Bringing the Middle East Back Home
​The American Orientalist Class attempts to paint a fantasy Middle Eastern landscape on the American canvas
 Tony Badran 

https://www.amazon.com/Syrian-Rebellion-Ajami-Fouad-Hardcover/dp/B01181X44I/ref=sr1fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531709123&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=found+ajami+syrian+rebellion

IS children, the lost generation
The misallocation of resources, social stigma and de facto administrative discrimination uphold obstacles to the reintegration of children in Iraq born under or recruited by the Islamic State.

The world, in all its tangled webs, will be read into the Boston bombing suspects.

For some, the Tsarnaev brothers are Chechen avengers, young men seared by the long war in Russia’s “southern backyard.” For Vladimir Putin and his regime, this deed of terror in an American city is, doubtless, a vindication of the iron fist with which the Russians fought their long war against Chechnya, proof of the malignancy of the Islamist menace.

Foes of immigration can be expected to offer the Tsarnaev brothers as evidence that a nation that throws its gates wide open courts this kind of calamity. One way or the other, the matter of Islamist radicalism hovers over this episode.

There are other testimonies that speak to the puzzlement of our time, to the difficulty of drawing hard lines between cultures in conflict.

A classmate who knew Dzhokar, the younger of the two brothers, from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School described him as a cool guy, a regular American kid on the wrestling team. Another classmate, Ty Barros, describes a boy who liked sports and listened to rap music and hung out with other kids in the neighborhood. Dzhokar never discussed religion and politics, this acquaintance adds. Pamela Rolon, a residential adviser in the dorm where Dzhokar lived, at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said that the young man “studied hard and spoke English beautifully.”

Baseball Caps
The world outwits us, furrows run across it: We look for fixed identities and whole, intact worlds, and we find instead the shaking up of continents, the intermingling of peoples and ways.
For me, the earliest evidence of the foreign birth of the bombers was not their features, as we saw them in the grainy early footage, but the baseball caps -- one turned backward -- and the backpacks. This was Americanism as the two assailants understood it -- easily available, the kind that could slip across boundaries, evade detection. American urban culture fashioned the look, but it is now the property of one and all.

We know the pattern. These assailants live on the seam between countries and cultures.

Think of Faisal Shahzad, the young Pakistani who, three years ago, sought to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. He had driven his car from his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He had worked for Elizabeth Arden, and completed that all-American degree, the MBA. Neighbors recall him jogging in the evening near his home. The U.S. was his home and wasn’t; Pakistan, the land of his birth, was no longer home. It could no longer answer his needs.

He came to militant Islam after personal failure and disappointment. For him, the faith had become a weapon. He found it online, on the World Wide Web -- that mix of modern technique and belligerent enmities.

Of all that has been said and written about this breed of “nowhere men” who have risen to war against the very messy world that forged them, the most poignant was said about the Lebanese-born terrorist, Ziad Jarrah, who is thought to have been at the controls of the plane forced down by its heroic passengers in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 11: He never missed a party in Beirut and never missed a prayer in Hamburg.
​
Jarrah had been the quintessential party boy in Lebanon, hip and trendy; he and his sisters were strangers to traditional Islam. The pampered boy of an affluent family was unhinged by a radical reading of the faith that he found in the storefront mosques in Hamburg. Modernity failed and unsettled Jarrah.

Making Sense Of The Syrian Civil War
mentioning Fouad Ajami, Hoover Institution via The New York Times 
After a chemical attack in Syria on Saturday that killed dozens and is suspected to have been launched by the Assad government, President Trump is warning that the United States may strike back. These books will get you up to speed on the seven-year war and highlight those most affected: the country’s people.

In This Arab Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance by Fouad Ajami. With @samueltadros, Hudson Institute.
"In this collection of bold and wide-ranging essays, Fouad Ajami offers his views on the Middle East, commenting on the state of affairs in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt and more. He brings into focus the current struggles of the region through detailed historical standpoints and a highly personal perspective. The author discusses such landmark past events as the Algerian civil war, the state of the Arab world shortly after 9/11, and the pan-Arab awakening that began in 2011, as well as current events such as the Syrian rebellion and the repercussions of its brutal response from Bashar al-Assad. In addition, he sheds new light on some of the significant players in the Arab world, past and present, from Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel laureate of the Arabs, to Ziad Jarrah—the terrorist who is thought to have been at the controls of the plane forced down by its heroic passengers in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 9/11."
https://www.amazon.com/This-Arab-Time-Pursuit-Deliverance/dp/0817914943/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470005828&sr=1-4

In This Arab Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance by Fouad Ajami. With @SamuelTadros, Hudson Institute.
"In this collection of bold and wide-ranging essays, Fouad Ajami offers his views on the Middle East, commenting on the state of affairs in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt and more. He brings into focus the current struggles of the region through detailed historical standpoints and a highly personal perspective. The author discusses such landmark past events as the Algerian civil war, the state of the Arab world shortly after 9/11, and the pan-Arab awakening that began in 2011, as well as current events such as the Syrian rebellion and the repercussions of its brutal response from Bashar al-Assad. In addition, he sheds new light on some of the significant players in the Arab world, past and present, from Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel laureate of the Arabs, to Ziad Jarrah—the terrorist who is thought to have been at the controls of the plane forced down by its heroic passengers in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 9/11."