Joan Peters

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Feb 4, 2009 at 08:17

Hi Infidel

>From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters, 577 pages,

This is a poorly written book and at times I wonder why would anyone read it or even use it as reference. What is most appalling about Ms Peters is that she misquotes from the sources and she uses statistics (what I call the numbers game) to prove her point but in the process the reader that has some command of statistics will be able to sort out her little game and that statistics can be twised anyway one wants them to be and this is ineed shameful to base one's own conculsions of historiacal reconstruction on bogus numbers.

Ms Peters reminds me of a certain 7th century Arab that "writes" a book but his little book is no more than polemics and hate and violence and misquoting others when it suits him and the end result is it is no more than poor literature but 1.2B people still read it.

I really have to get my refrences here but I recall that this book was not well received even in Israel and in one of the reviews of the book the person who wrote such review stated that this is good only for hasbara (misinformation/disinformation) but no more

The real issue with the Palestinian Israeli conflict is what Walid Jumblat (the Druze leader) once said: There is a place for everyone in the Middle East but not for all ambitions

Now if you really want to read good historical reconstruction of "what really happened" then read Benny Morris

As for the quote in her book it reminds me of a British woman in the 19th century that was travelling in the area of today's Luxor and was very upset to discover an abnadoned Coptic village (circa 600CE to785CE) at the site of the Ramses temple complex on the western side of the Nile and how dare the Copts built such village on this great site? And she also had her own diatribes about how those fellaheen do not deserve to be there. But this woman did not realize that this was the site of the Coptic town of Jeme (see "The women of Jeme") and the site revealed much evidence that now historians are able to reconstruct the rich lives of those people that lived in such village and was abandoned in about 785CE most likely as they were the vicitms of the conflict between an Umayyad warlord and the 3Abbassids

The problem here is we only see what we know

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