Eddie Said Rotting in Hell by Jean 12:30pm Fri Oct 3 '03 broiled print article "Edward Said: A Life Devoted to Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism" Posted by Jean Shaw Friday, October 03, 2003 Author and professor of English at the University of Washington Edward Alexander, writes a fitting tribute to hero-of-the-left Edward Said, for IntellectualConservative.com. If enormous influence in the academic world is a reliable indicator of intellectual distinction, then Edward Said merited his reputation as one of America's intellectual eminences. He taught a whole generation of English professors to search for racism in writers (like Jane Austen) who did not think as the professors do. He induced a generation of Middle East scholars not only to believe that ''since the time of Homer...every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist'' but to ridicule ''speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies'' as ''highly exaggerated [racial] stereotyping'' (this in a statement of 1997). His acolytes also found meat and drink in Said's pristinely ignorant pronouncements about Jews. They are not, he claimed, really a people at all because Moses was an Egyptian (he wasn't) and because Jewish identity in the Diaspora is entirely a function of external persecution. The Holocaust (which destroyed most of the potential citizens of a Jewish state) was in Said's estimation a great boon to Jews because it served to ''protect'' Palestinian Jews ''with the world's compassion.'' Prior to 1948, he asserted, ''the historical duration of a Jewish state [in ''Palestine''] was a sixty-year period two millennia ago.'' Said's pronouncements about his fellow Arabs were also widely influential. While bewailing the racist stereotyping of Arabs by Western ''Orientalists'' Said insisted that ''there are no divisions in the Palestinian population of four million. We all support the PLO.'' Said wrote this while he was still a member of the Palestine National Council and one of the closest advisors of Arafat, whom he praised for ''his microscopic grasp ... of politics...in the Gramscian or Foucauldian sense.'' But at the same time that Said insisted that ''every Palestinian...is up in arms'' against Israel, that they all belonged to a monolithic body, acting and thinking in perfect unison, he felt it necessary to urge the murder of Arab ''collaborators'' with Israel. Indeed, he insisted that ''the UN Charter and every other known document or protocol'' sanctions such murders. Said eventually withdrew his support from the PLO head not because Arafat had become one of the major war criminals of modern times but because the Oslo Accords showed him becoming ''soft'' on Israel. Said's intense hostility to America also powerfully influenced that sizable contingent of our academics whose motto is ''the 'other' country, right or wrong.'' He called Operation Iraqi Freedom the crusade of an ''avenging Judeo-Christian god of war,'' fitting into the pattern of America ''reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.'' And, as usual, he blamed the Jews for what he hated: ''The Perles and Wolfowitzes of this country'' have led America into a war ''planned by a docile professionalized staff in ...Washington and Tel Aviv'' and publicly defended by ''Ari Fleischer (who I believe is an Israeli citizen).'' (A 'New York Post' journalist who attempted to find the source of Said's phony claim about Fleischer located it in the website of the White Aryan Resistance Movement.) Far from making him an untouchable, Said's past membership in an international terrorist organization, his Disneyland versions of history, his thinly-veiled antisemitism and blatant anti-Americanism made him a star in the academic, literary, and intellectual worlds. In July of 2000 Said, during a visit to Lebanon, was spotted hurling rocks over the border at Israelis, a perfect existential realization of his intellectual violence against Jews. Much of his life, after all, was devoted to spilling ink to justify Arafat's spilling of blood. To read the entire article, click here. add your comments Source file

in that very special hell by goldberg 6:24pm Fri Oct 3 '03 print comment ...eddie is in that very special corner of hell that is reserved for suicide killers of babys,suicide flyers of planes into buildings, and the islamist murderers from india to iraq to bali......they all belong there add your comments

Way To Speak Ill Of The Dead, Fascist by Waiting For Goldberg's Libel 7:38pm Fri Oct 3 '03 print comment The Jewish community would do well to examine the encrochment upon their positions of leadership by Zionists, who are an Extremist Political Minority, hiding behind the Jewish Community in order to hide their true faces. Abusing 'Anti-Semitism' by Ran HaCohen The eve of the Jewish New Year is an excellent occasion for what Jewish tradition calls Kheshbon Nefesh, or soul-searching on so-called "anti-semitism", which has now become the single most important element of Jewish identity. Jews may believe in God or not, eat pork or not, live in Israel or not, but they are all united by their unlimited belief in anti-semitism. When a Palestinian kills innocent Israeli civilians, it's anti-semitism. When Palestinians attack soldiers of Israel's occupation army in their own village, it's anti-semitism. When the UN General Assembly votes 133 to 4 condemning Israel's decision to murder the elected Palestinian leader, it means that except for the US, Micronesia and Marshal Islands, all other countries on the globe are anti-semitic. Even when a pregnant Palestinian woman is stopped at an Israeli check-point and gives birth in open field, the only lesson to be learnt is that Ha'aretz journalist Gideon Levy – who reported two such cases in the past two weeks, one in which the baby died – is an anti-semite. Anti-semitism is an all-encompassing explanation. Anything unpleasant to anti-Palestinian ears is just another instance of anti-semitism. Jewish consciousness focused on anti-semitism has taken the shape of anti-semitic conspiracy theories, like that of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: whereas the anti-semitic classic relates every calamity to Jewish conspiracy, Jews relate to anti-semitic conspiracy every criticism of Israel. As we shall see, this is not the only similarity between anti-Palestinianism and anti-semitism. It is high time to say it out loud: in the entire course of Jewish history, since the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BC, there has never been an era blessed with less anti-semitism than ours. There has never been a better time for Jews to live in than our own. Up to just two generations ago, anti-semitism was a legitimate political and cultural attitude in most of the world's leading powers. Anti-semitism was something you could express openly, even be proud of. Disliking Jews was as natural then as detesting cockroaches is today. Nowadays, anti-semitism is a taboo and a criminal offence in every developed country on earth. Even truly anti-semitic groups deny their anti-semitic character, knowing it is politically unacceptable. Unlike earlier centuries, where anti-semitism stood in direct proportion to the number of Jews in the pertinent country and thus constituted a real threat to them, the countries where anti-semitism is still thriving today – mostly poor Muslim countries – are virtually empty of Jews, so that the actual danger to Jews there is minimal; representatives of Muslim communities in the West have to give up their anti-semitism as a precondition for entering the political system. Just a few generations ago – the Holocaust aside for now – Jews were treated as second-class citizens in all major Jewish concentrations. They were denied civic and religious rights almost universally. There were limits on access of Jews to universities and many professions, to public service and to any position of power; sometimes even marrying and making children was dependent on quotas and licences. Such institutionalised discrimination and oppression is not only totally extinct today: it is utterly unimaginable. With one revealing exception (Israel, where non-orthodox religious Jews are discriminated against), Jews enjoy full religious freedom wherever they are. They have full citizenship wherever they live, with full political, civic and human rights like every other citizen. This may sound trivial, but it was not so just a few generations ago and throughout the entire first and second millennia. Repressive regimes have either collapsed, or their Jewish population has left them. Nowadays, an orthodox Jew can run for the most powerful office on earth, the president of the United States (I personally hope he doesn't win). A Jew can be the mayor of Amsterdam in "anti-semitic" Holland, a minister in "anti-semitic" Britain, a leading intellectual in "anti-semitic" France, a president of "anti-semitic" Switzerland, editor-in-chief of a major daily in "anti-semitic" Denmark, or an industrial tycoon in "anti-semitic" Russia. None of this was imaginable a century ago. Jews have free and unlimited access to every institution in every country they live in; Ironically, a converted Jew is even mentioned as a possible successor to the Holy See. At the same time, "anti-semitic" Germany (home to the world's fastest-growing Jewish community) gives Israel three military submarines for free, "anti-semitic" France has proliferated to Israel the nuclear technology for its weapons of mass destruction, and "anti-semitic" Europe has welcomed Israel as a single non-European country to everything from football and basketball leagues to the Eurovision Song Contest, and has granted Israeli universities a special status for scientific fund-raising. The Holocaust has been the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history and among the greatest crimes in human history – but the very fact that these words sound so obvious is a great victory on anti-semitism. The term genocide, coined by a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust (R. Lemkin) and modelled on the genocide of the Jews, has found its way to international legislation and been affirmed as a crime by almost all the countries on earth, including eventually (with a shamefully long delay) the US. The Holocaust has (justly!) become the prototype of genocide, a synonym for Crime against Humanity. There were several other genocides in the 20th century – enough to mention the Armenian genocide by Turks (which preceded and inspired the Holocaust) or the Tutsi genocide by Hutu in Rwanda (which was even more "efficient" than the Holocaust). However, while other genocides are still struggling even to be acknowledged, the Holocaust is the only genocide which is considered unquestionable to the extent that its denial is in some countries a criminal offence. No other genocide even comes close to the 250 memorial museums and research institutes dedicated to the Holocaust around the world, and no other genocide survivors have been financially compensated like the persecuted Jews. In such a world, whoever cries "anti-semitism" twice a day has an extremely heavy burden of proof to shoulder. The State of Israel has always been cynically exploiting allegations of anti-semitism, condemning purported and cooperating with actual anti-semites at will. Last week, to quote just a minor example, when the world was outraged by Italy's monarch Berlusconi's claim that his fascist predecessor Mussolini "had not killed anybody but just sent people to holidays in exile" – which comes fairly close to Holocaust denial – the only official Israeli reaction was that of an unnamed spokesman for the 2nd Minister in the Ministry of Finance, who mumbled that "If the words have been said (!), one can not agree with them, since History speaks for itself" (Ha'aretz 14.9, p.12 bottom). The reason for this ear-deafening outcry is simple: Berlusconi, like most right-wing extremists, has taken a decisive pro-Israel stand in Europe. So let him even deny the Holocaust if he likes, Israel will show understanding. After all, Israel was a closest ally of the most racist regime in the post-WWII era, South Africa's Apartheid: moral considerations have never played any role whatsoever in Israel's politics and diplomacy. On a state level, some may excuse it as Realpolitik. The institutionalised pro-Israel lobby has compromised its integrity to such an extent, that I won't be surprised if, say, the Anti-Defamation League, which cries anti-semitic wolf on a daily basis, now hails the fascist apologist Berlusconi as a distinguished statesman; Actually, precisely this world-record of hypocricy has taken place this very week. Much more disturbing is the intensive resorting to "anti-semitism" claims by Jewish individuals and institutions who do try to maintain a look of integrity.Such claims take many creative forms: for example, some Jews have a morally repulsive pastime of looking for worst cases of oppression – Russian atrocities in Chechnya (whose veterans, by the way, join the Israeli army), Chinese in Tibet – which supposedly "prove" that the media focus on Israel is anti-semitically motivated. As if it were not outrageous enough to be on the shortlist of evil-doers, as if only the gold medal in this satanic competition, but not bronze or silver, is worthy of protest. And I wonder how many of those arm-chair pro-Israel Tibet specialists ever bothered to actually do something to free Tibet, except for exploiting its suffering to distract from Israel's atrocities. The abuse of alleged anti-semitism is morally despicable. It took hundreds of years and millions of victims to turn anti-semitism – a specific case of racism which led historically to genocide – into a taboo. People abusing this taboo in order to support Israel's racist and genocidal policy towards the Palestinians do nothing less than desecrate the memory of those Jewish victims, whose death, from a humanistic perspective, is meaningful only inasmuch as it serves as an eternal warning to the human kind against all kinds of discrimination, racism, and genocide. Moreover, portraying the victimisers as victims – a standard characteristic of anti-Palestinian propaganda – is precisely what anti-semitism has always done: in blood-libels which portrayed defenceless Jewish victims as victimisers of Christian children, or in the ultimate accusation of Christ killing, which abused the persecution of early Christians to legitimate the persecution of Jews once the balance of power changed. Thus, evoking Jewish victims of the past to defend Jewish victimisers of the present –remember that Israel has one of the mightiest armies on earth – is a moral fault on a par with, and embarrassingly similar to, anti-semitism itself. Happy New Year 5764. – Ran HaCohen add your comments

Going to that very special hell by Mirror.. 9:03pm Fri Oct 3 '03 print comment ...Goldberg is going to that very special corner of hell that is reserved for zionist killers of babies, pilots who fire missiles into residential buildings, and the jewish murderers from Jenin to Nablus to Gaza....they all belong there add your comments

Collection by Various 9:05pm Fri Oct 3 '03 print comment A Mighty and Passionate Heart by ALEXANDER COCKBURN • Thursday September 25, 2003 at 02:50 PM September 25, 2003 Edward Said, Dead at 66 A Mighty and Passionate Heart By ALEXANDER COCKBURN A mighty and a passionate heart has ceased to beat. Edward Said died in hospital in New York City Wednesday night at 6.30 pm, felled at last by complications arising from the leukemia he fought so gamely ever since the early 1990s. We march through life buoyed by those comrades-in-arms we know to be marching with us, under the same banners, flying the same colors, sustained by the same hopes and convictions. They can be a thousand miles away; we may not have spoken to them in months; but their companionship is burned into our souls and we are sustained by the knowledge that they are with us in the world. Few more than Edward Said, for me and so many others beside. How many times, after a week, a month or more, I have reached him on the phone and within a second been lofted in my spirits, as we pressed through our updates: his trips, his triumphs, the insults sustained; the enemies rebuked and put to flight. Even in his pettiness he was magnificent, and as I would laugh at his fury at some squalid gibe hurled at him by an eighth-rate scrivener, he would clamber from the pedestal of martyrdom and laugh at himself. He never lost his fire, even as the leukemia pressed, was routed, pressed again. He lived at a rate that would have felled a man half his age and ten times as healthy: a plane to London, an honorary degree, on to Lebanon, on to the West Bank, on to Cairo, to Madrid, back to New York. And all the while he was pouring out the Said prose that I most enjoyed, the fiery diatribes he distributed to CounterPunch and to a vast world audience. At the top of his form his prose has the pitiless, relentless clarity of Swift. The Palestinians will never know a greater polemical champion. A few weeks ago I was, with his genial permission, putting together from three of his essays the concluding piece in our forthcoming CounterPunch collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I was seized, as so often before, by the power of the prose: how could anyone read those searing sentences and not boil with rage, while simultaneously admiring Edward's generosity of soul: that with the imperative of justice and nationhood for his people came the humanity that called for reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. His literary energy was prodigious. Memoir, criticism, homily, fiction poured from his pen, a fountain pen that reminded one that Edward was very much an intellectual in the nineteenth- century tradition of a Zola or of a Victor Hugo, who once remarked that genius is a promontory in the infinite. I read that line as a schoolboy, wrote it in my notebook and though I laugh now a little at the pretension of the line, I do think of Edward as a promontory, a physical bulk on the intellectual and political landscape that forced people, however disinclined they may have been, to confront the Palestinian experience. Years ago his wife Mariam asked me if I would make available my apartment in New York, where I lived at that time, as the site for a surprise 40th birthday for Edward. I dislike surprise parties but of course agreed. The evening arrived; guests assembled on my sitting room on the eleventh floor of 333 Central Park West. The dining room table groaned under Middle Eastern delicacies. Then came the word from the front door. Edward and Mariam had arrived! They were ascending in the elevator. Then we could all hear Edward's furious bellow: "But I don't want to go to dinner with *******, Alex!" They entered at last and the shout went up from seventy throats, Happy Birthday! He reeled back in surprise and then recovered, and then saw about the room all those friends happy to have traveled thousands of miles to shake his hand. I could see him slowly expand with joy at each new unexpected face and salutation. He never became blase in the face of friendship and admiration, or indeed honorary degrees, just as he never grew a thick skin. Each insult was as fresh and as wounding as the first he ever received. A quarter of century ago he would call, with mock heroic English intonation, "Alex-and-er, have you seen the latest New Republic? Have you read this filthy, this utterly disgusting diatribe? You haven't? Oh, I know, you don't care about the feelings of a mere black man such as myself." I'd start laughing, and say I had better things to do than read Martin Peretz, or Edward Alexander or whoever the assailant was, but for half an hour he would brood, rehearse fiery rebuttals and listen moodily as I told him to pay no attention. He never lost the capacity to be wounded by the treachery and opportunism of supposed friends. A few weeks ago he called to ask whether I had read a particularly stupid attack on him by his very old friend Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic Monthly. He described with pained sarcasm a phone call in which Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own conscience by advertising to Edward the impending assault. I asked Edward why he was surprised, and indeed why he cared. But he was surprised and he did care. His skin was so, so thin, I think because he knew that as long as he lived, as long as he marched onward as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous Palestinian, there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the street eager to pour sewage on his head. Edward, dear friend, I wave adieu to you across the abyss. I don't even have to close my eyes to savor your presence, your caustic or merry laughter, your elegance, your spirit as vivid as that of d'Artagnan, the fiery Gascon. You will burn like the brightest of flames in my memory, as you will in the memories of all who knew and admired and loved you. www.counterpunch.com/ add your comments Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony by EDWARD SAID • Thursday September 25, 2003 at 02:59 PM September 25, 2003 Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony By EDWARD SAID [An Excerpt from The Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair] Aside from the obvious physical discomforts, being ill for a long period of time fills the spirit with a terrible feeling of helplessness, but also with periods of analytic lucidity, which, of course, must be treasured. For the past three months now I have been in and out of the hospital, with days marked by lengthy and painful treatments, blood transfusions, endless tests, hours and hours of unproductive time spent staring at the ceiling, draining fatigue and infection, inability to do normal work, and thinking, thinking, thinking. But there are also the intermittent passages of lucidity and reflection that sometimes give the mind a perspective on daily life that allows it to see things (without being able to do much about them) from a different perspective. Reading the news from Palestine and seeing the frightful images of death and destruction on television, it has been my experience to be utterly amazed and aghast at what I have deduced from those details about Israeli government policy, more particularly about what has been going on in the mind of Ariel Sharon. And when, after the recent Gaza bombing by one of his F-16s in which nine children were massacred, he was quoted as congratulating the pilot and boasting of a great Israeli success, I was able to form a much clearer idea than before of what a pathologically deranged mind is capable of, not only in terms of what it plans and orders but, worse, how it manages to persuade other minds to think in the same delusional and criminal way. Getting inside the official Israeli mind is a worthwhile, if lurid, experience. In the West, however, there's been such repetitious and unedifying attention paid to Palestinian suicide bombing that a gross distortion in reality has completely obscured what is much worse: the official Israeli, and perhaps the uniquely Sharonian evil that has been visited so deliberately and so methodically on the Palestinian people. Suicide bombing is reprehensible but it is a direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed result of years of abuse, powerlessness and despair. It has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed propensity for violence as the man in the moon. Sharon wants terrorism, not peace, and he does everything in his power to create the conditions for it. But for all its horror, Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped of its context and the terrible suffering from which it arises: a failure to see that is a failure in humanity, and that context doesn't make the violence any less terrible but at least situates it in a real history and real geography. Yet the location of Palestinian terror-of course it is terror-is never allowed a moment's chance to appear, so remorseless has been the focus on it as a phenomenon apart, a pure, gratuitous evil which Israel, supposedly acting on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously battling in its variously appalling acts of disproportionate violence against a population of three million Palestinian civilians. I am not speaking only about Israel's manipulation of opinion, but its exploitation of the American equivalent of the campaign against terrorism without which Israel could not have done what it has done. (In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it.) That this evil has been made consciously part of George W. Bush's campaign against terrorism, irrationally magnifying American fantasies and fixations with extraordinary ease, is no small part of its blind destructiveness. Like the brigades of eager (and in my opinion completely corrupt) American intellectuals who spin enormous structures of falsehoods about the benign purpose and necessity of US imperialism, Israeli society has pressed into service numerous academics, policy intellectuals at think tanks, and ex-military men now in defense-related and public relations business, all to rationalize and make convincing inhuman punitive policies that are supposedly based on the need for Israeli security. Israeli security is now a fabled beast. Like a unicorn it is endlessly hunted and never found, remaining, everlastingly, the goal of future action. That over time Israel has become less secure and more unacceptable to its neighbors scarcely merits a moment's notice. But then who challenges the view that Israeli security ought to define the moral world we live in? Certainly not the Arab and Palestinian leaderships, who for 30 years have conceded everything to Israeli security. Shouldn't that ever be questioned, given that Israel has wreaked more damage on the Palestinians and other Arabs relative to its size than any country in the world, Israel with its nuclear arsenal, its air force, navy and army limitlessly supplied by the US taxpayer? As a result the daily, minute occurrences of what Palestinians have to live through are hidden and, more important, covered over by a logic of self-defense and the pursuit of terrorism (terrorist infrastructure, terrorist nests, terrorist bomb factories, terrorist suspects-the list is infinite) which perfectly suits Sharon and the lamentable George Bush. Ideas about terrorism have thus taken on a life of their own, legitimized and re-legitimized without proof, logic or rational argument. Consider for instance the devastation of Afghanistan, on the one hand, and the "targeted" assassinations of almost 100 Palestinians (to say nothing of the many thousands of "suspects" rounded-up and still imprisoned by Israeli soldiers) on the other: nobody asks whether all these people killed were in fact terrorists, or proved to be terrorists, or were about to become terrorists. They are all assumed to be dangers by acts of simple, unchallenged affirmation. All you need is an arrogant spokesman or two, like the loutish Ranaan Gissin, Avi Pazner or Dore Gold, and in Washington a non-stop apologist for ignorance and incoherence like Ari Fleischer, and the targets in question are just as good as dead. Without doubts, questions or demurral. No need for proof or any such tiresome delicacy. Terrorism and its obsessive pursuit have become an entirely circular, self-fulfilling murder and slow death of enemies who have no choice or say in the matter. With the exception of reports by a few intrepid journalists and writers such as Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Amos Elon, Tanya Leibowitz, Jeff Halper, Israel Shamir and a few others, public discourse in the Israeli media has declined terribly in quality and honesty. Patriotism and blind support for the government has replaced skeptical reflection and moral seriousness. Gone are the days of Israel Shahak, Jakob Talmon and Yehoshua Leibowitch. I can think of few Israeli academics and intellectuals-men like Zeev Sternhell, Uri Avnery and Ilan Pappe, for instance-who are courageous enough to depart from the imbecilic and debased debate about "security" and "terrorism" that seems to have overtaken the Israeli peace establishment, or even its rapidly dwindling left opposition. Crimes are being committed every day in the name of Israel and the Jewish people, and yet the intellectuals chatter on about strategic withdrawal, or perhaps whether to incorporate settlements or not, or whether to keep building that monstrous fence (has a crazier idea ever been realized in the modern world, that you can put several million people in a cage and say they don't exist?) in a manner befitting a general or a politician, rather than in ways more suited to intellectuals and artists with independent judgment and some sort of moral standard. Where are the Israeli equivalents of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Athol Fugard, those white writers who spoke out unequivocally and with unambiguous clarity against the evils of South African apartheid? They simply don't exist in Israel, where public discourse by writers and academics has sunk to equivocation and the repetition of official propaganda, and where most really first-class writing and thought has disappeared from even the academic establishment. But to return to Israeli practices and the mind-set that has gripped the country with such obduracy during the past few years, think of Sharon's plan. It entails nothing less than the obliteration of an entire people by slow, systematic methods of suffocation, outright murder and the stifling of everyday life. There is a remarkable story by Kafka, In the Penal Colony, about a crazed official who shows off a fantastically detailed torture machine whose purpose is to write all over the body of the victim, using a complex apparatus of needles to inscribe the captive's body with minute letters that ultimately causes the prisoner to bleed to death. This is what Sharon and his brigades of willing executioners are doing to the Palestinians, with only the most limited and most symbolic of opposition. Every Palestinian has become a prisoner. Gaza is surrounded by an electrified wire fence on three sides; imprisoned like animals, Gazans are unable to move, unable to work, unable to sell their vegetables or fruit, unable to go to school. They are exposed from the air to Israeli planes and helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the ground by tanks and machine guns. Impoverished and starved, Gaza is a human nightmare, each of whose little pieces of episodes-like what takes place at Erez, or near the settlements-involves thousands of soldiers in the humiliation, punishment, intolerable enfeeblement of each Palestinian, without regard for age, gender or illness. Medical supplies are held up at the border, ambulances are fired upon or detained. Hundreds of houses are demolished, and hundreds of thousands of trees and agricultural land destroyed in acts of systematic collective punishment against civilians, most of whom are already refugees from Israel's destruction of their society in 1948. Hope has been eliminated from the Palestinian vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains, and still Sharon and his sadistic minions prattle on about eliminating terrorism by an ever-encroaching occupation that has continued now for 35 years. That the campaign itself is, like all colonial brutality, futile, or that it has the effect of making Palestinians more, rather than less, defiant simply does not enter Sharon's closed mind. The West Bank is occupied by 1,000 Israeli tanks whose sole purpose is to fire upon and terrorize civilians. Curfews are imposed for periods of up to two weeks, without respite. Schools and universities are either closed or impossible to get to. No one can travel, not just between the nine main cities but within the cities. Every town today is a wasteland of destroyed buildings, looted offices, purposely ruined water and electrical systems. Commerce is finished. Malnutrition prevails in half the number of children. Two-thirds of the population lives below the poverty level of $2 a day. Tanks in Jenin (where the demolition of the refugee camp by Israeli armor, a major war crime, was never investigated because cowardly international bureaucrats such as Kofi Annan back down when Israel threatens) fire upon and kill children, but that is only one drop in an unending stream of Palestinian civilian deaths caused by Israeli soldiers who furnish the illegal Israeli military occupation with loyal, unquestioning service. Palestinians are all "terrorist suspects". The soul of this occupation is that young Israeli conscripts are allowed full rein to subject Palestinians at checkpoints to every known form of private torture and abjection. There is the waiting in the sun for hours; then there is the detention of medical supplies and produce until they rot; there are the insulting words and beatings administered at will; the sudden rampage of jeeps and soldiers against civilians waiting their turn by the thousands at the innumerable checkpoints that have made of Palestinian life a choking hell; making dozens of youths kneel in the sun for hours; forcing men to take off their clothes; insulting and humiliating parents in front of their children; forbidding the sick to pass through for no other reason than personal whim; stopping ambulances and firing on them. And the steady number of Palestinian deaths (quadruple that of Israelis) increases on a daily, mostly untabulated basis. More "terrorist suspects" plus their wives and children, but "we" regret those deaths very much. Thank you. Israel is frequently referred to as a democracy. If so, then it is a democracy without a conscience, a country whose soul has been captured by a mania for punishing the weak, a democracy that faithfully mirrors the psychopathic mentality of its ruler, General Sharon, whose sole idea-if that is the right word for it-is to kill, reduce, maim, drive away Palestinians until "they break". He provides nothing more concrete as a goal for his campaigns, now or in the past, beyond that, and like the garrulous official in Kafka's story he is most proud of his machine for abusing defenseless Palestinian civilians, all the while monstrously abetted in his grotesque lies by his court advisers and philosophers and generals, as well as by his chorus of faithful American servants. There is no Palestinian army of occupation, no Palestinian tanks, no soldiers, no helicopter gun-ships, no artillery, no government to speak of. But there are the "terrorists" and the "violence" that Israel has invented so that its own neuroses can be inscribed on the bodies of Palestinians, without effective protest from the overwhelming majority of Israel's laggard philosophers, intellectuals, artists, peace activists. Palestinian schools, libraries and universities have ceased normal functioning for months now; and we still wait for the Western freedom-to-write groups and the vociferous defenders of academic freedom in America to raise their voices in protest. I have yet to see one academic organization either in Israel or in the West make a declaration about this profound abrogation of the Palestinian right to knowledge, to learning, to attend school. In sum, Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel can have its security, which is just around the corner but cannot be realized because of the special Israeli "insecurity". The whole world must sympathize, while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless, we will be told, these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere sadistic cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are engaged in a "cycle of violence" which has to be stopped, sometime, somewhere. Once in a while, we ought to pause and declare indignantly that there is only one side with an army and a country: the other is a stateless, dispossessed population without rights or any present way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete daily life has either been hijacked, or it has been so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture-slowly, fastidiously, inexorably. That is the truth of what Palestinians suffer. But in any case, Israeli policy will ultimately fail. Anyone who believes that the road map devised by the Bush administration actually offers anything resembling a settlement or that it tackles the basic issues is wrong. Like so much of the prevailing peace discourse, it places the need for restraint and renunciation and sacrifice squarely on Palestinian shoulders, thus denying the density and sheer gravity of Palestinian history. To read through the road map is to confront an unsituated document, oblivious of its time and place. The road map, in other words, is not about a plan for peace so much as a plan for pacification: it is about putting an end to Palestine as a problem. Hence the repetition of the term "performance" in the document's wooden prose-in other words, how the Palestinians are expected to behave, almost in the social sense of the word. No violence, no protest, more democracy, better leaders and institutions, all based on the notion that the underlying problem has been the ferocity of Palestinian resistance, rather than the occupation that has given rise to it. Nothing comparable is expected of Israel except that a few small settlements, known as "illegal outposts" (an entirely new classification which suggests that some Israeli implantations on Palestinian land are legal) must be given up and, yes, the major settlements "frozen" but certainly not dismantled. Not a word is said about what since 1948, and then again since 1967, Palestinians have endured at the hands of Israel and the US. Nothing about the de-development of the Palestinian economy as described by the American researcher Sara Roy in her forthcoming Scholarship and Politics. House demolitions, the uprooting of trees, the 5000 prisoners or more, the policy of targeted assassinations, the closures since 1993, the wholesale ruin of the infrastructure, the incredible number of deaths and maimings-all that and more passes without a word. Nonetheless It may seem quixotic for me to say, even if the immediate prospects are grim from a Palestinian perspective, they are not all dark. The Palestinians stubbornly survive, and Palestinian society-devastated, nearly ruined, desolate in so many ways-is, like Hardy's thrush in its blast-beruffled plume, still capable of flinging its soul upon the growing gloom. No other Arab society is as rambunctious and healthily unruly, and none is fuller of civic and social initiatives and functioning institutions (including a miraculously vital musical conservatory). Even though they are mostly unorganized and in some cases lead miserable lives of exile and statelessness, Diaspora Palestinians are still energetically engaged by the problems of their collective destiny, and everyone that I know is always trying somehow to advance the cause. Only a minuscule fraction of this energy has ever found its way into the Palestinian Authority, which except for the highly ambivalent figure of Arafat has remained strangely marginal to the common fate. According to recent polls, [in the early summer of 2003] Fateh and Hamas between them have the support of roughly 45 percent of the Palestinian electorate, with the remaining 55 percent evolving quite different, much more hopeful-looking political formations. One in particular has struck me as significant (and I have attached myself to it) inasmuch as it now provides the only genuine grassroots formation that steers clear both of the religious parties and their fundamentally sectarian politics, and of the traditional nationalism offered up by Arafat's old (rather than young) Fateh activists. It's been called the National Political Initiative (NPI) and its main figure is Mostapha Barghuti, a Moscow-trained physician, whose main work has been as director of the impressive Village Medical Relief Committee, which has brought health care to more than 100,000 rural Palestinians. A former Communist Party stalwart, Barghuti is a quiet-spoken organizer and leader who has overcome the hundreds of physical obstacles impeding Palestinian movement or travel abroad to rally nearly every independent individual and organization of note behind a political program that promises social reform as well as liberation across doctrinal lines. Singularly free of conventional rhetoric, Barghuti has worked with Israelis, Europeans, Americans, Africans, Asians, Arabs to build an enviably well-run solidarity movement that practices the pluralism and co-existence it preaches. NPI does not throw up its hands at the directionless militarization of the intifada. It offers training programs for the unemployed and social services for the destitute on the grounds that this answers to present circumstances and Israeli pressure. Above all, NPI, which is about to become a recognized political party, seeks to mobilize Palestinian society at home and in exile for free elections-authentic elections which will represent Palestinian, rather than Israeli or US, interests. This sense of authenticity is what seems so lacking in the path cut out for Abu Mazen. The vision here isn't a manufactured provisional state on 40 percent of the land, with the refugees abandoned and Jerusalem kept by Israel, but a sovereign territory liberated from military occupation by mass action involving Arabs and Jews wherever possible. Because NPI is an authentic Palestinian movement, reform and democracy have become part of its everyday practice. Many hundreds of Palestine's most notable activists and independents have already signed up, and organizational meetings have already been held, with many more planned abroad and in Palestine, despite the terrible difficulties of getting around Israel's restrictions on freedom of movement. It is some solace to think that, while formal negotiations and discussions go on, a host of informal, un-coopted alternatives exist, of which NPI and a growing international solidarity campaign are now the main components. continued.... www.counterpunch.com/said09252003.html add your comments Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony - Part II by Edward Said • Thursday September 25, 2003 at 03:01 PM In early May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter's murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter's body. They had immediately sought out their US senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn't materialize. As expected, the Israel lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family. But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman's action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before. Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable documents of her ordinary humanity that make for very difficult and moving reading, especially when she describes the kindness and concern showed her by all the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of their own, because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of refugees, and what she calls the Israeli government's insidious attempt at a kind of genocide by making it almost impossible for this particular group of people to survive. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli reservist named Danny who has refused service to write her and tell her, "You are doing a good thing. I thank you for it." What shines through all the letters she wrote home, which were subsequently published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings stuck in the most terrible position of suffering and despair but continuing to survive just the same. We have heard so much recently about the road map and the prospects for peace that we have overlooked the most basic fact of all, which is that Palestinians have refused to capitulate or surrender even under the collective punishment meted out to them by the combined might of the US and Israel. It is that extraordinary fact that is the reason for the existence of a road map and all the numerous so-called peace plans before it, not at all some conviction on the part of the US and Israel and the international community for humanitarian reasons that the killing and the violence must stop. If we miss that truth about the power of Palestinian resistance (by which I do not at all mean suicide bombing, which does much more harm than good), despite all its failings and all its mistakes, we miss everything. Palestinians have always been a problem for the Zionist project, and so-called solutions have perennially been proposed that minimize, rather than solve, the problem. The official Israeli policy, no matter whether Ariel Sharon uses the word "occupation" or not or whether or not he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals or ever to admit that their rights were scandalously violated all along by Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to deal with this other concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like the majority of American Jews have made every effort to deny, avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality. This is why there is no peace. Moreover, the road map says nothing about justice or about the historical punishment meted out to the Palestinian people for too many decades to count. What Rachel Corrie's work in Gaza recognized, however, was precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the Palestinian people as a national community, and not merely as a collection of deprived refugees. That is what she was in solidarity with. And we need to remember that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a small number of intrepid souls here and there, but is recognized the world over. In the past six months I have lectured in four continents to many thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian people which is now a byword for emancipation and enlightenment, regardless of all the vilification heaped on them by their enemies. Whenever the facts are made known, there is immediate recognition and an expression of the most profound solidarity with the justice of the Palestinian cause and the valiant struggle by the Palestinian people on its behalf. It is an extraordinary thing that Palestine was a central issue this year both during the Porto Alegre anti-globalization meetings as well as during the Davos and Amman meetings, both poles of the world-wide political spectrum. Simply because our fellow citizens in this country are fed an atrociously biased diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media, where the occupation is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks, where the apartheid wall 25 feet high, five feet thick and 350 kilometers long that Israel is building is never even shown on the networks (or so much as referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the road map), and where the crimes of war, the gratuitous destruction and humiliation, maiming and death imposed on Palestinian civilians are never shown for the daily, completely routine ordeal that they are, one shouldn't be surprised that Americans in the main have a very low opinion of Arabs and Palestinians. After all, please remember that all the main organs of the establishment media, from left liberal all the way over to fringe right, are unanimously anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian. Look at the pusillanimity of the media during the buildup to an illegal and unjust war against Iraq, and look at how little coverage there was of the immense damage against Iraqi society done by the sanctions, and how relatively few accounts there were of the immense world-wide outpouring of opinion against the war. Hardly a single journalist except Helen Thomas took the administration directly to task for the outrageous lies and confected "facts" that were spun out about Iraq as an imminent military threat to the US before the war, just as now the same government propagandists who cynically invented and manipulated "facts" about WMD are let off the hook by media heavies in discussing the awful, the literally inexcusable situation for the people of Iraq that the US has irresponsibly and almost single-handedly created there. However else one blames Saddam Hussein as a vicious tyrant, which he was, he had provided the people of Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water, electricity, health and education of any Arab country. None of this is any longer in place. With the extraordinary fear of seeming anti-Semitic by criticizing Israel for its daily crimes of war against innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians, or seeming anti-American for criticizing the US government for its illegal war and its dreadfully run military occupation, it is no wonder, then, that the vicious media and government campaign against Arab society, culture, history and mentality that has been led by Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes has cowed far too many of us into believing that Arabs really are an underdeveloped, incompetent and doomed people, and that with all the failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world for being retarded, behind the times, unmodernized and deeply reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical thinking must be mobilized to see what is what and to disentangle truth from propaganda. No one would deny that most Arab countries today are ruled by unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of poor, disadvantaged young Arabs are exposed to the ruthless forms of fundamentalist religion. Yet it is simply a lie to say, as The New York Times regularly does, that Arab societies are totally controlled, and that there is no freedom of opinion, no civil institutions, no functioning social movements for and by the people. Press laws notwithstanding, you can go to downtown Amman today and buy a Communist Party newspaper as well as an Islamist one; Egypt and Lebanon are full of papers and journals that suggest much more debate and discussion than these societies are given credit for; the satellite channels are bursting with opinions of a dizzying variety; civil institutions are, on many levels having to do with social services, human rights, syndicates and research institutes, very lively all over the Arab world. A great deal more must be done before we have the appropriate level of democracy, but we are on the way. In Palestine alone there are over 1000 NGO's and it is this vitality and this kind of activity that has kept society going. Under the worst possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated nor has it crumbled completely. Kids still go to school, doctors and nurses still take care of their patients, men and women go to work, organizations have their meetings, and people continue to live, which seems to be an offense to Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either imprisoned or driven away altogether. The military solution hasn't worked at all, and never will work. Why is that so hard for Israelis to see? We must help them to understand this, not by suicide bombs but by rational argument, mass civil disobedience, organized protest, here and everywhere. The point I am trying to make is that we have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in particular in more comparative and critical ways than superficial and dismissive books like Lewis's What Went Wrong and Paul Wolfowitz's ignorant statements about bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic world even begin to suggest. Whatever else is true about the Arabs, there is an active dynamic at work because as real people they live in a real society with all sorts of currents and crosscurrents which can't be easily caricatured as just one seething mass of violent fanaticism. The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one must express solidarity, rather than endless criticism and exasperated, frustrating discouragement, or crippling divisiveness. Remember the solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia, and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights. I want now to speak about dignity, which of course has a special place in every culture known to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and humanists. I shall begin by saying immediately that it is a radically wrong, Orientalist and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans and Americans, Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life, no values that express love, intimacy and understanding which are supposed to be the property exclusively of cultures that had a Renaissance, a Reformation and an Enlightenment. Among many others, it is the vulgar and jejune Thomas Friedman who has been peddling this rubbish, which has alas been picked up by equally ignorant and self-deceiving Arab intellectuals-I don't need to mention any names here-who have seen in the atrocities of 9/11 a sign that the Arab and Islamic worlds are somehow more diseased and more dysfunctional than any other, and that terrorism is a sign of a wider distortion than has occurred in any other culture. We can leave to one side that, between them, Europe and the US account for by far the largest number of violent deaths during the 20th century, the Islamic world hardly a fraction of it. Behind all of that specious, unscientific nonsense about wrong and right civilizations, there is the grotesque shadow of the great false prophet Samuel Huntington, who has led a lot of people to believe that the world can be divided into distinct civilizations battling against each other forever. But Huntington is dead wrong on every point he makes. No culture or civilization exists by itself; none is made up of things like individuality and enlightenment that are exclusive to it; and none exists without the basic human attributes of community, love, value for life and all the others. To suggest otherwise as he does is the purest invidious racism of the same stripe as that of people who argue that Africans have naturally inferior brains, or that Asians are really born for servitude, or that Europeans are a naturally superior race. This is a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed uniquely today against Arabs and Muslims, and we must be very firm as to not even go through the motions of arguing against it. It is the purest drivel. On the other hand, there is the much more credible and serious stipulation that, like every other instance of humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent value and dignity that are expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural style, and those expressions needn't resemble or be a copy of one approved model suitable for everyone to follow. The whole point about human diversity is that it is in the end a form of deep co-existence between very different styles of individuality and experience that can't all be reduced to one superior form: this is the spurious argument foisted on us by pundits who bewail the lack of development and knowledge in the Arab world. All one has to do is to look at the huge variety of literature, cinema, theater, painting, music and popular culture produced by and for Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that needs to be assessed as an indication of whether or not Arabs are developed, and not just how on any given day statistical tables of industrial production either indicate an appropriate level of development or show failure. The more important point I want to make, though, is that there is a very wide discrepancy today between our cultures and societies and the small group of people who now rule these societies. Rarely in history has such power been so concentrated in so tiny a group as the various kings, generals, sultans and presidents who preside today over the Arabs. The worst thing about them as a group, almost without exception, is that they do not represent the best of their people. This is not just a matter of no democracy. It is that they seem to radically underestimate themselves and their people in ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and fearful of change, frightened of opening up their societies to their people, terrified most of all that they might anger big brother, that is, the United States. Instead of seeing their citizens as the potential wealth of the nation, they regard them all as guilty conspirators vying for the ruler's power. This is the real failure, how during the terrible war against the Iraqi people, no Arab leader had the self-dignity and confidence to say something about the pillaging and military occupation of one of the most important Arab countries. Fine, it is an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein's appalling regime is no more, but who appointed the US to be the Arab mentor? Who asked the US to take over the Arab world allegedly on behalf of its citizens and bring it something called "democracy", especially at a time when the school system, the health system and the whole economy in America are degenerating to the worst levels since the 1929 Depression? Why was the collective Arab voice NOT raised against the US's flagrantly illegal intervention, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation upon the entire Arab nation? This is truly a colossal failure in nerve, in dignity, in self-solidarity. With all the Bush administration's talk about guidance from the Almighty, doesn't one Arab leader have the courage just to say that, as a great people, we are guided by our own lights and traditions and religions? But nothing, not a word, as the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeals and the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified that his country may be next. How unfortunate the embrace of George Bush, the man whose war destroyed an Arab country gratuitously, by the combined leadership of the major Arab countries. Was there no one who had the guts to remind George W. that he has brought more suffering to the Arab people than anyone before him? Must he always be greeted with hugs, smiles, kisses and low bows? Where is the diplomatic and political and economic support necessary to sustain an anti-occupation movement on the West Bank and Gaza? Instead all one hears is foreign ministers preaching to the Palestinians to mind their ways, avoid violence and keep at the peace negotiations, even though it has been so obvious that Sharon's interest in peace is just about zero. There has been no concerted Arab response to the separation wall, or to the assassinations, or to collective punishment, only a bunch of tired clichיs repeating the well-worn formulas authorized by the State Department. Perhaps the one thing that strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to grasp the dignity of the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little political support among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat, Israel and the US precisely because he has no constituency, is not an orator or a great organizer, or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasser Arafat, and because I am afraid they see in him a man who will do Israel's bidding. How could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to pronounce words written for him, like a ventriloquist's puppet, by some State Department functionary, in which he commendably speaks about Jewish suffering but then amazingly says next to nothing about his own people's suffering at the hands of Israel? How could he accept so undignified and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget his self-respect as the representative of a people that has been fighting heroically for its rights for over a century just because the US and Israel have told him he must? And when Israel simply says that there will be a "provisional" Palestinian state, without any contrition for the horrendous amount of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer sadistic, systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian, man, woman, child, I must confess to a complete lack of understanding as to why a leader or representative of that people doesn't so much as take note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity? Has he forgotten that he is not just an individual but also the bearer of his people's fate at an especially crucial moment? Is there anyone who was not bitterly disappointed at this total failure to rise to the occasion and stand with dignity-the dignity of his people's experience and cause-and testify to it with pride, and without compromise, without ambiguity, without the half embarrassed, half apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders take when they are begging for a little kindness from some totally unworthy white father? But that has been the behavior of Palestinian rulers since Oslo and indeed since Haj Amin, a combination of misplaced juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication. Why on earth do they always think it absolutely necessary to read scripts written for them by their enemies? The basic dignity of our life as Arabs in Palestine, throughout the Arab world, and here in America, is that we are our own people, with a heritage, a history, a tradition and above all a language that is more than adequate to the task of representing our real aspirations, since those aspirations derive from the experience of dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on each Palestinian since 1948. Not one of our political spokespeople-the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser's time-ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done and where we want to go. Slowly, however, the situation is changing, and the old regime made up of the Abu Mazens and Abu Ammars of this world is passing and will gradually be replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab world. The most promising is made up of the members of the National Political Initiative; they are grassroots activists whose main activity is not pushing papers on a desk, nor juggling bank accounts, nor looking for journalists to pay attention to them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the working classes, the young intellectuals and activists, the teachers, doctors, lawyers, working people who have kept society going while also fending off daily Israeli attacks. Second, these are people committed to the kind of democracy and popular participation undreamt of by the Authority, whose idea of democracy is stability and security for itself. Lastly, they offer social services to the unemployed, health to the uninsured and the poor, proper secular education to a new generation of Palestinians who must be taught the realities of the modern world, not just the extraordinary worth of the old one. For such programs, the NPI stipulates that getting rid of the occupation is the only way forward, and that in order to do that, a representative national unified leadership must be elected freely to replace the cronies, the outdated perspectives and the ineffectiveness that have plagued Palestinian leaders for the past century. Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggle, only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people wounded with her from ISM, Tom Hurndall and Brian Avery, have felt it possible to express their solidarity with us. I conclude with one last irony. Isn't it astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity that Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire and respect us more than we do ourselves? Isn't it time we caught up with our own status and made certain that our representatives here and elsewhere realize, as a first step, that they are fighting for a just and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologize for or anything to be embarrassed about? On the contrary, they should be proud of what their people have done and proud also to represent them. Edward Said is a professor at Columbia University. He is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's, The Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). www.counterpunch.com/said09252003.html add your comments A bridge to the ivory tower: The legacy of Edward Said by DR. TYLER TOKARYK: • Friday October 03, 2003 at 09:43 AM CBC News Viewpoint | September 26, 2003 On September 25, the world lost one of the most important literary critics and philosophers of the late 20th century. After a lengthy battle with leukemia, Professor Edward W. Said died at the age of 67, leaving behind him an entire generation of scholars, intellectuals and social activists profoundly affected by his work. A Christian Palestinian who spent most of his academic and professional career at Columbia University in New York, Said was one of that increasingly rare breed of intellectuals who believed his role was not just to study the world, but also to change it. For students and scholars like myself, increasingly skeptical about the relevance of their work in the "real world," Said's approach to the rarified realm of contemporary literary theory and philosophy is not only refreshing but also inspiring. It is not an exaggeration to say that Edward Said has provided the humanities and social sciences with a renewed sense of relevance in an age when increasingly critical eyes are looking to cut academic programs that cannot seem to provide a "practical purpose" in our utilitarian society. Throughout his career Said was a vocal political activist, philosopher, literary critic, cultural theorist and, during the 1970s and 1980s, a sitting member of the Palestinian parliament in exile. Virtually anyone who has taken undergraduate or graduate courses in the humanities and social sciences since the 1970s has been required to study Said and become familiar with his work – and for good reason. Edward Said is probably best known for the place of primacy he occupies in the rapidly growing field of postcolonial studies and theory. Dedicated to the investigation of the social, political and cultural impact of European imperialism and the ways former European colonies have responded to that experience, postcolonial studies now has an important presence on most university campuses. Many people in a number of different disciplines would argue that it is impossible to really understand the impact of imperialism on the cultures of both the West and East without reading Said's work. In fact, with the 1978 publication of his book Orientalism, Edward Said introduced the dominant methodology and language for studying the effects of imperialism. Twenty-five years after its publication, students today are still reading Orientalism to learn how the accumulated utterances, statements, and representations of the Orient over the years have constituted a discourse whereby the West has pretended "to know" this part of the world. It is through such knowledge, argues Said, that the West has been able to exercise control and power over the Orient. Whether one agrees with Said's approach or not (and many do not), the term "Orientalism" is now central to most discussions of East/West relations carried out in the humanities and social sciences. Said also argues that European imperialism simply could not have existed without a culture to support it. In his 1993 book, Culture and Imperialism, he exhaustively explores the different ways in which notions of "empire" and "imperial dominance" were present in the novels and other cultural artifacts of the day. By studying, among other things, the British realist novel, Said convincingly argues that imperialism was not only supported by culture, but that the military and economic operations of imperialism were enabled and made possible by a worldview that existed in cultural artifacts. Not surprisingly, after reading Culture and Imperialism, students everywhere might be tempted to argue that the work of literary and cultural studies is as important as that of military generals, world leaders and economists. In some ways, this may be true. One of his most interesting contributions to the academy was included in a 1983 collection of essays entitled The World, the Text and the Critic. As the title suggests, Said argues that cultural theorists must consider three things: 1) the world; 2) the text; 3) the critic. In other words, occupants of the ivory tower should not, indeed must not, be content to study a text in isolation from the material world from which it emerged; nor should an academic write or teach about a book without considering the relationship between themselves and the reader. In the 1970s and 1980s, this was a rather unfashionable position to take as these were the years when the academy was enamored of other theories that argued language could only refer to itself. Notwithstanding the ferocity of attacks on his work, Said generated a huge following and succeeded in establishing the foundation of an entirely new discipline that has come to be known as "Postcolonial Studies." Said's greatest legacy, however, might end up being his theory of the public intellectual. According to Said, the real function of an intellectual in any society is to build bridges between the ivory tower and the real world. He summarily rejects the tradition of "specialized intellectual work" and the cult of the academic expert, arguing that specialized language ensures that the academy only speaks to itself. Instead, he argues for a more "secular" form of criticism, a language more engaged with the real world. The importance of Said's model of the public intellectual cannot be underestimated. Having spent many years at universities around Canada, I have met very few academics in the humanities and social sciences who are cut from Said's mould. Said's writing should remind all of us in the academy that self-indulgent reading practices (i.e. reading the text without considering its social, political context) come at a price, that public intellectuals have a responsibility to locate culture in the material world and to expose the complicity between "cultural artifacts" and the different forms of violence they sanction. Said was born in Jerusalem (then part of British-ruled Palestine), grew up in Cairo, studied at Princeton and Harvard, and worked at Columbia University in New York. He was a diasporic Palestinian and was an outspoken critic of how the West has demonized Islam, and yet his own work has been banned in Palestine. Many postcolonial scholars today are critical of his work, while others are threatened by his demand that scholarly studies be "worldly" and account for the material conditions of their existence. In other words, by inflecting his academic work with both himself and the material world, Edward Said has created as many critics as he has followers. I mourn the loss of Edward Said and will always be thankful for the direction he provided me at a particularly crucial juncture in my academic career. It is in part thanks to Said that I ended up studying the language of foreign aid as it is used in India (rather than, say, the self-deconstructing tendencies of a 17th-century sonnet) for my dissertation. Said forced me to consider the material world to which the language of foreign aid referred, and he inspired me to consider people inside and outside the academy while doing my research. Critics and fans alike will probably agree that Said's contributions to the academy will be felt in positive ways for generations to come. The strength of Said's arguments, the power and importance of his words might best be summarized in this passage from The World, the Text and the Critic: In having given up the world entirely for the . . . unthinkable paradoxes of the text, contemporary criticism has retreated from its constituency, the citizens of modern society, who have been left to the hands of 'free' market forces, multinational corporations. www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_tokaryk/20030926.html add your comments Thousands came to bid farewell to Edward Said by Thousands came to bid farewell to Edward Said • Friday October 03, 2003 at 12:01 PM 'What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?' Tamim Al-Barghouti,in New York, attends the funeral service for Edward Said ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Last Monday the funeral of the distinguished Arab-American scholar and passionate proponent of the Palestinian cause, Edward Said, was held at Riverside Church in uptown New York, not far from the Columbia University campus where he had taught until the end of his life. Earlier Said's family had announced that the service would be private, open only to family members and closest friends, but in the event the church was turned into the site of a large-scale pilgrimage, with many of the innumerable mourners present having travelled thousands of miles to pay their final respects to this unique figure. Americans, Arab- Americans and Arabs formed the vast majority of a remarkably multinational constituency listening to the tributes paid to Said. Daniel Barenboim, Chief Conductor for Life of the Staatskapelle Berlin and a close friend of Said's, played Mozart, Bach and Brahms on the piano, the musical instrument Said loved the most. Opening with a traditional invocation, the Reverend James Forbes ended the ceremony with a similarly traditional benediction, while the Reverend James Fitzgerald, describing Said as a great thinker and an honest man who had boldly stood up for his views, was likewise conventional in his speech. The more intimate side of the service was left to the Reverend Fouad Bahnan, a Lebanese national who has been close to the Said family since 1982. The sermon he delivered in Arabic moved even those with no knowledge of the language, his voice communicating the depth of his grief. Bahnan's sermon, which spoke for many Arabs, emphasised Said's Palestinian identity and expressed the wish that, one day, when Palestine emerges from the affliction of occupation, Said would be buried in Jerusalem, his rightful resting place. Bahnan's anger and the serenity of Barenboim's piano-playing embodied the duality of Said's mission, the one emphasising the Palestinian cause, the other its advocate's humane and polyphonic leanings. To many Israelis, Barenboim, an Israeli national, had declared himself a traitor when he visited Ramallah to play the piano for Palestinians under siege. Together with Said he founded the East- Western Divan, a forum for young Israeli and Arab musicians to learn music together, something greeted with suspicion on the part of Arabs opposed to normalising relations with Israel. To them, any dealing with Israel is to be denounced, since being Israeli in and of itself implies taking the place of a Palestinian by force of arms. Arab and Israeli denunciation notwithstanding, Barenboim's presence side by side with Bahnan was testimony to Said's salutary ability to combine divergent strands in himself, and a fitting homage to his passion for contrapuntal voices. Said's son, Wadie, gave a poignant speech, the physical resemblance between father and son -- Wadie's height and sturdy build -- making it all the more touching. Wadie's steady voice and his captivating smile also recalled his father's ability to smile in the face of all manner of hardships, including the illness he stoically endured for 12 years. The piano played again, followed by Najla Said, the scholar's daughter and an actress by profession, reading Waiting for the Barbarians by the Greek Alexandrine poet Konstantinos Kavafis (1836-1933), one of her father's favourite poems, she said. The poem recounts the confusion that besets the Romans when the long- awaited arrival of the Barbarians is delayed, and rumours circulate that they will never come. The assembled people, waiting for the Barbarians and postponing any decision until they come, ask in bewilderment, "Now what is going to happen to us without the Barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." Read in the context of Edward Said's funeral service, the poem lent itself to various interpretations. Who thinks of whom as "Barbarians"? Whatever the answer might be, to many Arab newcomers in the United States, the loss of Edward Said is ominous at a time when neo-colonialism and collective enslavement is in full swing. With American troops occupying Iraq and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pressing on with his criminal policies, aimed at exterminating the Palestinians, to be deprived of Said's sobering voice is a cruel calamity indeed. At the end of the ceremony, as the coffin was being escorted out, people lined up to offer their condolences to Said's family in a reception area adjoining the chapel. All were united in the sense of loss that the absence of Edward Said entailed. However, Arab students like myself, who came to the US in search of that small oasis of academic freedom that Edward Said so brilliantly guarded, felt like orphans confronting an uncertain future. The same could be said of Arab- Americans in general: with Edward Said's death, the Arab presence in the United States has lost even the small margin of articulate self-assertion that he provided. This has happened at a time when that margin of self-assertion is more needed than ever. As Edward Said is escorted to his final resting place, the margin narrows by the minute. weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/658/fr2.htm add your comments

he was a beautiful individual. by * 4:36am Sat Oct 4 '03 print comment Mr. Said was a celebrated scholar who stayed true to his roots. Always, did he remain loyal to the group of people who is the current scapegoat for all of the world's ills. Without so much as evidence as to who planned the attack on 9/11, the Arabs were framed. No longer does it matter that the first alleged planner was a cave dweller from Afghanistan, all arabs are now fair game. add your comments