Elie Kedourie

Elie Kedourie (1926-1992) was a British historian of Iraqi Jewish background who specialized in the Middle East. He wrote from a conservative point of view.
==Biographical Information==
===History===
===Activities===
===The New Right===
Like the influential conservative historian Maurice Cowling, Kedourie was a member of the Salisbury Group. Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p.xxix. He was thanked by Maurice Cowling for reviewing the manuscript for his 1963 book Mill and Liberalism. Maurice Cowling, Mill and liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1990) p.viii In early 1980 Kedourie was invited by Margaret Thatcher to lunch at Chequers. Thatcher had been advised by the Foreign Office that the Soviet Union did not pose a serious military threat, so she invited Kedourie and other right-wing experts to take part in a committee offering 'independent' advice. Michael Howard, who was also invited, recalls the following in his memoires:
In the USA a group of hawks formed a well funded Committee on the Present Danger, consisting largely of pupils and associates of Albert Wohlstetter, who urged the breaking off of arms-control negotiations and massive rearmament. Mrs Thatcher was temperamentally inclined to agree with them. The Foreign Office was not. Not surprisingly, the Prime Minister sought further options...She asked Hugh [Thomas] to set up a small committee to draft independent recommendations for the conduct of British foreign policy consisting of myself, Leonard Schapiro and Elie Kedourie...We put together a totally incoherent document which deserved to go straight into the waste paper basket and probably did. I continued to be invited to Chequers seminars and always found the Prime Minister friendly and courteous. But she was not easy company, lacking as she was in any sense of humour, and increasingly impervious to new ideas. Michael Howard, Captain Professor The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006) pp.192-3
Howard recalls that Kedourie and Leonard Schapiro "believed the recently concluding Helsinki Accords had been a defeat for the West by 'legitimizing' the Soviet control of Eastern Europe." Michael Howard, Captain Professor The Memoirs of Sir Michael Howard (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006) p.193
==Views==
==Affiliations==
*Salisbury Group 
*IEA Health and Welfare Unit, published a pamphlet by Kedourie in 1989. 
*Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies - listed as one of the 'founders'.Bulletin 55, Moshe Dayan Center, Spring 2012, accessed June 26, 2012 
*Speaker at the Second Conference on International Terrorism hosted by the Jonathan Institute in 1984. This was in a session on Islam and terrorism where he joined the theree other members of the 'gang of four' analysts of the Middle East who all shared an anti-Islam outlook: Bernard Lewis, P.J. Vatikiotis and John Barrett Kelly.
*Washington Institute for Near East Policy - published with WINEP: Democracy and Arab Political Culture 1st ed. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1992 2nd ed. Frank Cass, 1994
*Institute for the Study of Conflict - wrote for them.*'Retrospect and Prospect' in Conflict Studies; Institute for the Study of Conflict Special Report of a Seminar
Held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University 11-13 December 1970, April 1971, pp.2-6 - the Arab-Israeli Dispute.
*Report (participant) 'Arabia and the Gulf - History and Political Strains: Section III in the Security of Middle East Oil' in Conflict Studies, Institute for the Study of Conflict, EK et al., May 1979
==Publications==
*Elie Kedourie Perestroika in the universities London : IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1989. ISBN: 0255362579
*Elie Kedourie The Chatham House Version, 2004.Chicago: Ivan R Dee.
==Resources==
*Martin Kramer Elie Kedourie A formidable and dissident historian of the Middle East. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, accessed 24 October 2008.
*Wikipedia Elie Kedourie, accessed 24 October 2008.
==Contact, Notes==
===Contact===
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===Notes===
Category:Middle East WatchKedourie, Elie