Re. the book dealing with the terror raids (ghazwa) from Gaza in the 1950s...the person to review that book would have been ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish.

For *she was there*; she spent her early years in Gaza, exposed to the full blast of thoroughly Islamic antisemitic (and anti-infidel, generally) propaganda both in the mosque and outside it (to which she has borne witness); her own father took part in those terror raids into Israel and was, eventually, killed in the course of one such raid, by the Israelis.  She holds, today, no grudge against Israel; indeed today, as an ex-Muslim, an apostate, a Christian, she is a staunch *friend* of Israel.  

Well before her apostasy fully took hold, she had little glimmerings of doubt...and one of those glimmerings flickered into life during her childhood when, while her father was still alive and waging jihad, Israeli operatives raided the family home in search of him. Nonie's mum and Nonie and the rest of the family were at home; but Nonie's dad was not.  Nonie had been told all sorts of mad Muslim horror stories about the demonic Joooz.  But to her astonishment, once the terrifying surprise visitors had satisfied themselves that Mr Darwish, jihad gang boss, was currently Not At Home, they...left, without touching a hair on the heads of his wife or his children.

Yes, I think Nonie Darwish would be just the right person to review - or, perhaps, I should say, dissect - Sacco's book; she would be in an excellent position to tell us just how many lies the author is peddling.

A final thought: anyone reading this, who has not yet read Martha Gellhorn's classic article, "The Arabs of Palestine", which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1961, should hasten to do so.  It is available in its entirety online - just google (and once you find it, read, copy and keep).  

Gellhorn has quite a lot to say about what Muslim-dominated Arab Gaza was like, Gaza under the thumb of thoroughly-Muslim Egypt, Gaza which she describes as a cross between a prison (since Egypt did not let Gazan Arabs out of Gaza to do anything much *except* carry out jihad raids into Israel) and...a lunatic asylum (this because of the 'madhattery' [her inimitable coinage] of the Arab Islamic hate propaganda with which Egypt saturated the populace day and night...a populace who hardly needed to be thus propagandised, for they were full of nonsense and lies already). 

And readers of the Times Sunday Book Review were treated to a sympathetic review of a pro-"Palestinian" work of sheer propaganda, one that backdates the "Palestinians" to the mid-1950s, accepts the Arab Muslim narrative of the incidents in question (attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza), and claims that these attacks -- attempts really to halt the thousands of fedayeen attacks on Israeli civilians sponsored by Nasser -- "explain" Arab, or rather, "Palestinian" attitudes. The book could have been written by the propaganda office of the World Islamic Congress or, for that matter, the Arab League. But it was chosen by the Times Book Review as a  book worthy of review (only a handful are chosen every week) and what's more, treated most sympathetically. 

Of course, there is no mention of what Islam inculcates in the book by Sacco, or in the review, just as the New York Times has managed, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, to avoid telling its readers a thing about the contents of the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. Quite an achievement.

The New York Times outdoes itself.