Kedourie attacked British policy-makers for first creating in 1921 the Kingdom of Iraq out of the former Ottoman vilayets (provinces) of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra and then imposing "a militantly Arab nationalist regime upon a diverse society".

[3] Given the prestige of a DPhil at Oxford, Kedourie, in the words of the American historian Martin Kramer, displayed "much courage" in refusing to change his thesis.

[5] The Israeli historian Major Efraim Karsh criticised Kedourie for his thesis that the era of the Ottoman Empire was one of peaceful co-existence of peoples who did not have national identities, citing the Wahhabi raids; the wars of independence in Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria; the anti-Christian pogroms and massacres in the Levant in 1859–60; and the Hamidian massacres of Armenians, to demonstrate the limits of Kedourie's "peaceful co-existence" thesis.

[5] In his 1976 book, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations, 1914–1939, Kedourie disputed what he considered the myth of "the Great Betrayal" that British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon had promised in 1914–15 the Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali an empire in the Middle East and that the British betrayed the Sharif by signing the Sykes–Picot Agreement with the French in 1916, followed by the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

[1] In a 1977 column published in the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing the book A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne, Kedourie vigorously attacked Horne as an apologist for terrorism, accusing him of engaging the "cosy pieties" of bien-pensants as Kedourie condemned those Western intellectuals who excused terrorism when committed by Third World revolutionaries.

[7] Kedourie argued that Charles de Gaulle was the "master of the situation" by 1960 and could have ensured that the Algerian Muslims would have equal rights with the pied-noirs, but instead blinded by other ideas of French greatness chose to grant Algeria independence.

"[8] Kedourie charged that de Gaulle had cynically sacrificed the colons and the harkis as Kedourie charged that de Gaulle had chosen to disregard his constitutional oath as president to protect all the French to ensure that "the French withdrew and handed over power to the only organized body of armed men who were on the scene – a civilized government thus acting for all the world like the votary of some Mao or Ho, in the barbarous belief that legitimacy comes from the power of the gun".

[9] He again denounced de Gaulle for granting Algeria independence, writing that the Algerians "were cruelly abandoned to the mercies of the FLN, a handful of purs et durs, spurred on by nationalism, that curse of the modern world to seize power and rule for their own benefit.

Their Arabizing policies, however, had opened up the country to the influence of fundamentalist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East, so that Islam came to provide the growing opposition with not only a political idiom, but also a revolutionary cause stigmatized by the same conspiratorial violence once shown by the FLN.