Guerre and Shalom: Pax Arabica (Reviews)

Pax Arabica: The State, the Street and the Idea That Won’t Stay Inside Borders

Daniel Clarke-Serret — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:36:56 GMT

Claude’s full review of Pax Arabica:

Most books about the modern Middle East pick a villain: a regime, a colonial legacy, an ideology, a foreign power. Pax Arabica tries something more ambitious and, for long stretches, is more persuasive than its title suggests: it argues that the region’s recurring catastrophes — minority persecution, failed peace proc…

Presenting PAX ARABICA

Daniel Clarke-Serret — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:19:31 GMT

On Tuesday 12th May, I had the great pleasure of presenting Pax Arabica to Harif, a special organisation committed to preserving the history and culture of Jews from the Middle East & North Africa. Please find the presentation attached along with a question and answer session at the talk's conclusion. I do hope that it inspires you to become a paid subscriber of Guerre & Shalom where you get full access to the book's chapters (see below).

Subscribe now

Daniel Clarke-Serret’s PAX ARABICA:

Acknowledgements: With Thanks

FOREWORD by Nachum Kaplan

Introduction: The time to change the narrative is now!

PART 1: BABEL

Chapter 1: On Arab Imperialism // Chapter 2: On the Vanguard //Chapter 3: On Dictatorial Oppression // Chapter 4: On Islamist “Freedom” // Chapter 5: On Islamist Misery // Chapter 6: On Arab Apartheid // Chapter 7: On Middle Eastern Minorities // Chapter 8: On the Masters of Ethnic Cleansing // Chapter 9: On Genocide, Slavery and Racist Indifference //Chapter 10: On Unjust “Justice” and the Inversion of Language // Chapter 11: On Appeasement // Chapter 12: On the Man who stood against Pax Arabica

PART 2: EDEN

Chapter 13: On Nations, States and the Nation State // Chapter 14: On Sykes-Picot // Chapter 15: On Zionism and the duty to protect // Chapter 16: On the New Regional Sheriff // Chapter 17: On the Psychology of Strength // Chapter 18: On the Paradigm Shift // Chapter 19: On the Post-Imperial Two State Solution // Chapter 20: On the End of the Great Game

AFTERWORD by Khaled Salih: A Song of the Oppressor and the Parody of the Oppressed.

Subscribe now

How the Middle East Was Lost in Translation - and why PAX ARABICA Refuses the Lie

Uriel Zehavi · אוריאל זהבי — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:02:24 GMT

Thank-you to Uri Zehavi for his kind review of my book PAX ARABICA. It was lovely meeting Uri and Modi in person earlier this month, passing by the famous college in Windsor where Anthony Eden (pictured below left) went to school. Indeed my new college, close to Runnymede (home of Magna Carta) is twinned with Eton and it’s main building is the Winton Building, named after Righteous of the Nations Sir Nicholas Winton. So Democracy, Edenism, Jewish History: I seem to be living the themes of Pax Arabica at the moment. Anyway, enough rambling and over to Uri for his wonderful analysis of an important work.

Don’t forget to subscribe as paid to read PAX ARABICA in full —and don’t forget to subscribe to Uri’s Substack ISRAEL BRIEF for up to date analysis of the latest events in Israel. I am pleased to announce that Uri will soom be serialising his own book here on Guerre & Shalom. Watch this space! - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

Subscribe now

I came to Pax Arabica the long way around.

Two or three months ago, Daniel Clarke-Serret’s name began surfacing in my orbit—passed along by people whose judgment I trust, usually accompanied by some variation of “you should read this.” I couldn’t find the book on Amazon, so I dug deeper. It was serialized on his substack Guerre and Shalom. So, I subscribed and then planned to binge the book. It was worth it. So is the subscription.

In an ecosystem saturated with moral posturing and conceptual sloppiness, Clarke-Serret does something increasingly rare: he insists on definitions, follows history where it actually leads, and refuses to flatter Western sensibilities. That alone puts him out of step with most contemporary writing on the Middle East.

I was also fortunate to meet Daniel recently in the UK—we spent an afternoon in Windsor with him, his wife, and daughter. The clarity on the page matched the clarity in person: serious, civil and refreshingly intellectual.

What follows is my impression of Pax Arabica. Whether you ultimately agree with each conclusion is beside the point. This is a book that deserves to be read honestly, argued with seriously, and judged on its substance rather than its convenience.

“How the Middle East Was Lost in Translation—and Why Pax Arabica Refuses the Lie” by Uri Zehavi

A book that restores definitions in a region where words have been conscripted.

Most books about the Middle East try to sound reasonable. Pax Arabica tries to be accurate.

Thucydides had a line for our moment: “words had to change their ordinary meaning.” When language gets drafted into war, “justice” becomes a cudgel, “genocide” becomes a slogan, and hesitation gets sold as virtue. Clarke-Serret’s book is built as a counterstrike to that corruption. He restores definitions, then he follows the consequences.

Daniel Clarke-Serret’s argument starts where political cowardice refuses to let most people begin. The region’s dominant “anti-colonial” narrative is inverted. The West has spent decades training itself to see only one kind of empire (its own) and only one kind of indigenous legitimacy (the kind that flatters the Western collective guilt). Clarke-Serret opens with Isaiah’s moral inversion—evil relabeled as good. Once you invert the terms, you invert the verdicts

The result is not a “fresh perspective” in the TED-Talk sense. It bluntly names the Arabized-Islamic imperial project—secularized in pan-Arab nationalism, spiritualized in Islamism—and takes it down. Which operates as an empire that expects deference, and punishes dissenters, minorities, and border-breakers with impunity. Israel, in this telling—rather than the region’s colonial irritant—is the region’s most serious obstacle to imperial uniformity. Therefore the permanent target of Islamist efforts.

The framework alone makes the book worth your time. But Clarke-Serret goes further. He builds the case across history, ideology, language, and incentives. And he does so in a way that reads less like an academic treatise (thank HaShem) and comes across more like an engaging seminar that got tired of watching diplomats nod along at lies.

The Architecture: Babel, Then Eden

The structure is effective. Part 1 (“Babel”) diagnoses the system. Imperial continuity. Ideological enforcement. Minority suppression. Along with all the propaganda grammar that lets it masquerade as liberation. Part 2 (“Eden”) pivots to statecraft. What stabilizes regions. What deters violence. What nationhood actually means. Why the West keeps repeating the same mistakes—because, as I often argue, it confuses process for reality.

Calling the first half “Babel” is clever. One language. One identity. One political theology—difference treated as disorder. Clarke-Serret’s claim is that this is not merely a cultural tendency. It shows up in demographics (who disappears), in law (who is permanently second-class), in education (what children are taught), and in foreign policy (which cause(s) must remain sacred to maintain pan-identity discipline).

Clarke-Serret also refuses the comforting mistake of treating this as medieval fanaticism. He argues Pax Arabica was consolidated in the modern world—where democracies, NGOs, and “expert” language can be coaxed into laundering conquest as justice.

“Eden,” meanwhile, is not utopian. It wagers that ordered nation-states are the only sustainable way out of permanent regional war. Clarke-Serret is not naive about what that takes. He sells borders, incentives, deterrence, and the hard moral requirement to name things accurately.

What the Book Gets Right—Repeatedly

It recenters the victims that fashionable politics deletes

If your mental map of the region begins and ends with Gaza headlines, Pax Arabica will feel like an insult—because it refuses to flatter your curated compassion. Clarke-Serret drags the reader through the minoritized, erased, and ethnically cleansed communities that do not trend on Western campuses, Jews across MENA. Kurds. Yazidis. Druze. Christians. Black Africans in Arab-ruled spaces. More. He treats “diversity” as a lived civilizational fact in the Middle East—then shows what happened to it under the dominant imperial identity project.

That move changes the moral arithmetic. When the region is framed as “Israel vs. Palestinians,” the West can keep outsourcing guilt, keep fantasizing about a procedural fix, and keep ignoring the ideological engine. When the region is framed as empire vs. minorities… Israel stops looking like the anomaly. One minority that refused to countenance its own extinction.
It treats “language inversion” as a weapon system

Some of Clarke-Serret’s Chapter most useful contributions are grounded in his claim that the modern conflict is fought as much in terminology as in terrain. He’s not talking about euphemisms in the gentle sense. He’s arguing that words like “justice,” “human rights,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” are deployed as instruments—often disconnected from their legal or historical meaning.

Clarke-Serret’s sharper point is older than Twitter and uglier than propaganda. Reason can be weaponized. Thucydides admired evidence and causality, and Athens still descended into sophistry. “Objectivity” becomes camouflage. Numbers become victory. Rhetoric replaces definition. That is how democracies learn to rationalize atrocities while congratulating themselves on procedure.

The West’s moral vocabulary is not simply “misapplied.” It is exploited. Institutions that assume good faith become tools for actors who never intended good faith. Clarke-Serret’s point is that norms without enforcement—and norms selectively enforced—become a trap.

He keeps circling back to the ancient pattern. Civil conflict at Corcyra where courage and recklessness trade names. The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must. It’s the engine of the region’s empire project—and the West’s excuse-making habit when minorities get crushed.

It refuses to pretend Islamism is “misunderstood grievance”

The book draws a hard line between private faith and political ideology. Refreshingly, it does not play the modern Western game of pretending political Islam is a misunderstanding. He treats Islamism as a coherent political project with a theory of sovereignty, a theory of conquest, and a theory of hierarchy. You don’t have to adopt every one of Clarke-Serret’s theological or historical emphases to appreciate the underlying realism: movements tell you who they are. Believe them.

Clarke-Serret’s twist is that the region’s rot is not simply religious irrationalism. He describes something worse. Conquest framed as liberatio. And a totalitarian collective identity that speaks as “history” itself—demanding submission while calling it progress.

This is where the book’s tone—unfashionable, impatient, direct—actually becomes a feature. It does not pre-apologize. It does not come across as if the reader’s first obligation is to avoid being disliked.

It models a strategic rather than sentimental pro-Israel case

Plenty of pro-Israel books plead. Clarke-Serret doesn’t. He argues Israel’s legitimacy as (a) indigenous nationhood returning to its origin point, and (b) the functional protector of minorities in a region that routinely punishes minority existence. When he discusses sovereignty, the nation-state, and deterrence, the argument is not “Israel is nice.” It’s “Israel is necessary.”

It understands appeasement as policy habit, not a one-off mistake

Democracies prefer the illusion of stability over the discipline of deterrence. They punish allies who act like adults in a hostile environment. Clarke-Serret treats appeasement as a repeatable Western reflex—a whole chapter’s worth (“On Appeasement”)—and then follows it into the psychology of strength. Predators expand when they smell proceduralism. Committees don’t deter. Borders do. Sheriffs do. Clarity does.

The “Levantia” Chapter: A Thought Experiment With Sharp Edges

A post-Palestinian identity—something like “Levantia”—is intriguing. Though, given the West’s short memory, I worry it could whitewash history. Clarke-Serret’s doesn’t present a naive peace plan, but a recognition that offers a new brand, a new flag, and new civic myths.

His claim is blunt: a “two-state solution” cannot be built on a political identity whose prestige economy is rejectionism and martyrdom. If you keep the identity engine intact, you don’t get a state—you get a launchpad. So he proposes a break: same people, different political story, different symbols, different incentives, and above all, a different educational project.

The break has to be visible where it hurts: schoolbooks, sermons, media, martyr payments, the prestige economy that treats rejection as honor. If the old incentives survive under a new flag, the map changes and the war stays.

This clean break can become a laundering operation if it skips accountability. Renaming something does not redeem it. But Clarke-Serret’s insight still stands. A future requires a civic narrative that does not require Israel’s death to feel meaningful. If that narrative cannot exist, then the conversation is not about borders; it’s about permanent war.

He uses the title with a double edge. Pax Arabica the empire is the regional order built on enforced uniformity and minority submission. Pax Arabica the book is written as an intervention in the modern West’s language crisis—the moment when “justice” became a mask for power and “decolonisation” became a cover story for imperial continuity.

A Necessary Book for an Unserious Era

Pax Arabica is not a book for readers who need their worldview affirmed by institutional approval. It is a book for readers who are tired of watching euphemism replace analysis. It’s for those who understand that moral clarity is necessary—even if the current moment of history treats it as an egregious overstep.

Clarke-Serret’s core contribution is a reframing. Shifting the conversation from a cartoon land dispute to a civilizational and imperial conflict over sovereignty, identity, and the right of minorities to remain alive. He takes the reader through the region’s suppressed record—minorities erased, words inverted, violence excused—and he does it with a thesis strong enough to argue with.

If you want a book that begs the West to be kind, this isn’t it. If you want a book that tells the West to stop being stupid—stop subsidizing narratives that reward rejectionism, stop treating jihadist politics as “context,” stop confusing NGO language with reality—then Pax Arabica delivers.

Clarke-Serret’s bet is simple and unfashionable. Truth exists. Words have meaning. Minorities deserve to live. That includes—especially includes—the indigenous peoples the Arabising whirlwind tried hard to erase. If the West keeps laundering conquest with corrupted terms, it will keep rewarding the strong and sacrificing the weak. Pax Arabica is a refusal to participate in that fraud.

— Uri Zehavi · Israel Brief

CHAPTERS REFERENCED BY URI:

Daniel Clarke-Serret’s PAX ARABICA (exclusively on Substack for paid subscribers):

Acknowledgements: With Thanks

FOREWORD by Nachum Kaplan

Introduction: The time to change the narrative is now!

PART 1: BABEL

PART 2: EDEN

AFTERWORD by Khaled Salih: A Song of the Oppressor and the Parody of the Oppressed.

Subscribe now

Westminster welcomes PAX ARABICA

Daniel Clarke-Serret — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:16:36 GMT

Yesterday PAX ARABICA came to Parliament!

In a special Jewish-Kurdish Network event hosted by Luke Akehurst MP, and in front of an audience of notables including Tel Aviv-based Professor Ofra Bengio, JKN Founder Liat Korduene, the Senior Vice President of the British Board of Deputies Adrian Cohen, Kurdish political/cultural figures from Iran to Syria and Guerre and Shalom’s very own Khaled Salih, I presented the necessity of fighting against Arab Imperialism.

It was timely —for it took place on an evening of escalating Syrian Arab violence against the country’s Kurds. One personally affected member of the audience spoke in tears of agony, in outrage at the world’s silence in the face of impending slaughter. Those around me were scrolling Facebook for the latest from Iran and Rojava.

It is in this context that PAX ARABICA arrived in Westminster — as a statement of truth in the darkness; as a project for a new region. So please take a listen and buy the book through a Guerre and Shalom paid subscription.

One person who will be buying was audience member and author of Forced Out: Labour Antisemitism Resignation Letters Judith Ornstein. Pax Arabica is a book on the art of language inversion - lying on a grand scale - and in Judith’s own words, “I’m a relative of Trotsky, so I know a thing or two about lying”.

If you would like me to speak on PAX ARABICA at one of your events, please get in touch in the normal way.

Subscribe now

Correction: the early line in the speech should have read “where imperialism is mistaken for decolonisation”.

Daniel with Khaled Salih

Daniel Clarke-Serret’s PAX ARABICA:

Acknowledgements: With Thanks

FOREWORD by Nachum Kaplan

Introduction: The time to change the narrative is now!

PART 1: BABEL

PART 2: EDEN

AFTERWORD by Khaled Salih: A Song of the Oppressor and the Parody of the Oppressed.

Subscribe now

The paperback version of Pax Arabica be found on Amazon here.

PAX ARABICA launched in Kurdistan!

Daniel Clarke-Serret — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 08:20:15 GMT

Subscribe now

I was never a supporter of the Iraq War.

It was a war of choice with no connection to 9/11. It caused inter-communal bloodshed, unending terrorist attacks and the rise of ISIS. Most ominously, it strengthened Iran.

Today though, from a vantage point of 20 years hindsight and Iranian humiliation in the 12 Day War, we see one enormous positive: the relative freedom of the Kurds to organise their own politics.

They are still split between four imposed states, variously chaotic and oppressive. They are still under the thumb of Erdogan’s Islamised Ottomans. They are still disappeared when they cry „Jin, jiyan, azadî” (Women, life, freedom) in Iranian streets.

But, in post-invasion “Iraq”, Kurdistan smells the scent of true freedom. Saddam Hussein is finally dead and Baathism along with him. No more can they be gassed by his machinery of terror. No more can they suffer an Anfal Genocide. They are on the path to true freedom from PAX ARABICA.

It will never be easy. In 2017, the Iraqi Kurds backed independence in huge numbers. 92.73 percent of votes were cast in favour of freedom. Yet their decisive, democratic call was ignored by the international community. Only Israel stood up and recognised the new country. Until today…

Following “my dear leader” Keir Starmer, who believes in recognising states before they have become geopolitical reality, Guerre and Shalom recognises Kurdistan with a capital in Erbil. Unlike Palestine, it has a government, a (defensive) army, a tax base and a willingness to live in peace with its neighbours. Unlike Palestine, it wishes to be free from the totalitarian terror of PAX ARABICA. It is a genuine (and functioning) nation state.

That’s not all…

Today Guerre and Shalom does its bit to make a post-imperial, Middle Eastern future a reality. We don’t hold a pathetic demonstration in London or virtue signal in a Marylebone bookshop. We take real steps on the ground in the Middle East.

So today I proudly announce that we are launching my new book in the only place it could be launched: not in London, not in New York, but in the heart of PAX ARABICA itself: in Kurdistan (see the photos).

This book is about freedom. The right of Middle Eastern minorities to protect themselves from Arab imperialism through self-determination. The right of women to protect themselves from male Arab apartheid. The right of black Africans not to be enslaved by their Arab Masters. And the duty of Arabs themselves to decolonize their own minds, so that they may turn to genuine nation statehood. Today, in Kurdistan, that process begins in earnest through this book launch.

In the photos, you will see what would have been impossible before 2003: Citizens of Kurdistan openly reading PAX ARABICA without fear of a bullet in their heads from Saddam’s thugs.

Thanks to Khalid Saleh (and yes to George Bush and Tony Blair), PAX ARABICA is now being freely distributed throughout Kurdistan. Hopefully, as this year goes on, it will be more and more read until such a time as we can see genuine independence from the Arab Empire.

It’s still too early for George W Bush to declare “Mission Accomplished!”, but at least we’ve finally begun the mission amongst those “Iraqis” who wish the mission to actually succeed.

Liberating the citizens of Baghdad from Arab imperialism is a rather more long-term project! Until then we must protect the Middle Eastern minorities: the Kurds, the Copts, the Maronites, the Druze, the black Africans and all the others who want free of accursed Arabism. We must also support Israel as the Northern Middle East’s only genuine indigenous nation state bar Kurdistan.

Even though PAX ARABICA is free for Iraqi Kurds, it comes with a price tag for a Western audience. Sorry!

Please become a paid subscriber to Guerre and Shalom so that you can read the book in full.

If you become a founder member (“Patron”), you will be entitled to a PDF copy to make your read a more pleasurable experience.

Subscribe now

PAX ARABICA by Daniel Clarke-Serret

Acknowledgements: With Thanks

FOREWORD by Nachum Kaplan

Introduction: The time to change the narrative is now!

PART 1: BABEL

PART 2: EDEN

AFTERWORD by Khaled Salih: A Song of the Oppressor and the Parody of the Oppressed.

Pax Arabica: "A discovery, a revelation in the truest sense"

Daniel Clarke-Serret — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 11:47:29 GMT

FOREWORD: Thank-you to Dr Lothar Riemenschneider and Noah Otte for their wonderful reviews of Pax Arabica. Please keep them coming —and please keep subscribing as paid so that you can read the text!

Please note that Dr Riemenschneider has done me the great honour of translating Pax Arabica into German! If anyone would find that easier than the English - or they just want to brush up on their language skills - please get in touch.

Now over to Lothar and Noah…

Subscribe now

“On Daniel Clarke-Serret’s Pax Arabica”: A Review by Dr Lothar Riemenschneider

Who does not remember those endless Sunday afternoons? The morning sermon of truth and hope was followed by the inevitable announcement: “We’re visiting family—dress properly.” Everyone was in their expected place, the respectable “mainstream.”

Decades later, nearly all those visits have faded into oblivion—except for the memory of “that child.”
The one who objected.
The one who talked back.
Unacceptable! And yet everyone misremembers it as “How cute, how funny” instead of “How embarrassing!”.

Still, that small act of protest contained something significant, something the adults should have been ashamed of — that they managed to turn the bitter into something merely sweet, until nothing meaningful remained.

Today, we have countless such Sunday afternoons—now called, among other things, “UN General Assemblies.” All the “adults” perform their roles, each in their place. But now no child—indeed, no one at all—is allowed to speak the truth. It is an institution of carefully maintained cowardice.

Daniel Clarke-Serret is one of the rare voices who insists on addressing the unwanted, the forgotten and the silenced. He dreams, and he dares to write what many might reject as “improper” or unspeakable. Yet for the reader willing to confront the unquestioned, to allow the unexpected and to recognize even the faint path toward freedom in a world drowning in collectivist immaturity—where individual liberty is condemned and smothered—the following questions arise:

Why not? What else is there? Do the endlessly confident slogans and dead-end “realities” lead to anything worthy?

Against the oft-repeated (and ridiculous) accusation of supposedly “colonialist” imported nation-statehood, Clarke-Serret notes the historical truth: the idea of the nation did not begin in Europe, but in the ancient biblical lands—the cradle of Western civilization. With Israel, it merely returns to its origins. Long before nation-states became common in Europe - and in an age of Middle Eastern empire - Israel had demanded national self-determination.

National consciousness was forced out of the Holy Land along with the indigenous Jews; Islam, with its all-embracing totalitarianism, became the only remaining “political idea,” and the once vibrant, exuberantly diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-religious region withered into an Arabized province.

And thus arose the almost perverse inversion that national identity is a “European import”—a supposed colonialism—when in fact the idea of Judea/Israel had proliferated massively in Europe and has now returned to its place of origin. ...

Yet many “critical,” “left-wing” journalists and students from “elite” universities repeat Arab-Islamic propaganda uncritically, suppressing the very “diversity” they claim to defend—especially the rights of non-Arab peoples, relegated to minorities. They celebrate the worst butchers, the most brutal oppressors, the most blatant liars, and the most murderous rapists, idolizing them as supposedly “oppressed”.

What went so grotesquely wrong?
How can the Israelites, the “People of the Book”, guardians of scholarship, “progressive” inquiry, and doubt for thousands of years, and now finally a free indigenous people in their ancestral homeland, be vilified as “colonialists”?

Thus a seminal work such as Tidiane N’Diaye’s The Veiled Genocide (2010) is out of print and available only second-hand, while countless inflammatory tracts from the “Arab world”—and lies about Israel and Jews—circulate freely. And while “hate speech” is policed with zeal, Islamic and antisemitic hate speech is openly broadcast on the streets of the “free West.”

This “progressive” madness rivals the enforced silence of those old Sunday afternoons.

N’Diaye, a Black Senegalese scholar, points out that the very “trade routes” used by the Western transatlantic slave trade had already existed for a thousand years under the Arab-Muslim slave trade—often maintained by African rulers selling their own subjects.

The slave trade conducted by white Europeans spans roughly three centuries—until the “evil West” abolished and criminalized slavery—while slavery still exists in parts of the supposedly “oppressed” Arab-Muslim world, as widely reported in the context of recent events such as slave labor for the World Cup. There are countless reports and the evidence is clear.

But such facts do not fit the left-wing mainstream narrative. Anyone who raises them is branded “right-wing” or “racist.” Meanwhile, ideological currents claiming to stand for “freedom” and “critical consciousness” leave no room for actual critical awareness—because such awareness destroys Marxism, though it strengthens liberalism.

A refusal to acknowledge individual responsibility lies at the core of this “leftist” and “anti-colonial” worldview. It becomes a kind of paternalism: a belief that certain groups must not be held accountable, that they are perpetual victims—an attitude that is itself deeply racist. The worst oppressors and greatest slave-traders in world history are recast as “the oppressed.”

And just as left-wing movements have never faced their own “mistakes” and historical crimes, but demand that others do so, they now resemble those parents and grandparents to whom one was never allowed to say anything “inappropriate.” Only today, instead of Sunday Best, the required attire is the keffiyeh.

And of course the West’s own many errors—some grave, some disastrous—must also be acknowledged. Ignorance, cowardice, arrogance and self-assurance endure, alongside empty refrains of “Never again” and “Stop it before it starts,” even as the same horrors unfold once more.

What more must happen this time?
When will the great Arab falsehood finally collapse?

Clarke-Serret lays all this before us—a discovery, a revelation in the truest sense.
Truth is unveiled, falsehoods are exposed and lies are uncovered. Only thus can hope be seen clearly, with all its bitterness and all its sweetness.

Where this may lead is up to you, to me, to each of us—to ensure that it will be remembered as something of true significance, not merely as a Sunday sermon.

“Pax Arabica: A Seminal Work” by Noah Otte

It has been my pleasure and my honor to read Daniel Clarke-Serret’s epic, paradigm-shifting book Pax Arabica!

The Arab Empire is invisible —an insidious entity that can’t be seen with the naked eye. This is the astonishing opening claim of a book which is a must-read. As Daniel masterfully shows, Pax Arabica isn’t an empire in the conventional sense. You don’t see huge Arab armies patrolling the streets of Damascus, Cairo, Triopoli, Amman, and Khartoum. Rather, it is a subtle form of imperialism that inseminates itself into other lands by means of culture, language and religion: the so-called “Babel Terror”.

For far too long, Arabs have ruled over and tyrannized Jews, Kurds, Africans, Berbers, Druze, Samaritans, Mandeans, Maronites, Copts, Yazidis and Bedoiuns. That must come to an end — the Middle East must be decolonized and its indigenous peoples liberated.

Daniel Clarke-Serret provides us with a blueprint with just how we can accomplish that task in Pax Arabica. Every single chapter of this book is well-worth reading but I want to quickly talk about a few chapters in the book that particularly stood out and resonated with me personally.

From Part 1 entitled Babel, Chapters 2, 6, 8, 9 and 11 were particular stand out for me. Chapter 2 educates the reader on the first October 7th, the horrific Coastal Road Massacre of 1978. PLO terrorists infiltrated Israel, hijacked a bus and started shooting and killing civilians left and right. Men, women, children —nobody was spared. In this chapter, Daniel explains that the PLO weren’t seeking true national self-determination, but rather sought bring the Holy Land back under complete Arab control.

Chapter 6 concerns the oppression of Arab women in and outside of Arab lands. Alas, Arab culture remains utterly patriarchal and chauvinistic to this day.

Chapter 8 reminds us of Iraq’s forgotten centrality in the history of the Jewish people and their faith. Daniel shows us how Iraqi Jews - despite their steadfast loyalty and patriotism - were pressured to leave amidst terrible violence and Nuremburg-style legislation.

Chapter 9 takes a look at a forgotten genocide, that which the world has shamefully neglected for two decades in Sudan. Daniel explores the Arab slave trade and the longstanding bigotry, hatred and violence of Arabs towards black ethnic groups in the region. He shows how a three-pronged racism towards Jews, Arabs and black Africans explains the complete lack of international media attention.

Chapter 11 is a classic! It revives the reputation of a great historical figure in Anthony Eden, showing us why the actions he took at Suez in 1956 were completely justified. As Daniel demonstrates, they were undertaken to preserve international law, not undermine it. The only naked act of imperialism on show was that of Nasser in his attempt to subjugate the entire Middle East.

Part 2 entitled Eden is also excellent and contains some personal favorites from the book as well. Chapters 14, 15, 16 and 19 are of particular interest.

Chapter 14 explains how Syria in its current form - under Islamist dictator Ahmad Al-Sharaa - has no right to exist. A controversial claim, but an extremely well-argued one. Daniel calls for each minority group to have their own nation state and I, for one, agree. Only then will each have an indigenous space to be safe and secure.

Chapter 15 covers why Israel has a duty to protect the beleaguered Syrian Druze population given the unbreakable bond between the Jewish and Druze peoples. Meanwhile Chapter 16 is an exploration of how Israel has stepped up as the regional sheriff in a lawless region. There where tribal loyalties and honor-based violence hold sway, Israel’s actions are the clear order of the day.

Finally, and most memorably, Chapter 19 brilliantly lays out why the Palestinian national identity - and its present imperial banner - need to be discarded in favor of a new nation called Levantia. A beautiful blue and gold flag will provide the Holy Land’s Arab inhabitants with a brand new national identity, as exemplified by a flag independent of the baggage of history and its bloodshed.

Pax Arabica is a seminal work and one which all readers are strongly encouraged to buy!

PAX ARABICA: Contents

Foreword by Nachum Kaplan

Introduction: The time to change the narrative is now!

PART 1: BABEL

PART 2: EDEN

AFTERWORD by Khaled Salih: A Song of the Oppressor and the Parody of the Oppressed.

Hypocrisy and Arab empire

Benjamin Kerstein — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:10:46 GMT

Benjamin Kerstein’s new book, Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, is now available at Amazon via Wicked Son Books and the Z3 Project. For an extract, please hit this link.

Thanks to Benjamin for his kind review of PAX ARABICA below. If the reader would like to publish a review of their own, please direct message me.

Fun fact: In the review, Benjamin references Edward Said and how PAX ARABICA acts as a “polemical and ferocious response” to his defence of Arab Imperialism. Interestingly, an alternative working title to Pax Arabica was Occidentalism….

“Hypocrisy and Arab empire: A review of PAX ARABICA” by Benjamin Kerstein

Clarke-Serret states a simple but too often silent truth: Morality is reciprocity. If the West must face history and itself, so must everybody else. As long as the partisans of Arab imperialism do not, no one in the West is obligated to listen to a single word they say.

Benjamin Kerstein

There comes a time when societies must face the reality of what they’ve done. That is, they must acknowledge and struggle with their history and, often, their historical crimes.

All the nations of the West and, of course, Israel are regularly admonished on this point, usually by those who refuse to reciprocate in any way. In his new book Pax Arabica, Daniel Clarke-Serret takes on perhaps the most prominent of these hypocrites: the Arab world.

In the process, Clarke-Serret holds a mirror up to the Arab world’s constant claims of victimhood and thus reveals the true victimizer. As he puts it, “The so-called Arab world is not oppressed. They are not suffering from genocide, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid, at least not from foreign hands. Rather, they are the oppressors who are audaciously and shamefully causing all these ills.”

Accusations of Islamophobia and racism will no doubt immediately follow, but Clarke-Serret points out in short order that his assertion is not fomenting hate but represents a return to historical truth.

“Which foreign power was it that invaded the entirety of the Levant and North Africa?” he asks. “Which distant people is it that imposed its religion on the unwilling at the barrel of the gun? And which racist interlopers have deemed it their God-given right to slowly but surely cleanse all non-believers from the indigenous lands of others?”

Indeed, whatever the virtues of Arab society, its constant execration of other societies—and racist assaults on Jews—usually appear to be little more than projection. Amidst the cries of racism, settler-colonialism, imperialism, and so on, we are faced with the history of an Arab world that only exists because of racism, settler-colonialism, imperialism, and innumerable other crimes.

Clarke-Serret makes his points in order to posit that the Arab world and thus the Middle East—with the sole exception of Israel—is an empire by any other name. It is one in which only one people with one religion is permitted to dominate an entire region, denying sovereignty to Kurds, Maronites, Yazidis, and numerous other, smaller peoples that it often relentlessly persecutes in the cruelest manner.

“Both the Mongols and the British are overshadowed by the most successful Empire of all time,” he writes. “An Empire that exists to this very day. An Empire so insidious that it has gaslit the world into believing that it is no empire at all. That they are the native people of all of the Middle East and North Africa and most audaciously of all that they are at the forefront of the fight against ‘Western imperialism.’”

The response to this, Clarke-Serret admonishes, should be the “de-colonization” of the Middle East by fostering the creation of nation-states for all its peoples. He states: “We do need unity in this world, but not Arab unity. We need the unity of free peoples coming together in liberty with respect and understanding for the other. We need a Middle East of different, but mutually respecting, nations.”

“There needs to be an independent Israel, an independent Kurdistan, an independent African Western Sudan, and an independent Christian state in Lebanon,” he urges. “Pan-Arabism—the remnant of medieval Islamic Jihad—needs to retire into the history books for good.”

Using examples from Sudan, Nigeria, and elsewhere—where non-Muslims and non-Arabs are being brutally slaughtered, enslaved, and otherwise abused—Clarke-Serret exposes the Arab world’s imperialist hypocrisy, saying, “The Arab Empire is an expression of all that we must set our face against: Superiority, slavery, submission, theocracy, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and inequality.”

The vanguard of this empire, he posits, is currently “Palestinianism,” which he sees as a fundamentally imperialist and colonialist ideology.

He asserts that Palestinian “nationalism” is not, in fact, “a national movement for self-determination. … As clearly set out in the PLO Charter, Palestinianism is the Vanguard of the Pan-Arab Empire. It is a temporary identity that must be maintained until the non-Arab Jews are expelled from the Middle East and or at least denied their sovereignty as a free, indigenous, Middle Eastern people. It is more an agent of Jewish non-self-determination than a vehicle for Palestinian national actualization.”

In such a situation, Clarke-Serret posits that genuine national self-determination is the only thing that can roll the empire back. Quite rightly, he points out that “If self-determination has any value, it is to create power structures for the powerless.” And it is the Kurds, the Maronites, the Yazidis, and others who are powerless; while the non-Arab and non-Muslim Nigerians, Sudanese, and Israelis are the ones facing the robbery of their power by those who already possess more than enough to be satisfied by any rational measure.

Along with this, Clarke-Serret points to the hypocrisy of the Western left, for whom Islam is the only beautiful empire, the glorious exception to all their professed values. He writes, “Progressive organizations are infected by an absolutist anti-imperial ideology that colors all their geopolitical and historical interpretations,” but this ideology is not, in fact, anti-imperialist. The left’s ideology posits, rather, that some empires are more equal than others, and has thus become a collaborator in the modern continuation of the ancient Arab conquests.

Pax Arabica is a welcome antidote, insightful and ferocious in equal measure. It is, at times, a bit too ferocious, running to the polemical and exhortatory in a manner that lacks proper sobriety. There are also moments of excess, such as Clarke-Serret’s proposal that the Palestinians be placed in a non-sectarian state called “Levantia,” which is at best a fantasy.

Nor could a true “de-colonization” of the Middle East, however desirable, occur without enormous regional upheaval and war. As a result, it is likely that slow liberalization, such as is occurring in some Arab states, is preferable to grand gestures toward total liberation.

Moreover, one cannot ignore the fact that many Arab states are moving away from the ancient belief in conquest. The Abraham Accords, which have held despite a bloody war in Gaza, are proof enough of this, and there is the possibility that, if the Accords expand, Arab imperialist ambitions will come to an end by sheer force of history. Clarke-Serret does not consider this at sufficient length.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of ferocious and polemical defenses of Pax Arabica by innumerable apologists for imperialism and terrorism like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi. A ferocious and polemical response to them is long overdue. In writing one, Clarke-Serret is stronger in history and logic than the apologists, and certainly possesses a moral clarity and historical accuracy they would never dare embrace.

More than anything else, however, Clarke-Serret states a simple but too often silent truth: Morality is reciprocity. If the West must face history and itself, so must everybody else. As long as the partisans of Arab imperialism do not, no one in the West is obligated to listen to a single word they say.

Paid subscribers have full access to all chapters of Pax Arabica.

Founder members (“Patrons”) have the right to receive a PDF manuscript of the chapters for an easier read.

Subscribe now

PAX ARABICA

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Nachum Kaplan

Introduction: The time to change the narrative is now!

PART 1: BABEL

PART 2: EDEN

JOIN THE DEBATE ON “LEVANTIA”! (Chapter 19)

You have read Benjamin’s comments on Levantia above.

By contrast, Steven Spelledright (a newly paid subscriber) said: ‘In a recent interview with 18Forty, Einat Wilf noted “a colleague of mine recently wrote a nice little thought experiment. He called it Levantia.” You should ask that she cite you by name. Save others the time I had to spend Googling.’

This chapter is starting to cause waves. Join the debate.

A New Pattern for a Cursed Landscape

Khaled Salih — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 11:33:44 GMT

FOREWORD FROM DANIEL: Senior Kurdish official, government advisor and academic (and Guerre and Shalom Founder Member) Khaled Salih has written a wonderful review of Pax Arabica, my new book available exclusively for paid subscribers of Guerre and Shalom. Thank-you Khaled.

The paperback version of Pax Arabica can be found here on Amazon here:

Subscribe now

“Some things you read don’t give you any new facts at all. They just give you a new pattern for understanding the facts you already have.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

A Tale of Two Creeds

To comprehend the moral and ideological chasm that defines the modern Middle East, one must first confront two starkly opposing visions of humanity. One is a creed of systematic de-humanisation, of a lust for power that reduces human beings to objects of sectarian hatred and instruments of gratification. The other is a creed of defiant solidarity, a belief in a shared humanity so profound that its adherents will choose death over betrayal. The struggle between these two visions is the central, bloody drama of a cursed landscape called Middle East.

The first creed revealed its horrifying nature in the summer of 2014. When Islamic State terrorists stormed the Yazidi communities in Sinjar, they were not operating blindly. They carried lists detailing every household, identifying every family member, with a particular focus on young girls. This intimate knowledge was provided by their Arab Muslim neighbours, who facilitated the selection of their preferred prey: girls with blue eyes, blond hair, and light skin. The horror that followed was a direct consequence of an ideology that sees the “other” not as a neighbour, but as property. Sounds familiar? Think of thousand of workers from Gaza in Israel who returned with a different mission on October 7th, 2023.

“IN THE FALL OF 2014, a Saudi fighter for the Islamic State, ISIS, in al-Shaddadi, Syria, bought a female slave in the market, a 34-year-old Yazidi captive. He raped her over and over again. Why else do you buy a female slave? Then he purchased a second sex slave. This one was a 12-year-old girl. And suddenly the handcuffs of the Saudi fighter’s lust came off. Said the 34-year-old sex slave after she escaped, the ISIS fighter raped the 12-year-old youngster “for days on end despite heavy bleeding.” The 34-year-old escapee says with a mixture of despair and disgust, “He destroyed her body. She was badly infected. The fighter kept coming and asking me, ‘Why does she smell so bad?’ And I said, she has an infection on the inside, you need to take care of her.”
“‘She’s just a little girl,’ pleaded the 34-year-old. But the ISIS fighter answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she knows exactly how to have sex.’’’ Then he added something vital: “And having sex with her pleases God [Allah].” So the fighter never provided medical care. Instead, he prostrated himself on the floor next to the adolescent girl’s bed, prayed to Allah, then mounted the child over and over again. Each time when he was finished, he laid himself out on the floor again and prayed. We do not know the end of the story. We do not know if Allah the merciful, Allah the compassionate ever answered the prayers with healing. And, frankly, we do not know if the fighter even bothered to pray for such a thing.”
— Quoted in Howard Bloom, 2016, The Muhammad Code.

This is the Middle East some have been propagating for hundreds of years.

But there is another creed, a bloody and essential rebuttal to this de-humanising sickness. It offers the only blueprint for a more humane future, and it was written not in a philosopher’s treatise but in the final, defiant act of the Christian villagers of Bedyal. This gripping story was re-told recently in a TV-interview by President Masoud Barzani. During Saddam Hussein’s Anfal genocide against the Kurds, these Christians, who lived as Barzanis in every civic and cultural sense, were rounded up with their Kurdish neighbours for extermination. At the last moment, an official offered them a cynical lifeline. Pointing out that they were Christians and therefore not technically part of the annihilation order, he told them, “You are not Barzanis, get out and go back.”

They were offered their lives in exchange for a simple declaration of sectarian difference. They refused. Their response was an act of communal fidelity so profound it rendered biological survival secondary to civic truth.

“No, we are Barzanis. Our life and our death are with the Barzanis.”

(For more on this village see here)

They chose fidelity to their community over the biology of survival, and their remains were later found among the martyrs with the Barzanis. A provocative new book, Pax Arabica, provides the intellectual framework to diagnose the sickness the Bedyal villagers died defying. It does not merely offer new facts; it provides a revolutionary new pattern for understanding this cursed landscape and presents a searing, unflinching vision for its dismantlement.

Subscribe now

The Imperial Indictment

The strategic importance of Clarke-Serret’s Pax Arabica lies in its audacious central thesis, an act of intellectual demolition that recasts the modern history of the Middle East. It begins by highlighting the Prophet Isaiah’s call, the greatest descriptor of the region’s modern malaise:

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

The book argues that the so-called “Arab World” is not a collection of oppressed post-colonial states but is, in fact, the most successful and insidious empire of all time. This “Arab Imperium,” it claims, has mastered a form of narrative inversion that compels its victims to recite its grievances.

The charge sheet against this empire is damning, exposing its true nature as a colonial power built on conquest and suppression.

Masters of Ethnic Cleansing The book directs our gaze to the ruins of Iraqi Jewry, a civilization that endured for 2,500 years and once constituted a third of Baghdad’s population, now reduced to a mere three souls. This was not a natural migration but a deliberate imperial policy of racist purge. Its success is enshrined in modern Iraqi citizenship law, which as recently as 2006 explicitly denied Jews the right to reclaim their stolen nationality—a clause that feels less like an injustice and more like a victor’s boast.
The Epicentre of Slavery and Genocide Through a blistering examination of Sudan, Pax Arabica claims that the Arab Empire perfected slavery and continues to practice it with racist indifference. The very name Sudan, we are told, is Arabic for “the Land of the Blacks,” a label applied not in celebration but as a designation for an outpost dedicated to kidnapping and enslaving black Africans. While the British Empire attempted to abolish this trade, the Arab elite resisted. This legacy finds its modern expression in the ongoing genocide against the Masalit people by the Janjaweed and its successor, the RSF—a horror that barely registers in a West obsessed with phantom colonialists.
The Architecture of Apartheid The true, functioning apartheid of the Middle East, the book argues, is not found where its enemies claim, but in the systemic and suffocating oppression of women. This female apartheid is illustrated through the poignant stories of “Leila” and “Loubna,” two culturally Arab women in France. Their experiences reveal how the tendrils of male domination, surveillance, and control extend far into the diaspora, creating a profound imprisonment even on the boulevards of a free Western nation.

Thus, the Arab Imperium built its dominion upon the ruins of civilizations like Iraqi Jewry and the bodies of the enslaved Masalit, perfecting the ultimate imperial art: forcing the world to stare at its finger while it hides its blood-stained hands.

Subscribe now

The Imperial Toolkit

Beyond cataloging the empire’s crimes, Pax Arabica dissects the sophisticated methods of psychological and narrative warfare it employs to maintain its power and project its grievances onto its victims. This is a modern imperium that has mastered ideological subversion.

The book exposes the Palestinian movement as the “Vanguard of the Empire,” a claim substantiated with direct evidence from its own foundational texts. The 1968 PLO Charter states unequivocally:

Article 1: “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”

As the charter later clarifies, Palestinian identity is a temporary tool to be used “at the present stage of the struggle” for the ultimate goal of “Arab unity.” In this reading, Palestinianism is not a national liberation movement but an imperial spearhead aimed at the heart of Israel, the one indigenous, non-Arab nation-state that successfully defied the empire.

When secular pan-Arabism failed, another imperial weapon arose from its ashes: Islamism. Pax Arabica examines the work of Sayyid Qutb to frame Islamism not as a genuine liberation theology but as another totalitarian, universalist ideology. It is a “death cult” that promises freedom from earthly masters only to demand absolute submission to a far more tyrannical one—a ruinous alternative for those seeking an escape from their own imperial project’s failures.

The empire’s ultimate weapon, however, is the inversion of language. When the attack in the name of jihād, they label their invasion infitāh, opening —not colonialism, conquest, looting and raping. Long before the idea of “the White man’s burden” was born, these invaders euphemistically described their mission thus: an “invitation” to embrace their belief by converting, paying humiliation taxes (djizya) or elimination.

The vocabulary of human rights has been systematically hijacked, with terms like “genocide” and “apartheid” weaponised to accuse the empire’s victims of its own signature crimes. The analysis invokes the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, whose reading of the Al Coran led him to conclude that a word like “justice” in the Arabic context of his time had a tribal meaning—“beneficial or hurtful to the true believers”—that is “utterly incompatible with civilized society.” This linguistic warfare is devastatingly effective against a credulous West, where words are not yet understood as instruments of deception in a tribal calculus of honour and shame.

This masterful manipulation, however, succeeded only because of the active complicity and strategic incoherence of the West.

Subscribe now

The Western Betrayal

Pax Arabica reserves some of its most scathing polemic for the West, whose failure to confront the Arab Empire is portrayed as a toxic cocktail of moral cowardice, historical ignorance, and cynical philosophy.

In a brilliant revisionist account of the 1956 Suez Crisis, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden is recast not as a fumbling imperialist but as a prescient statesman. Having resigned in protest against the appeasement of Mussolini, Eden correctly identified Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism as a new fascism, an ideological successor to the totalitarianisms he had fought in the 1930s. His attempt to halt this new menace was a defense of international order against a nascent Arab one. His defeat came at the hands of an America described as “the immature global power with the attention span of a smartphone addicted 6 year old,” a betrayal that unleashed Nasser’s imperial ambitions and fuelled decades of regional chaos.

The philosophical root of this modern Western appeasement is located in the bloodless calculus of utilitarianism. The book employs the “Sheriff counter example” to devastating effect. Israel is framed as the innocent man in the sheriff’s custody. The rioting townsfolk—the Arab world and its enablers in the West—demand his head. To achieve the “greatest good for the greatest number,” which translates to avoiding domestic terror and wider conflict, the utilitarian sheriff (the West) hands the innocent man over to the mob. This is the grim logic that repeatedly sacrifices a democratic ally to appease an imperial aggressor.

This profound vacuum of Western will and moral clarity has created a dangerous power vacuum, compelling the rise of a new, and reluctant, force for regional order.

Subscribe now

A New Sheriff for a Lawless Landmass

After demolishing the Babel Terror of the Arab Imperium, Pax Arabica dedicates itself to prescribing a path toward a new, stable order—an “Eden” of sovereign nations.

The central conflict of the Middle East is thus reframed not as a dispute over territory, but as a clash of political philosophy: the struggle between Israel as a true nation-state and the surrounding Arab polities as nationless states—mere administrative districts, or “sanjaks,” of a wider, pan-Arab empire. The solution, therefore, is not more universalism, but true decolonisation. This requires dismantling the imperial fiction of a monolithic “Arab World” and fostering genuine national identities, as has begun in Morocco. Crucially, it means advocating for new nation-states for the region’s unprotected indigenous minorities, such as the Kurds and the Druze.

This political project must be underpinned by a clear-eyed understanding of what the book calls “the Psychology of Strength.” In the region’s tribal, honour-based societies, peace is not achieved through “reasonable” compromise, which is perceived as weakness. It is imposed through the establishment of deterrence via overwhelming and credible force, which alone generates the respect necessary for a stable order.

With America in strategic retreat, Israel is being forced to reluctantly assume the role of the “New Regional Sheriff.” In the “Wild West” of the Middle East, where international norms are flouted, Israel is compelled to enforce foundational laws—like nuclear non-proliferation—to prevent a descent into total chaos. This is not a role it seeks, but one that the failure of both the Arab world and the West has thrust upon it.

This new reality demands an uncompromising assessment of the book’s importance and the stark choices that lie ahead.

Subscribe now

The Creed of Survival

In its brutal and brilliant diagnosis, Pax Arabica presents an intellectual framework that is nothing less than a controlled demolition of the West’s entire understanding of the Middle East. It unmasks the Arab Imperium as the region’s true colonial power, deconstructs its sophisticated weapons of narrative warfare, and indicts decades of Western appeasement as the product of moral cowardice and philosophical bankruptcy. The book argues that this combination of imperial aggression and Western weakness has forced the emergence of a new, reluctant regional order, demanding a radical re-evaluation of the path to peace.

We return to the sacrifice of the Bedyal villagers, who chose death over a life defined by the tyrant’s sectarian lies. Their choice was the ultimate defiance against the imperial creed of division. But this spirit of defiance, this creed of survival, is not just a historical anecdote. It is a living force.

We see this same spirit in the actions of the Yazidi community after their genocide. In the face of ISIS’s attempt to shatter their social fabric through mass rape and enslavement, the Baba Sheikh, the Yazidi spiritual leader, issued a critical dictum. He declared that the captured women—violated, sold, and brutalised—would be welcomed back into the faith and the community without shame or stigma.

This was a profound act of collective healing and strategic genius. By re-embracing the survivors, the Yazidi leadership directly defeated ISIS’s core intention: to break the spirit of an indigenous people and destroy them from within. They refused to let the enemy define the boundaries of their community or the worth of its members.

This is the path to dismantling the Babel Terror and building a new Eden. This is the vision of true decolonisation post-Pax Arabica. It is not a peace imposed by empires, but a peace built on the resilience and empowerment of indigenous peoples—Kurds, Druze, Yazidis, and others—who have survived relentless waves of genocidal ideologies.

There is a better future for the Middle East if we see and highlight the true energy of survival and thriving.

Buy Pax Arabica today by subscribing as paid to Guerre and Shalom:

Subscribe now

Sources:

Howard Bloom, 2016, The Muhammad Code: How a Desert Prophet Gave You ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram—or How Muhammad Invented Jihad. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House

Robert M. Pirsig, 1991, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Bantam Books.

—, 20251109, “The Grace of Power: Masoud Barzani.”

Khaled Salih

The Grace of Power: Masoud Barzani

By Khaled Salih…

a year ago · 4 likes · Khaled Salih

Khaled Salih, 20251020, “Bear witness to cages of ideology: Nadia Murad and Eli Sharabi.”

Khaled Salih

Bear witness to cages of ideology: Nadia Murad and Eli Sharabi

By Khaled Salih…

a year ago · 7 likes · Khaled Salih

—, 20250714, “When the wretched of Gaza returned. Death’s dream kingdom for six hours and one minute,” https://substack.com/@khaledsalih/p-168289930