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Bernard Lewis, Rest in Peace
Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar on Middle Eastern studies, died today at the age of 101. He spent his long career defending Israel and condemning the Islamist violence that surrounds it. Here is an interview Ricochet co-founder Peter Robinson conducted with Bernard Lewis and Norman Podhoretz in 2012 aboard a National Review cruise.
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Published in General
We’ve lost a great teacher and writer with Lewis. I know he obtained the enmity of the Left in recent decades, but he was a scholar, and when their pique at last subsides, they’ll look back and wonder at what they lost.
I’ve been an NR cruiser for some time, and I had the honor of meeting Professor Lewis.
Subsequent to that, as Professor Lewis became too frail to travel, I sat at the same dinner table as his companion of several years (decades). She was a delight to talk to.
Edward Said and his legion of acolytes did to Lewis’s scholarly reputation what critical theory has done to this country.
Bernard Lewis will be sorely missed.
I agree. This is a very great loss. I have read several of his books and loved them. I had hoped for even more to come. Rest in Peace, Sir.
Rest in peace, Bernard . . .
Thanks for bringing this back. A wise man. I used some of his writing in a foreign policy course I taught, so I had to find critics of his approach to offer a contrary view. They criticized him for doing his dissertation on Turkey not Arabs. This was their way of not having to deal with content. I love his final comment, the Arabs and the Middle East will sink into irrelevance. That’s probably right, but only if we hold them at bay, don’t allow immigration or fall over ourselves to get their tuition for our universities. Perhaps that’s what we should encourage, their irrelevance. Drill baby drill and frack baby frack.
We can dispense with stress positions and waterboarding and just subject the jihadi to a non-stop loop of these two lions.
I’d also mix in this recording:
Note the central roles for Eleanor Roosevelt and Millard Lampell. Remember when Israel was the fulfillment of liberal cultural values?
Two of the greatest minds interviewed by the premier interviewer. What an incredible bit of media history! I watched it years ago when it first aired. I enjoyed it even more this time around. What a terrible loss it is to mankind that Bernard Lewis has passed from us, but that loss is ameliorated by the fact that his books remain. May Norman Podhoretz live a thousand years.
The guy’s books were great. I highly recommend, What Went Wrong.
I was lucky enough to speak very briefly to Bernard Lewis while he autographed Notes On A Century Reflections Of A Middle East Historian while aboard the 2012 NR cruise.
That was a great cruise. The wife & I were in the audience while Yeti taped that interview. We had dinner that week with Norm & his wife Midge. That cruise was our emotional consolation for having just lost to Obama. It was a ship full of Happy Warriors.
RIP Mr Lewis.