Arthur Derounian who wrote under the pen name, John Roy Carlson, was an Armenian-American investigative journalist and best-selling author. He became famous for his undercover reporting on the subversive activities of Nazis and Communists in the United States. 

In 1948, he traveled by way of England to Egypt where he was granted permission to accompany the Arabs forces as they set off to fight the Jews in the Holy Land, in Palestine.  His coverage of the war later became a memoir, Cairo to Damascus.   It is a vivid, sometimes thrilling account of his experience that delves deeply into what the Arab world was like at the time and the nature of the Muslim dispute with the Jewish people and the active support the Britain was giving to the Arabs to crush the Jews.  It covers everything from the Muslim Brotherhood, Arab Nazi Haj Amin Al Husseini (whom he meets), ancient Cairo ghettos and Arab feudalism,  British – Nazi – Arab collusion and even the prevalence Arab homosexuality and transgenderism.  It’s quite the wild, riveting, mind-blowing read from an informed observer who is neither Jewish or Arab, yet writes with compassion and understanding for both and a keen grasp of the historical and political context surrounding the conflict.

In a footnote on page 235 (copied below) Carlson addresses the “flight” of the Arab refugees, describing who they were, the real reasons they fled, and their number which, even then, he says, for the purposes of propaganda, was hugely inflated.  Continue reading →