- Economics
- Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
Most discourses about Israel or Palestine are morality plays of good guys vs bad guys. Egyptian-born Hussein Aboubakr Mansour takes a different approach, seeing the conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction where Arab regimes, opposition movements, rival states, Western academics, NGOs, and Gulf monarchies like Qatar all convert Palestinian victimhood into their own forms of power, money, and meaning. Listen as Mansour speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about his childhood in an Egypt organized around the liberation of Palestine and explores why any exit from the system must run not through policy, but rather through the human need for meaning itself.
Listen to the episode here.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is the director of the Endowment for Middle East Truth’s Program for Emerging Democratic Voices from the Middle East. Hussein was born in Cairo, Egypt, into a family that raised another son to be an imam inspiring young people to become Jihadists. His critical intellect led him to find out more about Israel and Jews and to forge friendships with Israelis. Hussein received political asylum in the United States under President Barack Obama in 2012 and worked as an instructor for language and culture at the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, California. He then went on to work as an educator and public speaker for StandWithUs, educating students about cultural and geopolitical issues in the Middle East and helping them counter anti-Semitism. Hussein wrote an autobiography, Minority of One: The Unchaining of the Arab Mind, and his articles have appeared in Commentary, Newsweek, the Jewish Journal, JNS.org, Times of Israel, and Mosaic.
RELATED SOURCES
- Hussein Aboubakr Mansour at The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)
- Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)
- The Abrahamic Metacritique, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour's Substack
- A Metacritique of Palestine by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour on The Abrahamic Metacritique
- The Abraham Accords
- Shadi Hamid at The Washington Post
