Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East
by Jared Cohen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jared CohenEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-10-25
ISBN: 1592403247
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Gotham
Book Reviews of Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East
Book Review: What a shame.
Summary: 1 Stars
Are you looking for useful insight into the minds of Middle Easterners? You won't find it here, but you will find a good amount of ego and misconception. The book has some interesting accounts from the youth in Iran and Kurdistan, but the merits of this book are completely outweighed by an irritating narrative of an American constantly projecting his Orientalist fantasies while trying to confirm pre-formulated views about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Right away he looses all credibility with his exaggeration. He fondly describes how risky it was to sneak into an African Civil War on a truck of bananas. Is this necessary? Lines like "I was flirting with the idea of crossing from Iran into Basra." But he didn't, so why would he write this? To stroke his ego of how adventurous he is to ignorant people back in America who will never travel over here. The whole part leading up to entering Kurdistan and how he was going into a war zone is fabricated. He obviously knew this wasn't the case beforehand if he was a guest of the KRG, so why the long drawn out blabber about how he might die. People travel freely in Kurdistan and it is hardly dangerous, and he knew this going in. Much of the Middle East is very safe for travel, so why the constant reminders that he might die at any second? He is concerned with painting a picture of himself as a risk taker, regardless of the actual circumstances. This holds true in much of his writing about Arabs. He has a picture he wants to paint regardless of the actual situation.
The section that Cohen writes about Hezbollah is absurd. I am an American student at AUB, and what he says about hundreds of Hezbollah "operatives" "infiltrating" the university is ridiculous. Yes of course there are Hezbollah supporters at the school, since Hezbollah is a huge political party and the de facto government for half of the country! He can't get past the American "terrorist" designation to actually learn about these people. To someone that lives in Lebanon this book is infuriatingly naive. He does not make any effort to understand the people from the South, just has a few conversations and describes the "shivers sent down his spine" as an American Jew.
Now let's try to understand how these people view Israel, not as American Jews, but as the ones who have suffered under Israeli occupation and war. In the end Cohen describes how Hezbollah bursts back onto the scene with a "blast of rocket fire" to attack Israel and he describes the 2006 summer war as one sided attack against poor Israel. Look at the facts. It was started by the capture by Hezbollah of two Israeli soldiers, and the retaliation was the largest aerial bombardment in the history of the Middle East. Bigger even than the Yom Kippur war. The targets were largely civilian, the Israeli strategy being depopulation of civilians in the hope that they would put blame for their problems on Hezbollah. In the last 48 hours of the war, right up to the cease-fire, Israel dropped 4 million cluster bombs in civilian areas all over the south. And they won't release the maps of the cluster attacks for clean-up, because if the international community saw the targets they would absolutely condemn this attack as a war crime. Children and farmers continue to lose limbs and be crippled by these mines while trying to rebuild their villages, and Israel keeps the maps to themselves for political reasons. This example is very typical of Israeli action.
So yes of course they are going to view Israel as the enemy. The conflict is very lopsided, and Cohen does not even attempt to look at the other side, blindly assuming that the Israeli government is always in the right. Why doesn't he travel to Israel for this book? Or to the West Bank or Gaza where humans are treated like animals? Not one mention of the events that forced the Palestinians from their home and into the camp he visits in Lebanon. He brands them as extremists and quickly moves on. Anything he says about the Arab-Israeli conflict was decided before his travels.
This book only serves to confirm ignorant American perceptions of the Middle East, while working towards its main purpose which is ego-building. To anyone who lives here this book is infuriating. This book was written to impress people back home, not to write justly about the people living in the Middle East. How this book got the praise of Vali Nasr is beyond me. Enjoy your job in the State Department Mr. Cohen.
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Summary of Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East
Defying foreign government orders and interviewing terrorists face to face, a young American tours hostile lands to learn about Middle Eastern youth?and uncovers a subculture that defies every stereotype.Classrooms were never sufficient for Jared Cohen; he wanted to learn about global affairs by witnessing them firsthand. During his undergraduate years Cohen travelled extensively to Africa?often to wartorn countries, putting himself at risk to see the world firsthand. While studying on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, he took a crash course in Arabic, read voraciously on the history and culture of the Middle East, and in 2004 he embarked on the first of a series of incredible journeys to the Middle East. In an effort to try to understand the spread of radical Islamist violence, he focused his research on Muslim youth. The result is Children of Jihad, a portrait of paradox that probes much deeper than any journalist or pundit ever could.
Written with candor and featuring dozens of eye-opening photographs, Cohen?s account begins in Lebanon, where he interviews Hezbollah members at, of all places, a McDonald?s. In Iran, he defies government threats and sneaks into underground parties, where bootleg liquor, Western music, and the Internet are all easy to access. His risky itinerary also takes him to a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, borderlands in Syria, the insurgency hotbed of Mosul, and other frontline locales. At each turn, he observes a culture at an uncanny crossroads: Bedouin shepherds with satellite dishes to provide Western TV shows, young women wearing garish makeup despite religious mandates, teenagers sending secret text messages and arranging illicit trysts. Gripping and daring, Children of Jihad shows us the future through the eyes of those who are shaping it.
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