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My name is Daniel Denver and I'm

broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. Many in the West have long since

become accustomed to viewing the Middle East as a region of timeless

religious violence and tribal backwardness.

But this conventional wisdom has everything entirely upside down.

It's a frame whose chief function is to mystify history, and in doing so, legitimate

colonialism and imperialism.

The Arab regions of what was once the Ottoman Empire

have in fact been home to what is perhaps

the world's most ambitious cosmopolitan experiment, an effort to create a society that a however has been subjected to a century of sustained Western Imperial

assault from the European colonial mandates through the creation of the

state of Israel all the way up to the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent

...