Overview
Edward Said died on September 25, 2003 but his legacy is very much alive and will no doubt persist. Events, symposia and lectures commemorating him have sprung up on campuses across the country. Said was an international leader of the Palestinian cause and with his fancy rhetoric, he spun arguments that pro-Palestinians continually use. It’s important to know who he was and what his arguments have been. Professor Rashid Khalidi, who holds the anonymously endowed Edward Said chair at Columbia University, may become his successor.
A Columbia University Professor and a Palestinian-American, Said was revered and constantly honored during his life by progressive intellectuals for creating “post-colonial” theory, but even more for being the most celebrated spokesman-and spin-doctor-- for the Palestinian cause. The author or co-author of over 20 books, Said also wrote innumerable articles and appeared in the media and before government committees as an expert on the conflict. He was much sought after as a guest lecturer and drew huge, appreciative-even adoring-audiences.
Said was wildly polemical and bombastic, and University audiences delighted in his extravagant denunciations of Israel, Zionism and US policy. He was venomous in question-answer periods, even when the questioner was gentle. He responded with personal attacks, and was quick to accuse people of racism or bigotry.
Despite Said’s prestigious academic position, he was an extremist. He became a member of the PLO’s Palestinian National Council in 1970 but broke off with the PLO in 1991 because it had become too moderate; he was photographed flinging rocks at Israelis from the Lebanese border in 2000; he demanded a one-state solution, the “Right of Return” and reparations for all Palestinian Arabs. He furiously opposed the Oslo Accords as a Palestinian capitulation. In his view, Israel was an illegitimate, colonialist, racist, expansionist state. In all these positions, he claimed the moral high ground by wrapping his demands in human rights’ rhetoric, and was known for his fierce, uncompromising moral zeal. A sample of some of his positions:
- “Everything that has been said against Saddam Hussein also applies to Ariel Sharon.”[1]
- Israel “commits daily human rights abuses with a kind of refined viciousness that is absolutely stupefying.”[2]
- Israel has tried to eradicate all traces-even all memory-of the indigenous Palestinians and their culture, a “tremendous assault on memory (that) is quite without precedent or analogy in the annals of colonialist depredations.”[3]
- The Oslo Peace Process-“a willfully deceptive rubric” was designed to pacify the Palestinians and colonize more Palestinian land, not end the Occupation and grant autonomy to Palestinians. “It has simply repackaged the Occupation.” (“The Desertion of Arafat,” New Left Review, Sept-Oct 2001)[4]
- “Palestinians embody perhaps the most visible and universal case of human rights abuses today.”[5]
- “Uprooting trees and razing buildings are as dehumanizing-dare I say more dehumanizing-than suicide attacks.”[6]
- On a one-state solution: “[T]he Jews are a minority everywhere. They are a minority in America. They can certainly be a minority in Israel.”[7]
- “US policy is totally dominated by American Zionism” (“More on American Zionism 2; Al Ahram Oc 13, 2000)[8]
- “American Zionism…. is a system of antithetical thought and Orwellian distortion….” (“American Zionism -3-)[9]
- "I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are." Afterword to 1994 edition, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 331.[10]
[1] Lecture at UCLA Burkle Center, February 20, 2003 . Video available at: Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights
[2] Lecture at UCLA Burkle Center, February 20, 2003 Video available at: Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights
[3] Lecture at UCLA Burkle Center, February 20, 2003 Video available at: Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights
[4] http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24502.shtml
[5] Lecture at UCLA Burkle Center, February 20, 2003 Video available at: Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights
[6] Lecture at UCLA Burkle Center, February 20, 2003 Video available at: Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights
[7] Interview with Ari Shavit, August 2000, at http://www.planet.edu/~walawad/view/article/eddy.html
[8] Article at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/502/op2.htm
[9] Article available at http://www.amaweb.org/strategicnews/zionism_us_media.htm
[10] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/641
Biography
Edward Said, a Christian Palestinian-American, has claimed he was born and raised in Jerusalem until he was 12 (1947), when Zionists forced him and his family to flee. They destroyed the “paradise” of his childhood, dispossessed his family of its home and fortune, and turned him into a stateless person. He used his personal tragedy as a metaphor for what happened to all Palestinians.
This version of his story was proved untrue in 1999, and Said’s most recent autobiography, Out of Place, corrects the record, though Said never admitted he had lied about his past.[1] In fact, his father had US citizenship but moved to Cairo at least nine years before Edward was born and became an extremely wealthy businessman. Business reverses occurred when Nasser expropriated the business in the 1950’s. Said’s mother was Lebanese. Said was born in Jerusalem during one of the family’s visits there, but he grew up in the plushest suburb of Cairo and attended private schools until he transferred to the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts to finish high school.[2] He received his BA from Princeton, his PhD in 19th century English Literature from Harvard University, and joined Columbia University’s faculty where he taught until his death in the fall of 2003.
Though Said published scholarly articles in his field (his specialties were the authors Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad), he made his name in 1978 with his book, Orientalism. It argued that the West’s study of Islam has always been prejudiced and that this bias is simply another form of colonialism and racism. Or, as one critic put it more simply: “His most famous book, ‘Orientalism,’ published in 1979, did more for the jihad than a battalion of Osamas. Like all great polemics, "Orientalism" rests on a simple thesis: Westerners are inherently unable to fairly judge, or even grasp, the Arab world. In fact, any attempt to do so amounts to an act of intellectual imperialism.”[3]
Orientalism was criticized by mainstream scholars, but it became popular in progressive academic circles, had a profound and radicalizing influence on academia and contributed to “post-colonial” studies.[4] Subsequently, Said’s prolific output of books and articles were mostly about Palestine, Western prejudice against Arabs, and diatribes against Zionism and US policy.
Said began his political activism early. In the late 1960’s, he co-founded the fervently pro-Palestinian Association of Arab-American University Graduates. He was a member of the PLO’s Palestinian National Council from 1970 to 1991, was the principal author and translator of Arafat’s speech to the UN in 1974, and served as a go-between for several US administrations and Arafat. He also has become the most recognized-and adulated-spokesman for the Palestinian cause, with even the BBC doing a documentary that Said wrote and narrated, “In Search of Palestine” in 1998. He has received multiple honorary degrees from universities around the world, and was elected for a term as president of the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA).[5]
Said broke with the PLO in 1991 because he strenuously objected to Arafat’s increasing moderation. Though he had advocated a one-state solution in the 1970’s, in the 1980’s he supported a two-state solution, only to return to advocacy of a one-state solution in 1999.[6] He has virulently condemned Arafat as “an absolute tyrant” and the PA’s corruption.
When Said died in the fall of 2003, many mourned and a series of memorial services were held to honor him. "This death is an irreplaceable loss to the realm of ideas," said Columbia University President Lee Bollinger.[7] Others were less mournful, reflecting the controversy and contentiousness Said aroused. [8]
Affiliations
Said is the “godfather” of innumerable organizations even when he is not formally a member of them.
- PLO 1977-1991[9]
[1] http://www.freeman.org/m_online/sep99/weiner.htm and www.secularislam.org/articles/debunking.htm ; http://www.tzemachdovid.org/Facts/said.shtml ; www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP3899 and http://slate.msn.com/id/35696/ and Professor Edward Alexander at http://www.nas.org/forum_blogger/forum_archives/2003_09_28_nasof_arch.htm
[2] http://www.freeman.org/m_online/sep99/weiner.htm and www.secularislam.org/articles/debunking.htm ; http://www.tzemachdovid.org/Facts/said.shtml ; www.memri.org/bin/opener.cgi?Page=archives&ID=SP3899
[3] Zef Chavets, “Death of a New York Jihad Hero,” Jewish World Review, November 7 2003 at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1003/chafets_2003_10_07.php3
[4] www.secularislam.org/articles/debunking.htm andA.O . Scott, “Edward Said: The Palestinian Tory,” Slate, October 1 1999 at http://slate.msn.com/id/35696
[5] Tariq Ali, “Remembering Edward Said,” New Left Review, November/December 2003 at http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25804.shtml
[6] http://slate.msn.com/id/35696/ and Interview with Ari Shavit, August 2000, at http://www.planet.edu/~walawad/view/article/eddy.html
[7] Cited in Zef Chavets, “Death of a New York Jihad Hero,” Jewish World Review, November 7 2003 at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1003/chafets_2003_10_07.php3
[8] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=10042 and “Edward Said’s Parting Shots,” at Frontpage Magazine at http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=7929 and Hillel Halkin, Review of Ivory Towers in the Sand at http://www.martinkramer.org/pages/899529/
[9] Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents, 1996, p. 173
Accusations and Defamations
· “Flanked by three of the most venal politicians in the world (Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice), [President Bush] pronounced his speech with the halting accents of a mediocre elocution student and thereby allowed Sharon to kill or injure many more Palestinians in a US endorsed illegal military occupation.”
“One Way Street,” Al-Ahram Weekly, July 11 2002[1]
- “But so accustomed have we become to the blandishments of US advisers like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is the correct thing because that's the way the Arabs are.” “Imperial Perspectives,” Z/Net Mideast, July 24 2003[2]
- “What isn't always noticed is that when a leader there [in the Middle East] emerges whom "we" like -- eg the Shah of Iran or Anwar El-Sadat -- Americans assume that he is a courageous visionary who has done things for "us" or "our" way, not because he has understood the game of imperial power, which is to survive by humouring the regnant authority, but because he has been moved by principles that we share. Almost a quarter of a century after his assassination, Anwar El-Sadat is, it is not an exaggeration to say, a forgotten and unpopular man because most Egyptians regard him as having served America first, not Egypt. The same is true about the Shah.” “Imperial Perspectives,” Z/Net Mideast, July 24 2003[3]
· “[B]oth leaders [President Clinton and PM Tony Blair because of their actions in Kosovo] deserve the strongest moral condemnation and, given Clinton's appalling record in Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and the White House corridors, he should be indicted as a war criminal as much as Milosevic. In any event, even according to US law, Clinton violated the constitution by fighting a war without congressional sanction. That he also violated the UN Charter simply adds to the felony.” “Treason of the Intellectuals,” Al Ahram Weekly, 24-30 June 1999[4]
- “Everything that has been said against Saddam Hussein also applies to Ariel Sharon.”[5]
- “[T]he Jews are a minority everywhere. They are a minority in America. They can certainly be a minority in Israel.”[6]
- “US policy is totally dominated by American Zionism” (“More on American Zionism 2; Al Ahram Oc 13, 2000)[7]
- “American Zionism…. is a system of antithetical thought and Orwellian distortion….” (“American Zionism -3-)[8]
- “That is all discredited, ideological rubbish. Only what we, and our American instructors, say about the Arabs and Islam -- vague re- cycled Orientalist clichés of the kind repeated by a tireless mediocrity like Bernard Lewis -- is true.” Al-Ahram Weekly, 16-22 January 2003[9]
[1] http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/020711_said.html
[2] http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=3949§ionID=22
[3] http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=3949§ionID=22
[4] http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/435/op1.htm
[5] Lecture at UCLA Burkle Center, February 20, 2003 . Video available at: Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights
[6] Interview with Ari Shavit, August 2000, at http://www.planet.edu/~walawad/view/article/eddy.html
[7] Article at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/502/op2.htm
[8] Article available at http://www.amaweb.org/strategicnews/zionism_us_media.htm
[9] http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/621/op2.htm
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