“Freedom and Justice in Islam” by Bernard Lewis, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

I received this article from the Imprimis for Hillsdale College today, the only college that does not receive ANY Federal funding for college students and is the bastion for Free Enterprise and the Libertarian School of economic and political thought. But this is what Lewis had to say about Islam:

"By common consent among historians, the modern history of the Middle East begins in the year 1798, when the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force led by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte—who conquered and then ruled it for a while with appalling ease. General Bonaparte—he wasn't yet Emperor—proclaimed to the Egyptians that he had come to them on behalf of a French Republic built on the principles of liberty and equality. We know something about the reactions to this proclamation from the extensive literature of the Middle Eastern Arab world. The idea of equality posed no great problem. Equality is very basic in Islamic belief:All true believers are equal. Of course, that still leaves three “inferior” categories of people—slaves, unbelievers and women."

Read the article, it goes way into what the Middle East is thinking about us and where they are coming from.

What is interesting is that the same Hillsdale site has a paper on, based on the writings and history, of what General Patton would have thought of our war in Iraq.

Read this great article. This is a quote from it:

"Patton, who understood the hold of a radically triumphalist Nazism on a previously demoralized German people, would have the intellectual honesty to realize that we are at war with Islamic fascists, mostly from the Middle East, who have played on the frustrations of mostly male, unemployed young people, whose autocratic governments can't provide the conditions for decent employment and family life. A small group of Islamists appeals to the angst of the disaffected through a nostalgic and reactionary turn to a mythical Caliphate, in which religious purity trumps the material advantages of a decadent West and protects Islamic youth from the contamination of foreign gadgetry and pernicious ideas. In some ways, Hitler had created the same pathology in Germany in the 1930s.

Because of the Internet and globalization, Islamic youth have first-hand knowledge of the U.S. - its splendor, power and luxury - that both attracts and repels them, creating appetites forbidden in traditional and tribal society. Thus the fascist terrorists, to be successful, and cognizant of this paradoxical envy and desire, offer a mythical solution in lieu of real social, political and economic reform that in short order would doom the power of the patriarch, mullah and autocrat: Blame the imperialist Americans and the Zionist Israelis who cause this self-induced misery. Even those who don't join the extremists, like most Germans of the late 1930s, don't mind - albeit on the cheap - seeing their perceived enemies take a fall, as long as the consequences of terrorism are mostly positive in a psychological sense without bringing them material suffering in recompense."

What most people may not be aware of that Patton was a student of history and of learning. Both Patton and Eisenhower had person libraries in the thousands of books that they not only read, but passed on to others that had an interest with their own personal notes in the books margins

Would that some of today's kids would see this and take note.