FYI from BATR

Margalit and Buruma promise to deliver a deeper insight into the hearts and minds of people varying from Hezbollah leader Nasrallah to al-Qaida’s Bin Laden, by illustrating their feeble theory with Chinese revolutionaries, Japanese imperialists, Nazis, romanticists and God. However, in their attempt to ground occidentalism historically, the authors end up shoving animosity towards the West under a make-shift rubric of pathological hatred. Consequently, Occidentalism is not just a disappointing academic exercise but also an all too useful political tool.