Download American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East by Douglas Little PDF

Show description

34 In 1927 T. E. S. 35 Many of the orientalist stereotypes of the Arabs evoked by films and books were reinforced by popular magazines such as National Geographic, which by the late 1920s had become a window on the world for millions of middle-class Americans. National Geographic’s entire May 1923 issue, for example, was devoted to the recently discovered tomb of King Tutankhamen and other wonders of the Muslim world. Articles like “Egypt, Past and Present” and “East of Constantinople” contrasted the imperial grandeur of ancient Egyptian and medieval Islamic civilizations with the hardscrabble realities of the twentieth o r i e n ta l i s m , a m e r i c a n st y l e 17 century.

80 Eisenhower’s top advisers echoed the president’s growing frustration with the Arabs. Shortly after taking over at Foggy Bottom, for example, John Foster Dulles took a two-week fact-finding trip to the Middle East that confirmed all of his Presbyterian fears of the Muslim infidel. K. ”82 When anti-Western violence rocked Baghdad, Beirut, and Amman five summers later, White House troubleshooter Robert Murphy undertook a “twenty-nine-day Magic Carpet tour of the fabled East” at the behest of Eisenhower, with whom he had worked to curb “the restiveness of the indigenes” in Muslim North Africa during the Second World War.

Noninvolvement could not have come at a worse time for American Zionists or their comrades in Europe. Claiming that the influx of 250,000 European Jews during the decade and a half since the First World War was more than the overloaded Palestinian economic and political system could bear, in 1936 the Arabs launched a violent revolt to resist Zionism. While Palestinian militias battled the Haganah, the Jewish underground army, in the streets of Jerusalem and the foothills of Nablus, even more ominous events were unfolding in Germany, where Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies were growing ever more blatant.