Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect Read Online Free Page A

wife, Fran, and skilled cameraman Harry Chase went first to the European front and then to the Middle East. When Thomas met Lawrence in Jerusalem, Thomas found what he considered the perfect combination of war hero and mysterious denizen of the Arab world.
    Thomas interviewed Lawrence for a total of a few days (according to Lawrence) or a few weeks (according to Thomas). In 1919, Thomas returned home to put together his material.
    He eventually developed the world's first multimedia lecture show. Thomas used three projectors, slides, stage props, dancers, and live music. His florid rhetoric conjured up scenes of endless desert sands, veiled women, and Bedouins carrying curved swords.
    Thomas's stage show was a huge hit. He played to overflow crowds in Madison Square Garden in New York and the Royal Opera House in London, among other venues. Here's how Thomas modestly described his extravaganza:
    When I opened in London I used the sixty-piece Welsh Guards Band in their scarlet uniforms. On stage, the Moonlight On the Nile scene, as the curtain opened on the Nile set, the moon faintly illuminating distant pyramids, our dancer glided onstage for a two-minute Dance of the Seven Veils accompanied by an Irish tenor in the wings, singing the Mohammedan Call To Prayer, which Fran had put to music. Atthe end of this I emerged in a spotlight and without even saying Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen, I started my show with the words: “Come with me to the lands of mystery, history and romance.” The first prologue ever used in connection with films. This again was one of my wild ideas. Then the pictures began to roll. 2
    Thomas never explained what the slinky “Dance of the Seven Veils” had to do with the Arab revolt.
    That dancer and similar irrelevant scenes cleverly played to Western stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. They were to have a long-term impact on Americans’ view of Syria and the entire region. Thomas promoted Lawrence as the white savior of the Middle East. Lawrence biographer Richard Aldington noted that Thomas's British and American audiences understood little about the Middle East. Thomas “doubtless calculated that what little they thought they knew came from hazy memories of the Arabian Nights and the Bible [and] a reading of sensational novels of ‘The Sheik.’” 3
    Thomas quickly became the latest in a long line of Orientalists, intellectual dilettantes who seemingly explain the mysteries of the Middle East while patronizing Arabs and promoting the superiority of Western culture. For example, Thomas wrote in his 1924 book With Lawrence in Arabia that Muslim leaders had sought to unify Arabs. “None was successful, but where they failed, Thomas Edward Lawrence, the unknown unbeliever, succeeded. It remained for this youthful British archaeologist to go into forbidden Arabia and lead the Arabs through the spectacular and triumphant campaign.” 4 In reality, as explained in the previous chapter , Arab nationalists unified themselves and helped defeat the Ottoman Empire.
    Thomas's characterization of Islam as a violent, intolerant religion echoes contemporary, right-wing views. “Mecca and Medina, its sister metropolis, are the two most mysterious cities in the world,” Thomas wrote. “Any man in the vicinity of either who declared that Christ was the son of God would be torn to pieces.” 5
    And Thomas was not above lying to embellish the Lawrence myth.In a 1919 magazine article, he claimed to have been with Lawrence when he dynamited a Turkish railway line behind enemy lines. Thomas wrote “about the expedition in vivid detail—but it never took place,” according to historian Jeremy Wilson. “Thomas's diaries, together with other contemporary documents, show that he and Lawrence were together for only a day or two in Aqaba, during one of the quietest periods in the Arab campaign.” 6
    After the war, Thomas performed his multimedia show in