In the first week of the war in Afghanistan, a British news-paper reporter spoke to a Taliban fighter on the Pakistani border. The young jihadi was full of confidence. The Ameri-cans, he said, would never win for, ". . . they love Pepsi-Cola, but we love death."

In Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit have demonstrated that bad ideas can turn cancerous and metastasize into an infectious evil. With surgical precision, the authors provide a bioscopy of an ideological disorder and then offer readers a critical assess-ment of the underlying antipathy, a deep hatred for the West, most especially the United States and Israel. Occidentalism is the name given to this pathology, and in many respects it is the flip side of Orientalism, the bias exposed and analyzed by the late Edward Said. In both cases, prejudices that rob human targets of their humanity are enshrined. Buruma and Margarit have shown that hate for the West has a surprising history and has taken hold in vastly different geographical and cultural settings. There is no possibility that we can compre-hend, much less neutralize, this toxic world view without understanding its internal compostion.

While Orientalism conceives of non-Western peoples as lesser breeds, children incapable of managing their own affairs, Occi-dentalism reduces Western civilization to "a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grubbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling para-sites." The mind of the West is portrayed as captivated by science and reason. However alluring its promises, these intellectual gifts conceal the defects of an idiot savant who is incapable of discerning noble purpose or lasting meaning. The heart of the West is corrupted by a frivolous cosmopolitanism, a bourgeois complacency, and a decadent individualism. Ar-rogance and greed have stripped the West of its spiritual core and rendered its people soft and spoiled. Neither captialism nor liberal democracy is capable of generating self-sacrificing heroes.

Buruma and Margalit do not offer a historical reconstruction of this aversion, but rather single out key elements and illustrate how these different components were configured in diverse settings to serve a variety of ideological agendas. They begin with a profile of "the occidental city" and sketch its symbolic features as a soulless metropolis where human relations are commodities that serve immorality. The authors outline the political, economic, and social transformations that accom-panied urbanization-fueled reactions and led to a variety of agrarian revolts. Their account begins with the romantic condemnations of "cosmopolitan decadence" within Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They enlarge the parameters of this analysis to demonstrate that the push to return to the nation's roots, to reconnect with the blood and soil of the land, and to restore the virtues lost when peasants were transmuted into factory automatons inspired ideological movements that ranged from Hitler's National Socialist Party to the Chinese cultural revolution of Mao Tse-tung, from Cambodian Communism and the Khmer Rouge to fundamentalist Islam and the Taliban.

Buruma and Margalit then consider the Occidentalist portrayal of the hero over and against the merchant. The willingness of the true believers to embrace death is set in contrast to the flaccid and sickly character of the bourgeois. Those schooled in the discipline of self-sacrifice are driven by the example of martyrs while the corruptions of the West yield unexceptional lives. Once again the authors profile these dynamics with examples that range from the kamikaze pilot to Osama bin Laden's reformulation of Islam into a cult of death:

Osama bin Laden's use of death cult language to spur on his young followers bears many resemblances to the rhetoric of the kamikaze spirit. Unlike the Christian martyr, who suffers torture and death for his faith, the Muslim martyr (shahid) is an active warrior, more like the kamikaze pilot. But his mo-tives must be pure. It is not glorious to die for selfish reasons, or gratuitously, without an effect on the enemy. And the idea that freelance terrorists would enter paradise as martyrs by murdering unarmed civilians is a modern inven-tion, one that would have horrified Muslims in the past, Shi'ite or Sunni, and still horrifies many Muslims today. Islam is not a death cult.

The analysis proceeds to an examination of the "mind of the West" and concludes with the religious underpinnings of Occi-dentalism.

While this volume might initially seem to validate the hypothe-sis of Samuel Huntington and reinforce the notion that the West is inexorably condemned to global battle with Islam and countries such as North Korea, the authors caution readers to avoid sweeping generalizations. They conclude the book with challenges that hit much closer to home: First, we need to remember that most of the elements that constitute Occi-dentalism emerged in the midst of unresolved conflicts inside Western culture. The ideological components of hate were grown on Western soil and were only later transferred to for-eign lands. Second, we need to resist the temptation to mirror the failures of our enemies and to close ourselves off from their critiques.

If the West answers Occidentalist intolerance with reactionary religious and political biases of its own making, then we will wake up to discover that the image in the mirror has morphed into the face of our enemy.

This fascinating book reminded me once again that the world is far more interconnected than we often acknowledge. Beyond the entanglements of economic globalization and political interdependencies, there are shifting ideological currents that can carry entire populations into treacherous waters. Here is a book that will help readers chart a subterranean landscape often neglected and identify dangerous shoals. I strongly recommend this volume to anyone who wonders how to navi-gate these crucial challenges.

The story we have told (in this book) is not one of a civiliza-tion at war with another. On the contrary, it is a tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas. This could happen to us now, if we fall for the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. Reli-gious authority, especially in the United States, is already having a dangerous influence on political governance. We can-not afford to close our societies as a defense against those who have closed theirs. For then we would all become Occi-dentalists, and there would be nothing left to defend.

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