A recurring readable text
On Sept 29, Orhan Pamuk, a writer from Turkey, had written a text about that feeling of powerlessness that haunts many parts of the world and, in his opinion, needs to be taken seriously, though the beliefs held and expressed as its consequence are by no means thereby justified:
What prompts an impoverished old man in Istanbul to condone the terror in New York in a moment of anger, or a Palestinian youth fed up with Israeli oppression to admire the Taliban who throw nitric acid in women’s faces, is not Islam, nor the idiocy described as the clash between east and west, nor poverty itself, but the feeling of impotence deriving from degradation and the failure to be heard and understood.(source, I had already linked to and quoted from the German version here)
Now the New York Review of Books published what seems to be a slightly more extensive and perhaps updated – dated October 18 – version of same text.