It was once common for anthropologists to categorize certain societies as having “honor-shame” cultures. Among academics, such categorizations, at least when applied to the societies of the Middle East, have become passé if not taboo, thanks to Edward Said’s 1978 work Orientalism, which branded virtually all prior Western scholarship on the Middle East racist and imperialist. As a result of Said’s influence, writes Richard Landes, universities have produced numerous experts who have consistently misdiagnosed the resurgence of radical Islam, the Arab Spring, and above all the Israel-Palestinian conflict:

On Thursday, there was a fire—apparently caused by an explosion—at the uranium-enrichment facility in the Iranian city of Natanz. The incident followed closely on the heels of an explosion at the Parchin military facility, also connected to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, and another at a building in Tehran that left nineteen dead. While Israel has not commented on any of these incidents, there are reports that it was behind at least one. A few weeks earlier, Tehran set off an exchange of cyberattacks between the two countries. Yoav Limor analyzes the situation: