Social Middle East

Baer goes behind the scenes to show how the U.S. willingly overlooked the corruption of the Saudi royal family, its financing of violent Islamic fundamentalist groups that spread hatred of the West throughout Saudi society, and its bribery of American officials. From a close-up with a corrupt Arab family to the inside scoop on how we helped fund the Taliban, Baer shows what's at stake in our pursuit of oil.

A gripping and often harrowing inquiry into the factors that motivate young people to join extremist causes, In the Skin of a Jihadist is a pause register that helps us better understand the appeal of extremism.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

The Assassins' Gate, so dubbed by American soldiers, is the entrance to the American zone in the city of Baghdad. In 2003, the United States blazed into Iraq to depose dictator Saddam Hussein. But after three years and unknown thousands killed, that country faces an escalating civil war and an uncertain fate. How did it get to this point?

In this heart-pounding adventure, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Howard Blum tells the enthralling story of two modern-day adventurers - Larry Williams, a self-made millionaire and published author from Montana, and his friend Bob Cornuke, a retired policeman and former SWAT team member. Lured by the prospect of finding a fortune in gold, the two men set out to find the true site of Mount Sinai - with the Old Testament as a guide.

Instead of being trained to fight, the few soldiers each year selected for Talpiot are taught how to think. In order to join this unit they have to commit to being in the army for 10 years, rather than the three years a normal soldier serves. Talpiots are taught advanced level physics, math, and computer science as they train with soldiers from every other branch of the IDF. The result: young men and women become research and development machines.

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the belief that the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

The Babylonian influence upon its successors and even modern society knows no bounds. One of the leading civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Babylonians provided the fundamentals of mathematics, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, and other influential and necessary fields required to develop other great civilizations such as the Greeks, Romans, and even contemporary nations like China and the US. Without them, no neoteric world could exist.

In The Longest War, Peter Bergen offers a comprehensive history of this war and its evolution, from the strategies devised in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to the fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond. Weaving together internal documents from al-Qaeda and the U.S. offices of counterterrorism, first-person interviews with top-level jihadists and senior Washington officials, along with his own experiences on the ground in the Middle East, Bergen balances the accounts of each side.

Profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Iranian-born scholar Vali Nasr has become one of America's leading commentators on current events in the Middle East, admired and welcomed by both media and government for his "concise and coherent" analysis (Wall Street Journal). In this "smart, clear and timely" book (Washington Post), Nasr brilliantly dissects the political and theological antagonisms within Islam. He provides a unique and objective understanding of the 1,400-year bitter struggle between Shias and Sunnis, and sheds crucial light on its modern-day consequences—from the nuclear posturing of Iran's President Ahmadinejad to the recent U.S.-enabled shift toward Shia power in Iraq and Hezbollah's continued dominance in Lebanon.

If you are a college student in the United States, you have likely seen or participated in protests against Israel. Perhaps you’ve marched and demanded that your university stop being “complicit in genocide” or cut ties with the (world’s only, apparently) “white settler colonialist entity,” and the like. Perhaps you’ve abused your Jewish classmates over this issue, as nearly three in four Jewish college students reported in 2023.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Ben Kingsley and Theo James, the gripping true story of a young program coordinator at the United Nations who stumbles upon a conspiracy involving Iraq's oil reserves. "What made this episode in our collective history possible was not so much the lies we told one another, but the lies we told ourselves". Breaking a conspiracy of silence that had prevailed for years, Soussan sparked an unprecedented corruption probe into the Oil-for-Food program.

The Alkasem brothers, Riyad and Bashar, spend their childhood in Raqqa, the city that would later became the capital of ISIS. As a teenager in the 1980s, Riyad witnesses the devastating aftermath of the Hama massacre—an atrocity by the Assad regime. Wanting to expand his notion of government and justice, Riyad moves to the US to study law, but his plans are derailed and he eventually falls in love with a Southern belle. Bashar, meanwhile, stayed in Syria and embarked on a brilliant legal career under the same corrupt Assad government that Riyad despised.

The continuing crisis in Syria has raised a question mark over the common perception of Middle Eastern affairs as an offshoot of global power politics. To Western intellectuals, foreign-policy experts, and politicians, "empire" and "imperialism" are categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and more recently to the United States of America. Lacking an internal dynamic of its own, the view of such people is that Middle Eastern history is the product of its unhappy interaction with the West.

During 1915 to 1923, one and a half million Armenian people were deported and killed in the most appalling ways comprehensible. They were ripped from their homes (in a land where they had lived for longer than history can tell, a land so old that many speculate it was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden) and sent off on death marches across the blistering Syrian Desert. They were shot on the thresholds of the houses where they were raising their children. They were butchered with swords in gruesome ways in order to dishearten those left alive.

The Middle East is the beginning and the end of U.S. foreign policy: events there influence our alliances, make or break presidencies, govern the price of oil, and draw us into war. But it was not always so - and as Patrick Tyler shows in this thrilling chronicle of American misadventures in the region, the story of American presidents' dealings there is one of mixed motives, skulduggery, deceit, and outright foolishness, as well as of policymaking and diplomacy.

A true story as exhilarating as a great spy thriller, as turbulent as today's headlines from the Middle East, A Time to Betray reveals what no other previous CIA operative's memoir possibly could: the inner workings of the notorious Revolutionary Guards of Iran, as witnessed by an Iranian man inside their ranks who spied for the American government.

On August 1, 1990, Flight 149 was scheduled for its routine London-to-Kuala Lumpur run. But when the plane, carrying 385 passengers and crew, landed at a Kuwait airport to refuel that day, it was surrounded by Iraqi tanks and about to be bombed by fighter jets. The passengers and crew were kept as hostages and suffered brutal treatment including violent attacks, sexual assaults, and mock executions.

Malala's memoir of a remarkable teenage girl who risked her life for the right to go to school is now abridged and adapted for chapter book listeners. Raised in a changing Pakistan by an enlightened father from a poor background and a beautiful, illiterate mother, Malala was taught to stand up for what she believes. Her story of bravery and determination in the face of extremism is more timely than ever.

It is a simple fact that no president in American history brought less foreign policy experience to the White House than Donald J. Trump. The real estate developer from Queens promised to bring his brash, zero-sum swagger to bear to cut through America's most complex national security issues, and he did. If the cost of his "America First" agenda was bulldozing the edifice of foreign alliances that had been carefully tended by every president from Truman to Obama, then so be it.