Rating: 
Summary: Occidentalism - not worth reading
Review: The Book is full of double speak and nonsensical text. The author is trying to impress someone with the verbosity of his writing. Best summed up with:"They sat and talked of magnanimous things with the common sense of two kindly but ignorant people"
Rating: 
Summary: Trying (but failing) to identify the Islamic problem
Review: The Jewish authors of this stylish book pull off a considerable feat. Normally, it is the lot of defenders of Western values to suffer attacks from the left to the effect that they are `Fascists', `Nazis', `racists', `reactionaries' or `authoritarians.' Here, however, top journalist Ian Buruma and philosopher Avishai Margalit tar today's leading anti-Westerners of the Islamic world as drawing their own inspiration from revolutionary Paris, from romantic Volk-loving Germany and indeed from Hitler and Mussolini. B&M call such critics of the West `Occidentalists', mimicking the -- unhelpful -- usage of the pro-Arab Edward Said who labelled Western critics of the East as `Orientalists.'
There is plenty to be said for B&M's thesis, which claims that radical Islam hates cities, the bourgeois, science and infidels and which points out that such hostilities are far from original. For example, suspicion of cities and `civilization' characterized the German effort to pull back from Napoleon's assault on the mediaeval folkways and `culture' of Germany's statelets - so vulnerable to assault by a mighty conscript army. Again, the unheroic bourgeoisie was long the target of the West's own radicals, fascists and Christian opponents of usury; science was resisted in the West by Christians of many types and by Hitler and Stalin, and is resisted today by arts faculties of universities which have embraced reality-denying, deconstructibabbling postmodernism; and condemning infidels to fiery or watery deaths was long an enthusiasm for Christianity and indeed the Jews. Sadly, B&M never make clear whether Islam's top fanatics did actually learn such lines at the Western universities where they studied; but B&M are passably convincing that Islamic fundamentalism can be disdained as derivative.
Yet what is B&M's punch-line from all this merry smearing of the West's current ideological enemies? Should we insist on integration of the millions of Muslims granted government-funded homes and citizenship in the West by traitorous politicians? Should we deport ranting mullahs under our conveniently oppressive `race hate' legislation?
No, such proposals don't even get a mention from B&M, who are finally concerned instead to say that the real coming struggle will be within the Muslim world, with radicals pitching into the moderates and millionaire playboy princes who currently just about keep the lid on the simmering pot. What Westerners should do, apparently, is to back Islam's moderates against its militants - rather as Blair's government backed the Official Irish Republican Army against its more fanatic splinter groups and thus bought seven years of peace for Northern Ireland by giving up democracy and tolerating the ghetto-ization of Protestants and Catholics.
Readers can be forgiven for taking B&M's thesis as a great idea that fizzled out as the authors confronted their liberal-democratic `responsibilities' not to foment civil war in the West. Apparently, we are supposed to believe that America was right all along to have backed the Saudi Arabian elite. Yet, in fact, matters are more serious. Far from the Arabs being divided, it is the West that has failed to get its act together. This was most obvious in the failure of France, Germany and supposedly `westernized' Turkey to unite to help bring down the tyrant Saddam Hussein - who revelled in anti-Westernism and was even (disastrously) prepared to pretend to have weapons of mass destruction so as to bully his neighbours.
Yet the American and British governments still found enough constitutional support to carry on. More serious is the presence in the West of scores of millions of Muslims who will, from their 10% of extremists, pose a far greater threat than the million mainly-integrated Irish in the UK of 1949 ever did. It is not Arab countries that are split: they just have governments who cover for terrorists and fanatics in a deal to save their hides. Rather, it is the West that is dividing as its Muslims increasingly seek and find alliances with the left - in Britain, with the popularly elected Mayor of London and with the Scottish M.P. George Galloway whose new party, `Respect', pulls in as great a percentage of the vote as does the White-backing British National Party.
Given the past success of Arabic Ba'athites in welding nationalism and socialism together in Syria and Iraq under a Muslim umbrella, it would be no surprise if the European left could eventually cut some deals - especially now it has abandoned its long-standing principle of backing Jewry and Israel. We live in interesting times when Muslims will offer disciplined yet polygynous marriage as an alternative to the AIDS and infertility that have ravaged Africa, the West's sodomites and the West itself (now universally failing to reproduce thanks to years of statism and failure to support the family, as the Pope remarks). Eventually, like today's IRA, `moderate' Muslims will appear to offer a rather attractive deal: a terror-free life in exchange for junking feminism, homosexualism and high tax rates. Quite a few red-blooded male socialist and/or patriotic voters will one day look warmly at this vote-winning proposal -- especially if Muslims can rein in their antipathy to alcohol.
This is where B&M's book disappoints: it links radical Islam reasonably successfully to Hitler, wartime Japan and Pol Pot; but it fails to consider what should be done about the many half-reasonable Muslims who are already in the West and intend to take it over by sensible methods. The truth is that, if the West cannot rediscover support for its own nationalism, liberalism and the family, Muslims will really have something attractive on offer if Bush/Blair globalizing imperialism ooops capitalism fails. So, despite the fine early spirit in their book, warning against the Islamic threat, B&M earn no marks for far-sightedness. Understandably, Jews like B&M put their heads in the sand about the coming collapse of the political correctness which Jews of New York and Hollywood foisted on the West. Hoping to secure their own position, the Jews encouraged Muslim immigration to the West -- the worst foreign policy mistake since England encouraged the vengeful ambitions of post-Napoleonic France -- and B&M don't know the answer.
Rating: 
Summary: A mishmash of irrelevant ideas in search of a thesis
Review: This is a book that meanders and flops about looking for cohesion and a thesis. The authors, who are historians and philosophers and heady intellectuals of the sort that grace the pages of The New York Review of [Each Other's] Books with their speculations, think they have found something in their notion of "occidentalism." Occidentalism, they have decided is the way the East, or to be more accurate, primarily the Islamic Middle East, views the West. They are writing in partial reaction to Edward Said's book, Orientalism from 1978 and in more immediate reaction to Islamic terrorism. Their idea is first to imagine that such a world view as occidentalism exists, and then to trace its roots and weigh what influence various religious, social and political ideas have had in its formation, including Marxism, German militarism and German romanticism, "State Shinto" and other aspects of Japanese nationalism, Russian nativism, and especially Islamic radicalism. The problem with this of course is that no such animal exists. Occidentalism is just a fancy term for a confusion of views opposed to Western culture. There is no occidentalism anymore than there is an occident that can be defined. There is widespread hatred of Western culture, but it has less to do with all the ism's that the authors come up with (or their city versus country polarity), and more to do with religious animosity, remnants of colonial exploitation, poverty, jealousy, and plain ignorance. It has little to do with the intellectual notions that fascinate the authors. Additionally, just as there is no occident anymore (people living in China, Japan, Korea, etc., when they look toward the east to see the rising sun look, as they must, across a vast ocean toward the Americas) there is also no orient as such. Indeed today is it considered politically incorrect to refer to Asians as orientals, and it has been a long time since people in the Middle East were lumped together as orientals. Such artificial distinctions reflect a categorical way of thinking that no longer has much meaning other than as history. The authors, however, like the man searching under a lighted post for his keys (which he dropped elsewhere) are shining the light of their particular learning upon something that isn't there. Supporting such intellectual vacuousness is the style employed by the authors. Consider this statement from page 12: "Occidentalism is not the same as anti-Americanism." One would expect an explanation to follow, a distinction to be made. Instead the authors go off on a tangent about visiting Karl Marx's grave and how eastern European Jews found that Germans lacked "a spiritual dimension." They never return to support their statement. The whole book has this quality of expressing an idea and never actually demonstrating that it has anything other than rhetorical value. There are many other better books to read on why the West is hated. For a focus on how the Islamic peoples of the Middle East came to hate the West, I recommend Bernard Lewis's succinct, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002) or the more detailed War without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response (2002) by Dilip Hiro.
Rating:
Summary: A seriously flawed work
Review: This short book raises some interesting issues. It shows that for some people, there is a concept of "the City" as being evil. It asks where that concept came from. It asks what the foes of the Occidental city do to their own cities, and if they simply create brutal copies of them. And it addresses the issue of suicide attackers of the West. It tries to trace the recent history of cases where large groups of people willingly gave up their lives not to defend the lives and property of their countrymen but to destroy the lives and property of others. It asks what role religious intolerance plays in Oriental hatred of the Occident.
Moreover, the book tries to assess the Oriental point of view honestly, rather than simply apologize for it. That's a very good idea.
Normally, I simply give any book that can do all that five stars. But I'm giving this one only one star. And that is because the authors make a point which I disagree with very strongly. At first, I thought that maybe I merely have a political disagreement with the authors. I wouldn't want to tell people that a book is no good just because some people disagree with the politics of one of its statements!
But the problem I have is not political. I think what the authors are saying on the following issue is objectively false and misleading.
Here's the problem. The authors discuss Herzl and Zionism and Herzl's book, "Alteneuland." And they see its ideas as a problem. That Zionist Jews felt they could buy love with money.
But this implies that the Jews did something dubious in acquiring land and felt that their money would make things all right. And that is objectively untrue. The Jews bought land at high prices. Not surprisingly, many of them made good use of it. That's an example of human beings at their best. Some of their opponents decided to kill the Jews and steal the land. And, more importantly, trash that land. That's an example of human beings at their worst.
The issue isn't buying "the gratitude of lesser breeds." It is improving the quality of life for the entire community. And the Jews succeeded.
Meanwhile, I have to wonder about which side the authors wanted to imply were considered "lesser breeds." Suppose the authors had said such nonsense about Blacks in the South (and topped it by hinting that "poor White trash" were "lesser breeds"). Suppose they had said that the Blacks, who had earlier been enslaved by the Whites, were "naively" buying land with some of the money they were now earning. And that they were producing goods on that land, and that Whites were eager to buy those goods. Would the authors then blame the Blacks for doing all this? If so, everyone would be right to call the authors racists. More important, the authors would be saying something that is simply false, not just political.
In this case, the Jews didn't steal land or oppress their neighbors, much less try to get away with misdeeds by giving money to their victims. Instead, the Jews set a moral example for all of humanity, and the authors are simply criticizing people for being good. And that is not an accurate or useful way to evaluate Oriental attitudes towards the West.
Rating: 
Summary: A look into why people have resented the West
Review: To the growing literature which tries to decipher the current divide between Islam and the West, "Occidentalism" is a solid addition, which tells the history of the various groups and intellectuals who have, historically, challenged the Western way of life (even as they disagreed or were unclear about what exactly the West was supposed to represent). Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, professors at Bard College and Hebrew University of Jerusalem respectively, have written an intellectual history centering around the four pillars of Occidentalism (inverting the term Orientalism coined by Edward Said a quarter century ago), which they define as the "dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies." Occidentalism, the authors write, feeds on a chain of hostility-hostility towards the City and cosmopolitanism, towards the West's non-heroic and commercial ethos, towards its mind, and towards its infidelity. The result is an elegant narrative that looks both at the broad picture as well as the nuances of the four critiques. One of the major themes is how anti-Western criticisms tend to have some elements of the West in them; another, is that many are driven by a distorted, confused or romanticized view of the past (or an alternative present). Still, the book leaves something to be desired: to know that the death cult celebrated by Osama bin Laden has historical precedents in the Japanese Kamikaze or the Assassins of the eleven and twelfth centuries might not be as relevant as asking the question of how to overcome it. The authors turn to the question of "how to protect the idea of the West" in the conclusion, though the reader could have profited from a more lengthy treatment. All the same, "Occidentalism" sheds plenty light and adds historical context to some of the most important debates of the present.
Rating:
Summary: confusing
Review: What a strange book. It's a thin volume about a subject that I have always wanted to get a grip on, and yet it's mostly confusing. Ironically, the actual concept of Occidentalism is poorly defined by the authors, and the book never recovers. The authors fail to explain the many paradoxes of Westernization, including the most recent bifurcation between most of Europe and the US and England mess. However, it is not a total loss, and at under 150 pages, I still recommend it with 3 stars.
Rating: 
Summary: The enemy identified
Review: When receiving this book, I saw a small book with only 150 pages with a lot of line spacing and I was expecting a quick read, especially because this is a book that is on the bestsellers list for foreign affairs books. But after starting, that turned out to be quite a wrong impression, because it is quite a terse book, drawing heavy on history of philosophical ideas. But that also made it quite interesting.
The thesis of the book is that the perceived clash of civilizations, the West against the anti West (Islam), is a clash of ideas that is also found inside our own history and society. The Islamist are, whether they admit it or not, influenced by the West in that they borrow and use our own internal enemies. For example the old notion of the romantic rural as opposite of the harsh cite life or the brutal heroic idealist grandeur against the mediocrity reasoned life. To understand the current conflicts both external and internal, this is an enlighten read.
But this is not a book about the current world politics or an in depth description of Islam (I would recommend Bernard Lewis for that) nor does the book provide much practical solutions. The book is more a collection of philosophical ideas that describe the common cultural conflict between the modernity and its enemies, as an other reviewer wrote the book is a bit fragmented and could use some polishing. But never the less, I found it worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: incomplete?
Review: With Edward Said's Orientalism in mind, this book, obviously, is an answer to Mr. Said's thesis. However, Mr. Said was a lebanon-born scholar studying, in most of his life, in U.S. while in my humble opinion, the two authors don't have the same depth of counterpart trans-cultural experience. The book is extermely short to treat this huge subject, which, inescapability, fails to answer these two questions: 1. The book put a lot of effort on describing how the "Orient" hate the "Occident" on its corrupt social values, self-centerism, bourgeois, etc. But, does the rural conservative part of a "West" country has the same feeling against their own megapolis? 2. Beside the "hatred" towards the west, there is also a lot of admiration, which this book doesn't cover at all. E.g., Ian Buruma's own book "Anglophile" document and study how UK is "loved" by a lot of people. How can an "East" person love the "West" if there is only "hatred"? How is the struggle between the two class of people? E.g., in Japan, during the Meiji period, there was a proposal to drop Asia identity and jump into the Europe identity. In China, a similar proposal for a total Westernization around 100 years ago too. How can Arab/Chinese/Japanese/Indian send their kids to study in Europe/America if they hate the Europe/US?
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