politics and the mainstream media—than the conflict in the Middle East. Yet David Aikman adjusts the lens and brings this issue into sharp focus. Few people are as qualified as Aikman to give us such an accurate and balanced perspective. His Christian faith and his years as a journalist make this book a compelling read.
J. LEE GRADY Editor, Charisma Magazine Lake Mary, Florida
David Aikman’s elegant, readable style of in-depth journalistic writing guides readers through the complexities of the world’s biggest powderkeg in an eye-opening manner. Few journalistic writers today can come close to the breadth of international insight that Aikman brings to the craft of narrative reporting and historically informed journalism.
MICHAEL A. LONGINOW, PH.D. Professor and Chair of Department of Journalism, Biola University La Mirada, California
Like the biblical sons of Issachar “who understood the times” (1 Chron. 12:32), David Aikman regularly sheds light on the major people and trends of our times. He’s brought his unique perspective to bear on topics such as modern-day China and the greatest evangelist of our era, Billy Graham. This newest work will undoubtedly break new ground on one of the most intractable struggles of our age: the conflict in the Middle East.
CHRIS MITCHELL CBN News Bureau Chief Jerusalem, Israel

© 2009 David Aikman
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakerbooks.com
Baker Books edition published 2014
ISBN 978-1-4412-2355-5
Previously published by Regal Books
Ebook edition originally created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
All maps are from the United States Central Intelligence Agency. www.cia.gov
This book is dedicated to my two daughters, Abbie and Amanda
CONTENTS
1. The Middle East: A Central Hub of World Affairs
2. Israel and the Palestinians
3. Syria and Lebanon
4. Egypt and Jordan
5. The Persian (but Really Arabian) Gulf
6. Iraq
7. Iran
8. Saudi Arabia and Beyond

Appendix A: U.N. Security Council Resolution 242
Appendix B: United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181
Appendix C: The Palestinian National Charter
Appendix D: The Charter of the Hamas
Appendix E: Statistics

Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Index


Source: Central Intelligence Agency
1
THE MIDDLE EAST: A CENTRAL HUB OF WORLD AFFAIRS
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad … Al-Qaeda …Hezbollah …Hamas … Islamic radicalism … oil … sharia … terrorism … Iraq. Whenever the phrase “Middle East” looms over the horizon, so do a whole flock of Arabic names that conjure up a locust-plague of modern troubles. What is it about the Middle East that makes it so often seem like the worst locale on the planet? Why does it appear to be the only place in the world where there has supposedly been a “peace process” for decades but as much evidence of real peace as there is of marital bliss on a television episode of Desperate Housewives ?
Is it the air, the water, the geography, the language, the culture, the religions? Is it a little bit of each, plus a generous splash of the burden of history—that shadow reigning over all our lives at birth through no fault of our parents or grandparents, or any ancestral link of whom we have ever heard?
Above all, the Middle East is a very complicated place. Anyone who would attempt to make sense of large parts of it in a single book might be considered arrogant or immodest, or even stark raving mad.
This, nevertheless, is what I am setting out to do in The Mirage of Peace . If I succeed in unearthing even a tiny bit of increased understanding of the complex issues that affect nations and regions here, or offer some small insight that illuminates a hitherto fuzzy patch of the global map, I shall be happy. I apologize in advance for all of the topics on which there has been neither time nor space enough to focus adequately, or even focus at all. I apologize for any mistakes that have crept into the text despite the most diligent efforts to keep them out. I apologize if I have offended anyone in the judgments and criticisms that one is forced to make quickly, and with inadequate qualification, in a book of an introductory nature such as this one.
First, an explanation of the area we commonly call today the “Middle East.” Until the end of World War II, the region wasn’t even called by this name. The geopolitical strategists in the foreign ministries and imperial chanceries of the major powers of Europe called it the “Near East.” That term denoted a swatch of countries and states in the eastern Mediterranean, extending to the farthest south end of the Persian Gulf. Beyond the Near East lay the “Far East,” that collection of exotic cultures and states on the Pacific Rim of Asia: China, Japan, Indochina, Southeast Asia. The transition to the term “Middle East” from “Near East” was not simply a switch in nomenclature. Although the region referred to by the two terms is generally the same, the lands that are included within them are by no means identical.
Specifically, the Near East meant Turkey—known in the nineteenth century as the Ottoman Empire—and Armenia, as well as the sheikhdoms and monarchies surrounding the Persian Gulf. It also included the Balkans, that grand crossroads of cultures and faiths and perennial venue of strife that lies between the Black Sea on the east and the Mediterranean on the west.
The Balkans dominated world headlines after the archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, was felled by an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, unleashing the horrors of World War I. When that cruel episode of bloodletting ended in 1918, the Near East changed out of all recognition. Three of the great empires that had either vied for control of the region or sought to influence it for hundreds of years—the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the empire of Tsarist Russia—had collapsed. The victors of World War I—Britain, France and the United States—redrew the map of the Near East and, in so doing, helped set in motion the events that would lead to the region being called the Middle East today.
The term “Middle East” was, in fact, first popularized by an American: the naval historian and global strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), whose theory of the importance of what he called “sea power”—meaning the power of national navies—propelled nations around the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to build up navies as instruments to wield long-range international power. 1 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany kept a copy of Mahan’s book at his bedside on the imperial yacht, Hohenzollern .
Mahan first used the term “Middle East” in a 1902 article to refer to the area surrounding the Persian Gulf. When The Times of London ran an extended series of articles on the strategic significance of this region, it decided at the end of the series to drop quotation marks around the term “Middle East”—and we will now do likewise.
People who prefer the term the “Near East” don’t give up easily. While waiting for an interview at an American embassy in, well, one of the Middle East countries, in the fall of 2007, I got into a friendly but forceful argument with an American diplomat who insisted on using the term “Near East.” In this, her own government’s bureaucracy supported her: the State Department bureau that handles this region of the world is called the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Historians and archaeologists also support her view. Some of the most prestigious American universities have departments of “Near Eastern Studies” rather than of “Middle Eastern Studies.” 2 Archaeologists and historians, particularly those interested in the ancient period of time, prefer the term “Near Eastern,” perhaps because it sounds more academic, and hence less controversial, than “Middle Eastern.”
U.S. diplomats, archaeologists and historians aside, the “Middle East” has become the accepted term in general usage. Commerce has played a role in making it so. The airline industry, under rules determined by the umbrella International Air Transport Association (IATA), which comprises 240 global airlines and 94 percent of the global airline industry, uses the collective term “Middle East” for fares and ticket taxes for the following countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Many residents of the region object to the term “Middle East,” which they say reflects a Eurocentric view of the world. And they are right. East, of course, means east of London and Paris, and certainly east of Washington, D.C. Nervous U.N. bureaucrats, fearful of offending anyone, have taken to using the term “West Asia.” But in a sign that even the Arab world has come to acquiesce in the verbal formulations of an American naval histor