First look at the book
A UPS courier woke me up this morning in Beirut with some pre-publication copies of A Privilege to Die — my first look at the actual book. Odysseas had shown me a copy on g-chat yesterday of “Baba’s book,” but the feeling was complete when I held a physical copy in my hands of this project that has been four years in the making. Here I am on Borzou and Delphine’s balcony in Ashrafieh, outside the borrowed office where I typed up so many of the early notes that fed into the story.
Alf Mabrouk !!!
To me it was a privilege to cook.
Mabrouk!!! So excited for you Thanassi! I am pre-ordering right now!
parabéns, mabrouk, etc! can’t wait to see it.
Tragically and ominously for the Middle East this work by Thanassis Cambanis is yet another diatribe yet again stemming from naivety and unsophistication as is per usual coming from the United States.
A very unpromising and disturbing start to his book with the statement: “that Arab forces could do more than terrorize and harass Israel – they could defeat and destroy it”.
The whole historical background of the creation of Israel and its decades old conflict with the Arab countries has simply been immensily contracted to four key words: “terrorize and harass Israel”.
No mention that the Israelis were originally and still substantially colonizing foreign immigrants from the 1920 onwards who planned the Ethnic Cleansing of British Mandate Palestine, the Syrian Golan Heights, the south of Lebanon up till the Litani River, evincing their racist disdain and callousness towards the indigenous societies, and I emphasize the word ‘indigenous’, and also I emphasise not only Palestine but neighbouring portions of the Near East. These are well documented colonial designs by non-indigenous Jews to conquer/steal the land and ethnically cleanse the inhabitants. This is fundamental in setting the scene. In addition, circa 500 Palestinian villages were deliberately ethnically cleansed and destroyed, as well as many villages and towns in the Golan Heights. The south of Lebanon was very much in the colonial and expansionary sights of the Zionist immigrant jews, hence the enormous devastation and destruction wrought on the south of Lebanon and the Lebanon in general.
The setting above vastly negates what Thanassis Cambanis has portrayed as ‘terrorizing and harassing Israel’. It has been already attested to by historical works that it was the complete reverse: Israel was terrosing en masse, hence its creation came about atop the destruction of indigenous societes – very deliberately so and very conveniently so, but tragically as is so often the case, particularly and as always in the United States, these realities are so often masked and pushed well into the background.
There is a mistaken assumption that the Holocaust in Europe cancels everyone else’s suffering and other holocausts and wars and ethnic cleansing and devastation and racist policies when perpetrated only by the ‘sacred sacrosanct cow of Israel – infallible, untouchable and beyond reproach.
Again Thanassis Cambanis cites the acts of violence in the Lebanon such as the bombing of the U.S. army barracks and the U.S. embassy in Beirut,plus the aduction of foreigners which he describes as “shocking”. May one ask the pertinent question if you have bothered to delve into Israel’s invasion of 1982, not to mention other invasions of the Lebanon. Well, if you read about Israel’s 1982 invasion you will find your adjective ‘shocking’ will pale into utter insignificance juxtaposed with what Israel wrought on a massive scale on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
I’ve read exactly one-third of the book and I find Thanassis Cambanis’ descriptive powers wonderful. Tragically there’s a massive gaping hole of historical facts omitted, ominously paving the way for the unmerited demonization of Middle Eastern peoples as the latter are not part of the power mindset construct of ‘We are pure white as the driven snow and the other is some faceless demon to be exorcised willy-nilly’, however barbaric the means are and have been.