Recently while visiting Saudi Arabia, I met an American who was on his first trip to the Kingdom. He commented to me that he felt Saudi Arabia and the Middle East were difficult areas to understand, particularly for a newcomer. “However”, he stated, “I have this excellent book on the region called ‘Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present’ which came to me highly recommended. I really learned a lot about Saudi Arabia and the Middle East from this book.” I looked at him with believing disbelief and said, “I think that you got some bad advice.”

“Power Faith and Fantasy” is a new book about the Middle East by Michael Oren. Oren is a joint Israeli-American citizen. Born in the US as an American citizen, Oren emigrated to Israel in 1979 and served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces, seeing combat in the 1982 Lebanon War. He was an adviser to Yitzhak Rabin and served as the Israeli liaison officer to the US Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War. He also served as a major in the IDF Reserve during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. His writings about the Middle East are hardly impartial.

However, his book apparently is moving toward the top of the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. And Time Magazine recently stated, “On the night flight to Egypt, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice planned to curl up with Michael Oren’s ‘Power, Faith and Fantasy, America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present’. Recommending the best seller to the reporters traveling with her, she noted that American involvement in the region went back to Thomas Jefferson.”

When I first viewed Oren’s book a few weeks ago, I immediately turned to the section on the meeting aboard the USS Quincy between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia in 1945 in the Suez Canal. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have been privy to many firsthand stories regarding that historical meeting. I have attended the reunions of the naval veterans of the Quincy and also the reunions of the USS Murphy, the American ship that picked up King Abdul Aziz in Jeddah and took him and his delegation to meet the Quincy. I also have interviewed many members of the crews who met with and observed President Roosevelt, the king and his delegation closely.

All of these crewmembers recalled fond memories of the king and his Saudi delegation to me. And all of the previous books and articles that I have read regarding this meeting have also reported friendly relations and cordial meetings between the Saudis and the Americans on those ships. However, when I opened Oren’s book to the pages regarding these meetings, I noted the following description of these events.

Oren starts by saying that the “ill” king had to be “winched onto the Quincy in a lifeboat”. The king was not winched in a “lifeboat” and didn’t appear “ill” according to the sailors who viewed the event. Oren goes on to say: “Assisting him (King Abdul Aziz), though was an entourage of some sixty men, including his scimitar-wielding Nubian bodyguards, who, ‘lean and dark with murderous black eyes’ — in one sailor’s view — ‘looked as if they would get great enjoyment out of carving their initials on unfriendly anatomies’ ”.

Oren’s book goes on to say, “He (Roosevelt) even managed to persuade his daughter, Anna, to leave the ship prior to the Saudi’s arrival, telling her, ‘the Muslim will not permit women in his presence when he is talking to other men...(and) when he sees such a woman, he confiscates her.’ ”

Recently at a reunion of the Quincy and Murphy veterans in Memphis Tennessee, I read these excerpts from Oren’s book to about a dozen veterans. They all stated that Oren was 100 percent wrong in what he claimed in his book regarding the above quoted excerpts. The groups vowed to write letters to the author and the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, refuting Oren’s false claims. They would ask for a retraction of these statements as firsthand observers of the events Oren claims to portray correctly.

As I was composing this article, my 16-year-old high school sophomore son was reading it over my shoulder and commented to me about these false statements. He said, “Dad, I see this kind of stuff all the time in my classes and textbooks.” He went on to say, “Usually they are very subtle inferences that put down the Arabs and Muslims and glorify the Israelis.” He cited an example by showing me a paragraph in his high school history book “Western Heritage since 1300” by Donald Kagan of Yale, Steven Ozment of Harvard and Frank M. Turner of Yale published in 2007.

The book states, “After that (the defeat of the Jews by the Assyrians) the area of the old Kingdom of the Jews in Palestine was dominated by foreign peoples for some 2,500 years until the establishment of the State of Israel in C.E. 1948.” My son said, “How can they call people who lived in an area for 2,500 years ‘foreigners’? Only because many of these books are inevitably Israel-centric. And you can’t protest this, Dad. They will label you anti-Semitic if you do.”

My son and the Murphy and Quincy veterans have become fast friends although they are about 70 years apart in age. At least some senior citizens and some young people have gotten it right.