View Full Version : Why does Edward Said Matter?
Thomas Paine
07-18-2010, 13:33
Edward Said. Mean anything to you?
It should.
He's the author of "Orientalism" a book that has been called "Intellectual Terrorism" by Ibn Warraq in his critique of it "Defending the West."
Edward Said was also one of the Professors who Barrack Obama selected to study under.
Reading Christopher Hitchens book "Hitch-22" last night, he dedicated a chapter to Edward Said.
Here's a couple of Hitchen's notable observations:
- "Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing itself." page 393
- "...Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans [where the U.S. stopped Muslims from being mistreated by Christians]. Why was he being so stubborn? Edward believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action." page 394
- "The only unpardonable thing about "The Chairman" [Arafat] was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993." page 395
- "In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instituted by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of 'ending' the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda.[sic] Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person [Edward Said], let alone printed by a civilized publication." page 397
This is just one of our current President's mentors and professors.
Learn more:
DISCOVER THE NETWORKS:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=634
ORIENTALISM:
www.amazon.com/Orientalism-Edward-W-Said/dp/039474067X
DEFENDING THE WEST:
www.amazon.com/Defending-West-Critique-Edward-Orientalism/dp/1591024846
Thomas Paine
07-18-2010, 13:40
Does anyone have a a copy of the article "Professor of Terror" by Edward Alexander
published in the August 1989 issue of Commentary Magazine?
Interestingly, the article seems to have been deleted by the website:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/professor-of-terror-7594
- BUT - the rebuttals to the article remain (December 1989 issue):
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/-professor-of-terror--13855
What's up with that?
Thomas Paine
07-18-2010, 14:17
Edward Said: Professor of Terror
By Edward Alexander
Commentary
August 1989
Since the intifada began in December 1987, scores of Palestinian Arabs have been murdered by other Arabs as “collaborators” with Israel. In the spring of this year, the rate of attacks began to increase sharply. Even by the standards that obtain in the Arab world, the murders have been unusually brutal: the lucky victims were shot; the unlucky ones were raped, tortured, and then hacked or bludgeoned to death. On June 8, for example, the Israeli press reported that “the naked, bloodstained body of Samir Abu Ras, 30, was found chained and hanging from an electricity pole outside the casbah. Palestinians said Abu Ras, who was known as a ‘collaborator,' had been killed with hatchet blows.”
The alleged offenses of the victims include working or shopping in Israel, selling land to Jews, giving information to Israeli security forces, and expressing interest in the latest Israeli proposal for elections in the administered territories. Yet despite the fact that early in 1989 Yasir Arafat threatened the life of Bethlehem mayor Elias Freij for proposing a truce that would make elections possible—“Whoever thinks of stopping the intifada before it achieves its goals,” declared Arafat, “I will give him ten bullets in the chest”—Israeli and foreign journalists continue to ask whether the killing of “collaborators” in the administered territories and the threat of killing in the Galilee are carried out on the initiative of local freelance operators or on orders from the PLO abroad.
The answer to this question may be found in a most unlikely place: the spring issue of Critical Inquiry, an American academic journal of literary theory put out by the University of Chicago Press. Amid the moldy futilities that typically fill the pages of this quarterly we find a simmering incendiary charge by Professor Edward Said, full of that lurid illumination which always seems to attend any expression of the intellectual's desire to rule the world.
Said, who holds an endowed chair in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and is also a member of the Palestinian “parliament in exile,” has written extensively about a novelist whose great insight into modern political life, as it happens, has precisely to do with the special attraction of intellectuals to terror. Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent (1906), describes the “pedantic fanaticism” of a professor whose thoughts “caressed the images of ruin and destruction”; and he analyzes the longing of another (untenured) intellectual to create “a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means,” chief among them “death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity.”
But Said, whose double career as literary scholar and ideologue of terrorism is a potent argument against those who believe in the corrective power of humanistic values, has swallowed Conrad without digesting him; for knowledge is one thing, virtue another. In Critical Inquiry Said offers a so-called “Response” to an article appearing in the same issue by Robert J. Griffin, a member of the English Department at Tel-Aviv University. Griffin, a fairly recent Ph.D. from Yale, whose own essay is a carefully reasoned rejoinder to a still earlier screed by Said on the subject of Zionism as racism, is treated by his respondent in language like this:
Who is this Robert J. Griffin who has never in his life written a published word on Palestine, and is only . . . the author of two (or is it three? ) . . . articles on Dr. Johnson? . . . Who is this creature. . . ? . . . He should atone for the crimes he defends and keep decently silent until (if he is a human being) he either joins the real opposition to real occupation or, if he is (as I suspect) a political invention, dissolves himself. . . .
This (and much more) from the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, where Lionel Trilling once taught and exemplified the meaning of sweetness and light in culture.
Evidently thinking of his own prose as a verbal equivalent of the weapons wielded by his colleagues on the Palestinian National Council (PNC), Said spills ink to justify their spilling of blood:
When Farouk Kaddoumi or Abu Iyad say that collaborators would be shot or that “our people in the interior recognize their responsibilities”—passages quoted by Griffin—surely even he must be aware that the UN Charter and every other known document or protocol entitles a people under foreign occupation not only to resist but also by extension to deal severely with collaborators. Why is it somehow OK for white people . . . to punish collaborators during periods of military occupation, and not OK for Palestinians to do the same?
Anyone familiar with Said's longstanding habit of confidently reciting the most preposterous falsehoods will not be surprised to learn that the UN Charter includes not one word about resistance to foreign occupation or killing “collaborators.” I have searched without success for the unnamed “document or protocol” that would have “entitled” diehard followers of, for example, Tojo and Hitler to execute Japanese and Germans who cooperated with the American occupation forces in the aftermath of World War II. One can perhaps understand Said's craving as an intellectual (in Conrad's sense) for the ultimate “right,” the right to murder—legally, no less. But if he and his colleagues in Arafat's inner circle claim this right in their dealings with Palestinian Arabs, what may we imagine them to have in mind for the Jews?
For it must be remembered, again, that Edward Said is not merely a professor and an ideologue but a member of the Palestine National Council, the leading spokesman for the PLO in the American news media, and one of Arafat's closest advisers. Who can forget last November's television images of this intellectual-in-ordinary to the king of terror, whispering (who knows what?) into his master's ear at the conclusion of the PNC meeting in Algiers?
_____________
A writer who has alleged that Jews are not truly a people because their identity in the Diaspora has been entirely a function of external persecution, or that the Holocaust served to “protect” Palestinian Jews “with the world's compassion,” or that before 1948 “the historical duration of a Jewish state [in Palestine] was a sixty-year period two millennia ago,” cannot easily outdo himself in misrepresentation. And it is true that much of Said's essay in Critical Inquiry follows the well-trodden paths of professional Israel-bashers, who can validate Palestinian Arab nationality only by reinventing Palestinian Arabs as the shadow-selves of Jews. Thus, Said alleges that Zionists “were in touch with the Nazis in the hope of emulating their Reich in Palestine”; that Israeli “soldiers and politicians . . . are now engaged in visiting upon non-Jews many of the same evil practices anti-Semites waged against Holocaust victims”; and that Ansar III (a detention center in the Negev for security prisoners) is “a concentration camp.”
But the Israeli-Nazi (and Arab-Jew) analogy, now a mere ripple on the dead sea of anti-Semitic commonplace, also proves insufficently blatant for Said. “Israel's occupation,” he announces, “increased in severity and outright cruelty, more than rivaling all other military occupations in modern history.” Something new at last! Israel is even worse than the Nazi occupiers of Europe—and, one presumes, the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan, the Syrian and PLO occupiers of Lebanon, the Jordanian occupiers of the West Bank who, subsequent to their occupation, destroyed about 10,000 Palestinian Arabs while suppressing the “Black September” uprising of 1970-71.
Said's essay not only answers the question of whether the PLO and PNC have renounced terror in dealing with their internal opponents; it also sheds light on a secondary mystery, about Said himself. Some of his critics have wondered how he could reconcile his relentless denunciations of the “racist” stereotyping of Arabs by Western “Orientalists” with his own equally relentless and no less racist insistence that, as he put it in 1980, “there are no divisions in the Palestinian population of four million. We all support the PLO.” Moreover, a pedestrian mind might well ask, if every single Palestinian Arab belongs to a monolithic body with one will, acting and thinking in perfect unison, who are these “collaborators” with whom Said and his friends intend to “deal severely”? The answer perhaps is to be found in a sentence in his new essay which says that “every Palestinian, without significant exception, is up in arms against the laws of the Jewish . . . state.” So the dead and the terrorized are, after all, insignificant exceptions.
_____________
What impression, one wonders finally, will Said's advocacy of the short and ready way of dealing with “collaborators” make upon the readers of Critical Inquiry? Many are literary theorists who have laid aside not only their old copies of I.A. Richards's How to Read a Page but also their old understanding of literature as an art meant to encourage moral awareness and humane understanding. Immersed in what the novelist Malcolm Bradbury calls the latest designer philosophies, they are hard put even to see the tautologies and absurdities in such notions as “postmodernism” and “intertextuality.” Can such people be expected to recognize that the organization represented by this bloody-minded intellectual spokesman is an unlikely partner for negotiating a two-state solution in western Palestine? One wonders, but, alas, not for long.
_____________
[I]Edward Alexander is professor of English at Tel-Aviv University & the University of Washington. His most recent book is The Jewish Idea & Its Enemies (Transaction Books).
Buffalobob
07-18-2010, 15:24
Do you know who Destito was? Do you know what he believed?
Thomas Paine
07-18-2010, 19:46
Do you know who Destito was? Do you know what he believed?
You've gotta give me more than just "Destito" to work with...
You've gotta give me more than just "Destito" to work with...
I'm curious if he meant John Esposito, the apologist for militant Islam :confused:
Edward Said. Mean anything to you?
Why yes it does :D it means to me that a watered down version of Islam is now being taught to thousands of students across America, where fabricating facts to fit preconceived notions are the norm, as well as substituting politics for scholarship in the name of "speaking truth to power" - and that the fruition of Said's works are on the fast track of becoming policy for our country - since one of his disciples occupies the Oval Office :(
"Truth to Power" Da Arab American Action Network is in Da house...
With friends and mentors like Ayers, Said, Khalidi and Ali Abunimah, how tied in to the International Solidarity Movement is Barack Hussein Obama :confused:
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=2601
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6233
FWIW, Professor Said gave an interview shortly after 9/11 that was published in The Progressive in November 2001. The interview is available here (http://www.progressive.org/0901/intv1101.html). The text of that interview follows in two parts.Interview with Edward W. Said
By David Barsamian, November 2001 Issue
Urbane and sophisticated, Edward W. Said is in many ways the quintessential New Yorker. His love for the city is palpable. "New York," he says, "plays an important role in the kind of criticism and interpretation which I have done." He mirrors the city's restless energy and diversity. In addition to his great love for literature and his unflagging interest in politics, he is an inveterate devotee of opera and classical music. An accomplished pianist, he opens his home on New York's Upper West Side to artists, writers, and musicians from all over the globe.
He's been a New Yorker since 1963 when he accepted a position at Columbia, where he now holds the position of University Professor. Born in Jerusalem and educated at schools there and in Cairo, Said came to the U.S. in the early 1950s and attended Princeton and Harvard. There's lots of talk these days about public intellectuals. Much of it is hot air. Edward Said is the real thing. His creative intellectual talents and abilities are infused with passion and a sense of outrage at the hypocrisies, contradictions, and indignities of what passes for political commentary, particularly when it comes to the Middle East. He is no doubt the most prominent spokesperson for the Palestinian cause in the United States.
His productivity and range of interests are impressive. A relentless and indefatigable worker, he maintains a rigorous schedule while struggling against leukemia. A prolific author, he most recently published Reflections on Exile and Power, Politics, and Culture. Much of his political writing is not only excavating buried memories and affirming the Palestinian presence but also pointing toward a future where peace is possible.
We have done many interviews over the years, and what always strikes me is his tremendous intellectual energy and, yes, enthusiasm to talk. He remains doggedly hopeful. His oppositional role is "to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose so that choice and agency return to the individual," he says. He envisions a community that doesn't exalt "commodified interests and profitable commercial goals" but values instead "survivability and sustainability in a human and decent way. Those are difficult goals to achieve. But I think they are achievable." I talked with him by phone in late September.
Q: The events of September 11 have bewildered and confused many Americans. What was your reaction?
Edward W. Said: Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent people. It was aimed at symbols: the World Trade Center, the heart of American capitalism, and the Pentagon, the headquarters of the American military establishment. But it was not meant to be argued with. It wasn't part of any negotiation. No message was intended with it. It spoke for itself, which is unusual. It transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical. There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here, which refused to have any interest in dialogue and political organization and persuasion. This was bloody-minded destruction for no other reason than to do it. Note that there was no claim for these attacks. There were no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent piece of terror. This was part of nothing. It was a leap into another realm--the realm of crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It's important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort.
Q: What should the U.S. do?
Said: The just response to this terrible event should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it's probably too late because the United States has never done that; it's always gone it alone. To say that we're going to end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think, most Americans aren't prepared.There isn't a clear goal in sight. Osama bin Laden's organization has spun out from him and is now probably independent of him. There will be others who will appear and reappear. This is why we need a much more precise, a much more defined, a much more patiently constructed campaign, as well as one that surveys not just the terrorists' presence but the root causes of terrorism, which are ascertainable.
Q: What are those root causes?
Said: They come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East--those areas that are considered to be essential to U.S. interests and security. And in this relentlessly unfolding series of interactions, the U.S. has played a very distinctive role, which most Americans have been either shielded from or simply unaware of.
In the Islamic world, the U.S. is seen in two quite different ways. One view recognizes what an extraordinary country the U.S. is. Every Arab or Muslim that I know is tremendously interested in the United States. Many of them send their children here for education. Many of them come here for vacations. They do business here or get their training here.The other view is of the official United States, the United States of armies and interventions. The United States that in 1953 overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran and brought back the shah. The United States that has been involved first in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter of Israel against the Palestinians.
If you live in the area, you see these things as part of a continuing drive for dominance, and with it a kind of obduracy, a stubborn opposition to the wishes and desires and aspirations of the people there. Most Arabs and Muslims feel that the United States hasn't really been paying much attention to their desires. They think it has been pursuing its policies for its own sake and not according to many of the principles that it claims are its own--democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, international law. It's very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It's very hard to justify 140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers. These actions were taken with the support and financing of the United States. How can you say this is part of U.S. adherence to international law and U.N. resolutions? The result is a kind of schizophrenic picture of the United States.
Now we come to the really sad part. The Arab rulers are basically unpopular. They are supported by the United States against the wishes of their people. In all of this rather heady mixture of violence and policies that are remarkably unpopular right down to the last iota, it's not hard for demagogues, especially people who claim to speak in the name of religion, in this case Islam, to raise a crusade against the United States and say that we must somehow bring America down.
Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. It was thought that to rally Islam against godless communism would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad turn indeed, and that, in fact, transpired. In 1985, a group of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President Reagan, who called them "freedom fighters."These people, by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam. Osama bin Laden, who is a Saudi, feels himself to be a patriot because the U.S. has forces in Saudi Arabia, which is sacred because it is the land of the prophet Mohammed. There is also this great sense of triumphalism, that just as we defeated the Soviet Union, we can do this. And out of this sense of desperation and pathological religion, there develops an all-encompassing drive to harm and hurt, without regard for the innocent and the uninvolved, which was the case in New York. Now to understand this is, of course, not at all to condone it. And what terrifies me is that we're entering a phase where if you start to speak about this as something that can be understood historically--without any sympathy--you are going to be thought of as unpatriotic, and you are going to be forbidden. It's very dangerous. It is precisely incumbent on every citizen to quite understand the world we're living in and the history we are a part of and we are forming as a superpower.
Said interview part 2 of 2Q: Some pundits and politicians seem to be echoing Kurtz in Heart of Darkness when he said, "Exterminate all the brutes."
Said: In the first few days, I found it depressingly monochromatic. There's been essentially the same analysis over and over again and very little allowance made for different views and interpretations and reflections. What is quite worrisome is the absence of analysis and reflection. Take the word "terrorism." It has become synonymous now with anti-Americanism, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being critical of the United States, which, in turn, has become synonymous with being unpatriotic. That's an unacceptable series of equations. The definition of terrorism has to be more precise, so that we are able to discriminate between, for example, what it is that the Palestinians are doing to fight the Israeli military occupation and terrorism of the sort that resulted in the World Trade Center bombing.
Q: What's the distinction you're drawing?
Said: Take a young man from Gaza living in the most horrendous conditions--most of it imposed by Israel--who straps dynamite around himself and then throws himself into a crowd of Israelis. I've never condoned or agreed with it, but at least it is understandable as the desperate wish of a human being who feels himself being crowded out of life and all of his surroundings, who sees his fellow citizens, other Palestinians, his parents, sisters, and brothers, suffering, being injured, or being killed. He wants to do something, to strike back. That can be understood as the act of a truly desperate person trying to free himself from unjustly imposed conditions. It's not something I agree with, but at least you could understand it. The people who perpetrated the terror of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings are something different because these people were obviously not desperate and poor refugee dwellers. They were middle class, educated enough to speak English, to be able to go to flight school, to come to America, to live in Florida.
Q: In your introduction to the updated version of Covering Islam: How The Media and The Experts Determine How We See The Rest of The World, you say: "Malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West." Why is that?
Said: The sense of Islam as a threatening Other--with Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational--develops during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The study of the Other has a lot to do with the control and dominance of Europe and the West generally in the Islamic world. And it has persisted because it's based very, very deeply in religious roots, where Islam is seen as a kind of competitor of Christianity.If you look at the curricula of most universities and schools in this country, considering our long encounter with the Islamic world, there is very little there that you can get hold of that is really informative about Islam. If you look at the popular media, you'll see that the stereotype that begins with Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik has really remained and developed into the transnational villain of television and film and culture in general. It is very easy to make wild generalizations about Islam. All you have to do is read almost any issue of The New Republic and you'll see there the radical evil that's associated with Islam, the Arabs as having a depraved culture, and so forth. These are impossible generalizations to make in the United States about any other religious or ethnic group.
Q: In a recent article in the London Observer, you say the U.S. drive for war uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick. Tell me what you have in mind there.
Said: Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him--which had torn his leg out--to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality. Now, all the words that George Bush used in public during the early stages of the crisis--"wanted, dead or alive," "a crusade," etc.--suggest not so much an orderly and considered progress towards bringing the man to justice according to international norms, but rather something apocalyptic, something of the order of the criminal atrocity itself. That will make matters a lot, lot worse, because there are always consequences. And it would seem to me that to give Osama bin Laden--who has been turned into Moby Dick, he's been made a symbol of all that's evil in the world--a kind of mythological proportion is really playing his game. I think we need to secularize the man. We need to bring him down to the realm of reality. Treat him as a criminal, as a man who is a demagogue, who has unlawfully unleashed violence against innocent people. Punish him accordingly, and don't bring down the world around him and ourselves.