Prussian astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was a rebel and he knew it. Well aware how theologically radical and politically mutinous his ideas on heliocentrism were, he equivocated as to whether he should publish them. When he did so in 1543, he acknowledged his expected ostracism in a letter to the Pope: “when I considered in my own mind how absurd a performance it must seem to those who know that the judgment of many centuries has approved the view that the Earth remains fixed as center in the midst of the heavens, if I should, on the contrary, assert that the Earth moves; I was for a long time at a loss to know whether I should publish the commentaries which I have written in proof of its motion.” Whatever hesitation he might have had in launching an assault on the Catholic Church’s monopoly on scientific thought, he persevered. Shortly before his death, he published his seminal Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, asserting that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe around which all other celestial bodies revolved.
To judge from Secretary of State John Kerry’s October comments linking Israeli actions to ISIS’ potency, a similar canon beguiles the Western understanding of the Middle East. In unscripted remarks in mid-October, Kerry recounted how his Arab interlocutors implored him “to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt – and I see a lot of heads nodding – they had to respond to. And people need to understand the connection of that.”
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