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Chris Alger
09-25-2003, 02:51 PM
He finally succumbed today after a long strugle with lukemia. From an obituary:

"When images and narratives of the Palestinian struggle were dominated by misrepresentations, caricatures and hateful stereotypes, Said was for years often the sole and most effective advocate for bringing truth and light to the Palestinian cause in the United States. Despite being the target of relentless and vicious personal attacks, Said never abandoned a vision of peace between Israelis and Palestinians based on deep mutual recognition of the other's histories and narratives, and a reconciliation leading to complete equality. He taught and inspired a new generation of activists to speak with clarity and always search for truth no matter who it might offend." ...

Yet the greatest significance of Said's contribution is not only that he was an outstanding advocate for justice and peace in Palestine, but also that he consistently located this cause within a much greater struggle for a truly universal and humanist vision, entailing a firm rejection of ethno-nationalism and religious fanaticism. He taught by eloquent example that being faithful to a cause did not require blind loyalty to leaders or symbols, but rather necessitated self-criticism and debate. This fact meant that his engagement with the Arab world, and his fierce criticism of its status quo, was as important as his work communicating with people in the West.

Edward Said was a fountain of humanity, compassion, intellectual restlessness and creativity. At a time when the crude calculus of raw power and fanaticism threatens to swamp global discourse, his irreplaceable voice never needed to be heard more.

Cyrus
09-25-2003, 03:56 PM
Even if he had never written a line about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, he would still have been a giant among men. A hero, in many ways.

Wake up CALL
09-25-2003, 04:27 PM
[ QUOTE ]
Even if he had never written a line about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, he would still have been a giant among men. A hero, in many ways.

[/ QUOTE ]

That is what many of us will say about Chris Alger when he finally kicks the bucket. Well at least the RIP part.

adios
09-25-2003, 04:31 PM
THE TRUTH AND EDWARD SAID (http://www.bigeye.com/jj092800.htm)


THE TRUTH AND EDWARD SAID
By Jeff Jacoby
September 28, 2000

Edward Said, the world's most renowned Palestinian intellectual, was exposed as a fraud last summer. The experience apparently taught him nothing.

For decades Said had passed himself off as an exile -- an Arab born and raised in Jerusalem only to be driven out by the Jews in the runup to the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. He had told the story often, lacing his narrative with poignant detail.

"I feel even more depressed," he reminisced in March 1998, "when I remember my beautiful old house surrounded by pine and orange trees in Al-Talbiyeh in east Jerusalem." In a BBC documentary he recalled his years at St. George's, an Anglican prep school in Jerusalem; he and a boy named David Ezra, Said recollected, used to sit together in the back of the classroom. He told another interviewer in 1997 that he could still identify the rooms in his family's former house "where as a boy he read 'Sherlock Holmes' and 'Tarzan,' and where he and his mother read Shakespeare to each other." All this was lost when his family fled from Talbiyeh in December 1947, driven out, as he explained, by the "Jewish-forces sound truck [that] warned Arabs to leave the neighborhood."

But as Justus Reid Weiner showed in Commentary, the influential journal of opinion, Said's tragic tale was largely a fabrication. The Saids, it turned out, had lived in Egypt, not Palestine. Edward Said grew up and went to school in a posh neighborhood in Cairo, where his father had a thriving business. Now and then the family would visit cousins in Jerusalem; Edward was born during one such visit in 1935. But on his birth certificate, the Saids' place of residence was listed as Cairo; the space for indicating a local address in Palestine was left blank.

Weiner looked into the expulsion of Talbiyeh's Arabs in 1947. It never happened. He checked the student registries at St. George's. There was no mention of Edward Said. He even interviewed David Ezra, the student with whom Said sat in the back of the room.. Because of his bad eyesight, Ezra told Weiner, he had always sat up front.

Said occupies a lofty perch in the world of letters: He holds an endowed chair in English and literature at Columbia University, he is a highly sought-after lecturer, and he has served, at various times, as president of the Modern Language Association, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

But he is known above all as a zealous champion of the Palestinian cause. For many years he sat on the Palestine National Council, the PLO's "parliament in exile," and was a close advisor to Yasser Arafat. He has savaged Israel and pressed the Palestinians' case in every forum imaginable, from op-ed columns to radio broadcasts to congressional testimony. And his words were accorded great moral force, for wasn't Said himself a victim of Zionist usurpation? Hadn't he himself suffered displacement and exile?

When the world learned that he wasn't and he hadn't, his moral authority shriveled. It was as if, one observer put it, "we found out that Elie Wiesel spent the war in Geneva, not Auschwitz."

One might have thought that the embarrassment of it all would convince Said to stop lying about himself. And yet his fabrications continue.

During a visit to Lebanon in July, Said was seen hurling rocks over the border into Israel. Throwing stones at Israelis has been a popular pastime among Arab tourists in southern Lebanon ever since Israel withdrew in May. This stoning has drawn little international attention, even though several Israelis have been wounded, some permanently. But when Agence France Press released a photo of the world's most famous Palestinian intellectual joining in the violence, it made the papers everywhere. Said was sharply condemned, even in quarters where he is normally only praised. The Beirut Daily Star was appalled that a man "who has labored . . . to dispel stereotypes about Arabs being 'violent'" would let himself "be swayed by a crowd into picking up a stone and lofting it across the international border." On Said's own campus, the Columbia Daily Spectator blasted his "hypocritical violent action" as "alien to this or any other institution of learning."

His response was to shrug off the incident as merely "a symbolic gesture of joy" -- and to lie. His rock, he said, had been "tossed into an empty place." Witnesses told a different story. London's Daily Telegraph reported that Said "stood less than 10 yards from Israeli soldiers in a two-story, blue-and-white watchtower from which flew five Israeli flags."

As for the damning AFP photograph, Said professed surprise: "I had no idea that media people were there, or that I was the object of attention." But AFP had a very different explanation -- as two Columbia professors, Awi Federgruen and Robert Pollack, found out when they contacted the press agency. What they learned, they wrote in the Spectator, was that "the photograph of [Said] throwing the rock was in fact delivered to this news agency by none other than Professor Said himself."

For a man who has written that intellectuals are bound "to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible," Said seems to have a hard time sticking to the facts about himself. Perhaps that is because he knows that there is no professional price to pay for his deceptions.

When Weiner exposed Said's elaborate falsehoods last year, Columbia responded by doing -- nothing. "Amazingly, Professor Said was not sanctioned or reprimanded by the [university's] president,'' writes Weiner in a new essay in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. "Nor has the dean, the board of trustees, or the university senate publicly addressed Said's dissimulation."

To anyone familiar with Columbia's history, this lack of interest in a professor's deceit is remarkable. For Said is not the first famous member of the English Department to be caught in a series of public lies. In the 1950s, a junior instructor named Charles Van Doren won national acclaim for his brilliant run on the NBC quiz show "Twenty-One" That acclaim turned to scorn when it emerged that the show was rigged, and Columbia made it clear at once that it would not keep a known liar on its faculty. "The issue is the moral one of honesty and integrity of teaching," said Dean John G. Palfrey, and "if these principles are to continue to have meaning at Columbia," Van Doren could not remain. The young teacher was contrite, but to no avail. He left Columbia and never taught again.

No such punishment -- indeed, no punishment at all -- was meted out to Said, even though his fraud was clearly worse. (As Weiner points out, "while Van Doren had to be coaxed by the producers of the program to compete dishonestly, Said initiated and carried out his deceit by himself.") Why the double standard?

When it comes to mere mortals, Columbia still insists on honesty. Just a few months ago a 19-year-old Columbia student who falsely told a professor that he had been in a car crash (in order to get more time on an assignment) was suspended for two years. Yet Said, whose concocted tale of exile and dispossession was far more elaborate and misled far more people, has faced no discipline whatsoever.

A professor who spreads untruths is like a doctor who administers poison or a judge who takes bribes. Each betrays his calling. Each is a menace to society. Doctors who kill can be stripped of their license; corrupt judges can be impeached. But a professor who deceives -- at Columbia, at any rate -- is free to go on deceiving. Is it any wonder that Edward Said is still telling lies?

Gamblor
09-25-2003, 04:37 PM
I don't agree with the man, but he more often than not argued lucidly and cogently, something I cannot say about all of the Palestinian apologists in this forum.

I believe his knowledge of the Palestinian street was largely fabricated and created to evoke sympathy, not factual analysis.

But at least he never strapped a bomb to himself, and for that I can say he was a man among animals.

Chris Alger
09-25-2003, 06:13 PM
Although the Jacoby drivel was debunked years ago (see below), Commentary will no doubt continue to libel the man after his death, probably on the occasion of it. The key fact to Jacoby's story, which strongly implies that Said never even lived in Palestine, was that title to the Said "family" house in question was in Said's aunt's name, rather than a member of his immediate family. Therefore, Said must have fabricated his stories about his "family" house and his experiences in the former Palestine.

As for Said throwing rocks at occupation forces, this indeed a serious offense. After all, the temerity of a Palestinian throwing rocks at occupying troops! What kind of savage and barbaric culture could produce people who simply refuse to admit their inferior bloodstock and their absence of any right to be left in peace.
_______________________

They can't will the Palestinians out of existence
By Hussein Ibish
Boston Globe, 09/01/99

Edward Said, the most prominent Palestinian-American intellectual, has often written about the precariousness of Palestinian identity in a world that has no place for Palestinians: "Do we exist? What proof do we have?" he
famously asks. An article just published in the intensely pro-Israel magazine Commentary that questions Said's own status as a Palestinian and claims that he "fabricated" his childhood, once again demonstrates the lengths to which some will go to call this existence into question.

The article, "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said" claims that as a child Said did not live in Jerusalem but lived only in Cairo and has hidden this fact, that his family did not own a house in
Jerusalem, and he did not attend school there. The clear implication is that he, the leading spokesman for the Palestinian cause in the West, is not really a Palestinian but a fraud.

In some extraordinarily shoddy and irresponsible journalism, these claims have been repeated and embellished by several well-known American newspapers. But, as even a cursory glance at the record shows, it is his accusers, not Said, who are inventing fabrications.

The facts are these: Said has always clearly stated that, as a son of Palestinians living in Egypt, his childhood was spent traveling between "the Cairo-Jerusalem-Beirut axis, which is the one I grew up in," as he puts it. He spent a good deal of time in Jerusalem and went to St. George's School there. His family did indeed own the "beautiful old house," which was legal property of his father's sister. This house and the family business were seized from Said's family after 1948 through the notorious "absentee property law" by which Israel took all the property belonging to Palestinians who fled or were "ethnically cleansed" by Israel.

Moreover, all of Said's extended family, including aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, were expelled by Israel, and he and all his relatives were no longer allowed to live in their homes and homeland. All of this is easily verifiable by any honest investigator, and the details are spelled out in Said's forthcoming memoir "Out of Place" (Knopf).

As for the core allegation, that Said has concealed the fact that he was a Palestinian living in Cairo for much of his childhood, one need only point to the countless articles, interviews, and speeches over the past decades in
which he has not only mentioned, but thoughtfully reflected on this condition.

For example, in a 1989 interview that concludes the book "Edward Said: A Critical Reader" (Blackwell), Said says, "To go back to the early years of my awareness of Cairo: I grew up there, spending a large part of my youth in the place, but strangely not as an Egyptian.'' As a Palestinian living in Cairo, Said adds, "I always felt that I wasn't of the place." Hardly the words of a man concealing this chapter of his past, and only one example
among many such remarks. Said was never directly contacted by Commentary about the details of his childhood.

The question is not whether Commentary's preposterous allegations are true, since they clearly are not, but rather why anyone would make or repeat them.

This brings us back to the point that Said and other Palestinian intellectuals constantly make - that there is an imperative for many supporters of Israel to will the Palestinians out of existence and deny their collective experience. Since only Israelis have a right to Palestine and Palestinians are usurpers and interlopers, so the thinking goes, then their collective and individual narratives must be frauds and their spokespersons liars.

Commentary's pathetic attempt to "debunk" Said's unquestionable Palestinianness harkens back to Golda Meir's notorious assertion that "there is no such thing as the Palestinian people."

The rights of the millions of Palestinian exiles and refugees have acquired an urgent relevance because this is supposed to be a major issue in the next phases of the peace process.

In the wake of the Kosovo war, which was fought in the name of the right of refugees to return to their homeland, the immorality and inconsistency of denying Palestinians their right to return has become harder than ever to defend. Commentary's attack on Said's narrative of exile openly aims to challenge his championing of these rights, thereby calling them into question.

But if their history proves anything, it is that no matter the odds against them, the Palestinians are not going to allow themselves to be bullied out of their human rights and national identity.

As usual, Said put it best when he observed that "I have never met a Palestinian who is tired enough of being a Palestinian to give up entirely."

Hussein Ibish is communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C.

Chris Alger
09-25-2003, 06:26 PM
The Commentary School of Falsification
Christopher Hitchens
The Nation, 9/2/99

Israeli schoolchildren returned to their desks this year to find a new history curriculum. In place of the self-pitying and self-justifying standard story about the War of Independence, with its David and Goliath mythology and its deceitful propaganda about how the Arabs of Palestine were not expelled but were told by their leaders to flee, the updated texts acknowledge that Zionist forces were actually quite well prepared for combat by 1947, and that those same forces often dispossessed and drove out the Palestinians. These admissions, which come perhaps a little too late to be termed magnanimous, at least reflect a new confidence and a new candor, born in part from the recognition of Palestinian existence that results from the Oslo accords. (Many similar recognitions were on show in Israeli TV's fiftieth-anniversary documentary series last year, a series it would be nice to see on an American network.)

This wholesome and overdue revision does not sit well with the sympathizers of that other Revisionism--the militantly chauvinist variety advocated by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Resentment against Israeli "concessions" and Palestinian claims is still very intense, and has just found expression in an essay of extraordinary spite and mendacity. Sarcastically titled "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," it appears in the September issue of Commentary under the byline of one Justus Reid Weiner, of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. After a claimed three years of research into Edward Said's own account of his and his family's history, Weiner alleges:

1. That Said did not live in a house owned by his family in Mandate Palestine, and was not expelled.

2. That he did not "really" attend St. George's school there.

3. That he grew up and was educated in luxurious conditions in Cairo.

4. That he has never tried to bring any claim for compensation for the "loss" that he did not really suffer.

The implication is that Said the mythomaniac discredits the entire Palestinian "narrative" of diaspora and dispossession. But it takes only about three minutes to demonstrate that Weiner's three years were a malicious waste of time. In order, then:

1. Said's cousin Yusuf (the nephew of his father) confirms that the house on Brenner Street in Jerusalem was the home of an extended family, and that the name of the family member on the title deed--the legal owner was Edward's aunt--is irrelevant. Not only Edward but also his sister Jean were born in the house, occurrences unlikely to have taken place on random visits. Yusuf Said lives in Toronto but was never contacted by Weiner, who anyway has a difficulty with kinship ties and describes Boulos Said as a brother to Edward's father, instead of a cousin. As to the expulsion, Edward has never claimed to have suffered in person, but only to have been withdrawn from school and sent to Egypt, to be followed by every single adult member of his extended family, which was indeed ethnically cleansed and deprived of large holdings in land and business.

2. I know myself, from speaking to former teachers and pupils, that Said was--as was his father before him--a pupil at St. George's school in Jerusalem. An Armenian classmate named Haig Boyagian and a former instructor, Michel Marmoura, are both in North America and easily located. Weiner makes the cretinous error of citing another schoolmate, David Ezra, who, while mentioned in Said's recollections, does not recall things as Edward recalls them. Maybe so, but misremembering a boy from the school is not quite the same, dummy, as the impossible task of inventing him.

3. I quote from the concluding interview of Edward Said: A Critical Reader, published by Blackwell in 1992, in which Said says: "To go back to the early years of my awareness of Cairo: I grew up there, spending a large part of my youth in the place, but strangely not as an Egyptian." Elsewhere, and within easy reach of any reader, he has written of "the Cairo-Jerusalem-Beirut axis, which is the one I grew up in." Nor has he ever concealed the fact that his haut-bourgeois family was well enough cushioned from the disasters that overtook the evicted Palestinian peasantry. (It seems to me a bit much that Weiner, whose "Center" in Jerusalem is largely underwritten by Michael Milken of the junk-bond fortune, should dwell so enviously on this acknowledged fact.) Having spent much time in both Lebanon and Egypt, Said chooses to describe the period he spent in Palestine as a youth as "formative." That seems like a matter for him--born of two Palestinian parents--to decide.

4. From a wealth of material about the family's long and bitter struggle for compensation I select the fact that cousin Yusuf, only three years ago, took his title deeds to Israel and re-registered his claim, while yet another family property was being torn down to make way for the new Jerusalem Hilton.

All of the above, and much besides, is spelled out with almost painful honesty in Said's forthcoming memoir Out of Place. He deals with numerous anomalies, such as the fact that his mother, born in Nazareth, finally got a passport that gave her place of birth as Cairo. (Is it too much to ask that those with family histories extending to Riga and Vilnius be aware of discrepant documents and tangled records?) Aware of the book's full disclosure, Weiner now says that its veracity should be credited to him. In other words, that an exhaustive book commissioned in 1989, begun in 1994 (after Edward had learned that leukemia had set a term to his life) and completed in 1998 was undertaken to rebut a half-baked article in Commentary that had not yet been written! Such conceit--and such elegance, too. Weiner's emulators, like the New York Post editorialist who referred to Said as "the Palestinian Tawana Brawley," manifest the same distraught vulgarity. No other magazine I know of would have published such an article without trying to confront its subject. Commentary is evidently immune to such scruples. It ought to be taught, as G.K. Chesterton said in another connection, that when a man decides that any stick will do, he picks up a boomerang.

nicky g
09-26-2003, 05:22 AM
Nice timing.

Gamblor
09-26-2003, 09:08 AM
LOL Chris

You discredit every source I use as "right-wing Zionist Propaganda" and have the gall to post this?

The Nation?

Is this a joke?

Gamblor
09-26-2003, 09:09 AM
LOL Chris

You discredit every source I use as "right-wing Zionist Propaganda" and have the gall to post this?

The Nation (http://www.thenation.com) ???

Is this a joke? If anything is correct in this scandal rag, it would follow that there isn't a single honest person on earth.

John Cole
09-26-2003, 09:14 AM
Chris,

On Booknotes a few weeks ago, in a rebroadcast of Said's appearance three years early, Said clearly laid out his biography. My own interest in the Palestinian cause came about because of Said. I wanted to find out why the author of Beginnings, The World, the Text, and the Critic, and Orientalism had taken up the Palestinian cause. Until that time, I had only known of him as an astute critic.

Chris Alger
09-27-2003, 01:05 AM
You don't understand the difference between an ad hominem attack and impeaching a source based on its credibility. If I understand what you're saying, Hitchens' detailed refutation is invalid on its face simply because it was published in The Nation and The Nation is a left-wing organ. In the absence of any apparent connection to what Hitchens wrote, it's a logical fallacy.

The criticisms I've made of your sources were either in response to your endorsement of them as objective, or based on their record of disseminating false or irrelevant information, usually with examples given, usually together with a refutation of particular facts. Of course, to the extent I've failed to do this I'm subject to the same critique.

Chris Alger
09-27-2003, 01:29 AM
I remember looking at a photograph in New Republic showing some people throwing rocks in the West Bank, with a smartass caption something like: "the man in the middle is Edward Said," going on to denounce him for his resort to violence. It was kind of sickening remembering Peretz's cheerleading defense of the Lebanese invasion that began on the cover of the magazine, so vital was it that people should support Sharon's shelling of refugees.

His academic work was always above me but I've easily read a thousand pages by him on the Middle East. In the early 1980's, if you wanted to read anything about Israel/Palestine more connected to reality than Thos. Friedman, it seemed like there was Said, Chomsky and Shahak and that was pretty much it. I guess that was never true, but its certainly less true now thanks in large part to him.

Gamblor
09-27-2003, 03:56 PM
The criticisms I've made of your sources were either in response to your endorsement of them as objective, or based on their record of disseminating false or irrelevant information

Perhaps I've overestimated your wisdom - and perhaps you've underestimated mine...

It is fairly obvious to anyone who has studied any significant amount of anything, that there is no such thing as objectivity.

There is no action taken by anyone on this planet that is perceived in one way, and in one way only.

What I have provided for you is the Israeli viewpoint, and why I agree with it.

The Nation, as a left-wing propaganda rag, has no incentive to publish any editorial or even a journalistic article that does not fit into its world view. But it is only the Nation's world view. Not anyone elses.

One of the great things the Palestinian cause has done, is portray itself as the "little man" fighting against the big bad occupiers. As an expatriate Israeli, leaning to the right, it should be fairly obvious that I vehemently disagree with this , and most of the dissemination of pro-Palestinian literature obviously would come from those who support the "little man".

Chris Alger
09-27-2003, 04:22 PM
This is just stupid: even if the only facts that appeared in The Nation are those that supported its politics, it hardly makes such facts suspect. I notice that this is your third or so post in this mean subthread started by Tom Haley, and you still haven't even grabbled with the particular refutation on the attack against Said.

Gamblor
10-09-2003, 10:09 PM
Wall Street Journal
Oct 1, 2003
Orientalism
by: Ibn Warraq

Late in life, Edward Said made a rare conciliatory gesture. In 1998, he accused the Arab world of hypocrisy for defending a holocaust denier on grounds of free speech. After all, free speech “scarcely exists in our own societies.” The history of the modern Arab world was one of “political failures,” “human rights abuses,” “stunning military incompetences,” “decreasing production, [and] the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development.”

Those truths aside, Mr. Said, who died last week, will go down in history for having practically invented the intellectual argument for Muslim rage. “Orientalism,” his bestselling manifesto, introduced the Arab world to victimology. The most influential book of recent times for Arabs and Muslims, “Orientalism,” blamed Western history and scholarship for the ills of the Muslim world: Were it not for imperialists, racists and Zionists, the Arab world would be great once more. Islamic fundamentalism, too, calls the West a Satan that oppresses Islam by its very existence. “Orientalism” lifted that concept, and made it over into Western radical chic, giving vicious anti-Americanism a high literary gloss.

In “Terror and Liberalism,” Paul Berman traces the absorption of Marxist justifications of rage by Arab intellectuals and shows how it became a powerful philosophical predicate for Islamist terrorism. Mr. Said was the most influential exponent of this trend. He and his followers also had the effect of cowing many liberal academics in the West into a politically correct silence about Islamic fundamentalist violence two decades prior to 9/11. Mr. Said’s rock-star status among the left-wing literary elite put writers on the Middle East and Islam in constant jeopardy of being labeled “Orientalist” oppressors—a potent form of intellectual censorship.

“Orientalism” was a polemic that masqueraded as scholarship. Its historical analysis was gradually debunked by scholars. It became clear that Mr. Said, a literary critic, used poetic license, not empirical inquiry. Nevertheless he would state his conclusions as facts, and they were taken as such by his admirers. His technique was to lay charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism on the whole of Western scholarship of the Arab world—effectively, to claim the moral high ground and then to paint all who might disagree with him as collaborators with imperialism. Western writers employed “a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” They conspired to suppress native voices that might give a truer account. All European writings masked a “discourse of power.” They had stereotyped the “Other” as passive, weak, or barbarian. “[The Orientalist’s] Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized,” he said.

By the very act of studying the East, the West had manipulated it, “politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.” This conspiracy of domination, he said, had been going on from the Enlightenment to the present day. But while deploring “the disparity between texts and reality,” Mr. Said never himself tried to describe what that reality was, merely sighing that, “To look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an Oriental’s human or even social reality…is to look in vain.”

Mr. Said routinely twisted facts to make them fit his politics. For example, to him, the most important thing about Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” was that its heroine, Fanny Price, lived on blood money. In his writings, verbal allusion and analogy stood in for fact, a device to reassure the ignorant of the correctness of his conclusions. Of these he found many over the years in American universities. His works had an aesthetic appeal to a leftist bent of mind, but even this now can be seen as a fad of the late 20th century. The irony, of course, is that he was ultimately grandstanding for the West--for Western eyes, Western salons, and Western applause.

Chris Alger
10-10-2003, 12:12 AM
There is no Arab state today that does not publicly associate itself with such progressive positions as international anti-Zionism, anti-apartheid, anti-imperialism, and yet the fact remains that ... internal tolerance for the the local equivalent of international progressivism is very low indeed. ... Similarly, the Arab position on Israel at UNESCO ... is hardly matched by the broad range of censorship, political repression, and intellectual thought control practiced virtually everywhere in the Arab world."

Edward Said
The Arab Right Wing, 1979
(reprinted in The Politics of Dispossession, p. 225)

Note the date. So much for Said's "rare conciliatory gesture" indicting the Arab world for hypocrisy only in 1998, "late in life," five years before he died at age 67.

Stripping away the tortorous rhetoric trying to connect Said with bin Laden, what we're left with is the claim that that the "historical analysis" in "Orientalism" was "gradually debunked by scholars." The evidence? Zilch. Not one scholar, not one bit of analysis "debunked." It's a characteristic Journal opinion piece that tries to reinforce prejudices without bothering to inform, the staple right-wing junk.

But at least it's funny. Said supposedly cowed "many liberal academics in the West into a politically correct silence about Islamic fundamentalist violence two decades prior to 9/11," a "potent form of intellectual censorship."

So potent was Said's ability to censor discussion about Islamic violence that hardly anyone suspected it to have anything to do with the Tulsa bombing or even 9/11, as shown by the absence of media and academic speculation about Muslim or Arab terrorists for days and weeks afterward.

It's not true that liberals are from Venus and conservatives are from Mars. Conservatives are on Mars.

nicky g
10-10-2003, 06:22 AM
I haven't read "Orientalism" so I can't comment on it. To repeat Chris's point, the suggestion that Said's criticism of Arab governements was "rare" or a "conciliatory gesture" displays a either 100% ignorance or a deliberate lie about Said's writings or position. Said was a fervent critic of repressive Arab governments, and reserved particular bile, you might be interested to know, for Yasser Arafat. Of course, you wouldn't know such things because you automatically dismiss him because he's a Palestinian and read nothing but pro-Israeli propaganda.

nicky g
10-10-2003, 06:24 AM
"his writings, verbal allusion and analogy stood in for fact"

Shocking. He was a literary critic. This is what literary critics do. They look for meaning in allusion and analogy.

Gamblor
10-10-2003, 09:11 AM
Of course, you wouldn't know such things because you automatically dismiss him because he's a Palestinian and read nothing but pro-Israeli propaganda.

How can you argue with someone who purports to know exactly what I think at any given moment?

nicky g
10-10-2003, 09:34 AM
If you'd try to find out anything at all about Said, you would know this.

Cyrus
10-11-2003, 01:23 AM
...Pretend that Chris Alger doesn't exist.

And voila : No more cardiovascular palpitations! No more surges of blood flow to the face! No more unnecessay brain work!

Cyrus
10-11-2003, 01:31 AM
Read Daniel Barenboim's eulogy of Edward Said in the recent issue of Time.

Now all Jews are arrogant supremacists like you.