Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America » (Abridged)

Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of the New York Times bestseller Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson and Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq. He is an investigative reporter with more than two decades of experience writing for Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, Insight magazine, and Reader’s Digest.

Like no book before it, Preachers of Hate uncovers an ancient hatred that threatens the life and livelihood of every American. The “new” anti-Semitism targets not only Jews, but Americans specifically and the West in general. It targets our values, our lifestyle, and our freedoms. It is the single most important issue we face when trying to make sense of the Arab world.

Most Americans will be stunned to discover the depth and extent of anti-Semitic hatred in today’s Middle East and Europe, and that many Muslim leaders are not just encouraging it, but spending a great deal of money to spread the lies that spawned the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attack on America. In Preachers of Hate, bestselling author Kenneth R. Timmerman (who is not Jewish) contends that, besides Islam itself, the core unifying force in the Muslim world is a virulent strain of anti-Semitism that postulates the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the...

Publishers Weekly

The Western media commonly report that in much of the Middle East, anti-Zionism has edged into full-blown anti-Semitism, and Timmerman, in this travel journal intermixed with political analysis, gives potent and frightening examples of this phenomenon. The most visceral, and common, illustration he has found in interviewing Middle Eastern clerics, reporters and politicians is the widespread acceptance of the 1895 fraudulent document The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which details an alleged Jewish plot for world domination. Over the past two decades, he reports, the Protocols have become required reading throughout most Arab countries. Equally frightening is his analysis of the anti-Semitic sentiments routinely found in school texts in Arab countries. Timmerman, who has written for Time, Newsweek and Reader's Digest, has a forthright and compelling journalistic style that is also highly opinionated and often inflammatory. Many of his noteworthy reports and observations are undercut by heedless generalizations, such as his comment that "among European limousine liberals... it has become fashionable to [want Israel] punished by the international community, or simply eradicated," which will seem to many to be a gross simplification of a very complicated political reality. When he is not writing about the Middle East, Timmerman takes on such topics as what he sees as anti-Americanism on U.S. university campuses with the same lack of delicacy. MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky is described as typifying "the hate-America-first faction of campus radicals" and Timmerman baldly misrepresents his political positions. Timmerman, whose best selling Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson made the bestseller lists but which was frequently and severely criticized for its reliance on incendiary far-right rhetoric, has touched on some important topics in this book, but they are to a large degree lost in his tendency to overgeneralize and overstate. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.