A Brave Voice of Clarity is Gone: Farewell Fouad Ajami...
s Whenever I picked up our Wall Street Journal and saw an op-ed piece by Fouad Ajami, I read it first-- because I knew that he would have the most realistic, tell-it-like-it-is-insightful take on whatever was happening in the Middle East. He was spot-on in his assessment of the so-called Arab Spring, Arab culture and the Arab mentality. It was all the more incredible because Mr. Ajami was a Shiite Arab, born in Lebanon, whose family originated in Iran and emigrated to Lebanon in the 1850s, who changed his entire way of thinking about the Middle East conflict between the Arabs and Israel when reality hit him in the face--and he recognized it, and was not afraid to state it outright. From TheWall Street Journal : "I was formed by an amorphous Arab nationalist sensibility," he wrote in his 1998 masterpiece, "The Dream Palace of the Arabs." He came to the U.S. for college and graduate school, became a U.S. citizen, and first made hi...