"I want to speak with you today about the Middle East. This is the region where Africa, Asia, and Europe come together. It is also the part of the world where we have been most compellingly reminded that some struggles cannot be won, but there are no struggles that cannot be lost.
"It is often said that human beings learn little useful from success but can learn a great deal from defeat. If so, the Middle East now offers a remarkably rich menu of foreign-policy failures for Americans to study."
Further along, Freeman delivers this powerful description of Israel's current role in the Middle East:
"Israel has come to enjoy military supremacy but it remains excluded from most participation in its region's political, economic, and cultural life.
"In the 67 years since the Jewish state was proclaimed, Israel has not made a single friend in the Middle East, where it continues to be regarded as an illegitimate legacy of Western imperialism engaged in racist removal of the indigenous population.
"International support for Israel is down to the United States and a few of the former colonial powers that originally imposed the Zionist project on the Arabs under Sykes-Picot and the related Balfour Declaration. The two-state solution has expired as a physical or political possibility. There is no longer any peace process to distract global attention from Israel's maltreatment of its captive Arab populations.
There is more, much more, from this watchman. For the complete lecture click here.
Israel, Freeman reminds us, is "an illegitimate legacy of Western imperialism engaged in racist removal of the indigenous population".
Harper Lee's Watchman is the work of an author who knows she is struggling with the agony of racism in the hometown she loves, Monroeville, Alabama, which she calls Maycomb in her novels.
Reading chapter one, conveniently available on line, there is no doubt that this new book is in the familiar voice of Harper Lee, a writer deeply rooted in, and increasingly critical of, the cultural patterns of her native Monroeville, Alabama.
Mockingbird's continued popularity since its arrival in 1960, has been driven by English literature teachers and the immediate success of the 1962 film of the same name, featuring Gregory Peck as Scout's father, Atticus Finch, a self-educated attorney very much a man of his time.
Pay no heed to what the establishment media critics say, Atticus is no bigot. A bigot is someone whose life is devoted to hatred of another race. That is not Atticus.
As the grown-up Scout had come to realize, however, by the time she wrote Mockingbird, her beloved home town, driven by public ignorance and deeply-embedded prejudice, was strongly resisting the closing of the racial divide.
Small town lawyers like Atticus Finch were unable to adjust to change. The times that were 'achanging, had passed him by.
The time in which the original To Kill a Mockingbird is set, the early 1930s, was a time when the dominant white community members treated blacks with a conflicted, and inevitable unsustainable, mixture of condescending kindness and corrosive cruelty.
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