Edward Said was what I would call a "pseudo-scholar." His specialty was literature not Middle East poltiics, yet the media would dredge him up as if he was an expert. I never take pleasure in anyone dyng of cancer, however if a potted plant falling from a high rise would have landed on his head I would be hard pressed to repress a smirk.

Both of you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Edward Said, help-rejecting complainer.

July 26, 2003

WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE

PROFESSOR EDWARD SAID COMPLAINS THAT HIS DISDAIN FOR PUBLISHING IN HIS ADOPTED HOMELAND LEAVES IT ILL-INFORMED.

It was good of the Irish Times Jul 25, 03 to reprint from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Columbia University professor Edward Said's "The blind arrogance of the imperial gaze".

Said contends that "We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is US power."

But Said is not concerned with military power.

Empires are not maintained by military power, Said tells us:

"The key element was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it in one's gaze, constructing its history from one's own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant administrators think is best for them."

Jean Paul Sartre's objectifying "look of the other" writ large.
Said explains:

"At least since the second World War, American strategic interests in the Middle East have been, first, to ensure supplies of oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost the strength and domination of Israel over its neighbours."

This, no doubt, is why the US pulled the plug on the British and French economies that were slowly emerging from the wreckage of World War II in 1956 to force them and the Israelis to abandon their attack on Egypt in the Suez crisis - the lowest point in the Special Relationship until John Major stopped taking Bill Clinton's calls because of his interference in Northern Ireland. (See the Irish Times's own Conor O'Clery's "The Greening of the White House".)
And this must be why the US spends billions each year bribing Egypt, Jordan and Israel to remain at peace when the Israelis, the "big lie" (see below) to the contrary, had no trouble in dealing with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq without US aid in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973.

Professor Said, who does not seem to lack access to the marketplace of ideas in the US, contends that Americans can fool themselves into thinking that their "mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate" because "the US propaganda and policy apparatus ...impos[es] its imperial perspective on Americans, whose sources of information about Arabs and Islam are woefully inadequate." This is an exceedingly strange allegation for him to make in view of his disdain for writing for American publications proclaimed in his Columbia University bio.

Said continues:

www.blog-irish.com/saiddone.htm

Edward Said has a lot to answer for.

Now he has the chance to do so.

What I most adored about Said was that, a gentleman, he was unable to shout Death to the Zionists, so instead, like Chomsky, he muttered One state for all---with an arab majority and a vote that would turn the legitimate state *Peele Commission; League of Nations and finally 13-33 The State of Israel) into what Arafat et al want by murders.

"Men love the troubles they know."

No truer words.

I'll never forget the images of palestinians dancing in the streets on 9/11. I didn't see Said condem that.

It is very easy to criticize a genius when you do not agree with his politics.

Its even easier to criticize a psuedo intellectual when you see what his politics have wrought, and how they have failed.

"It is very easy to criticize a genius when you do not agree with his politics."
I don't know Said from Sid Vicious, ole Sid was probably a genius too. Big deal! From What? I've read it doesn't seem that Mr. Said was able to separate the forest from the trees and realize that in the real world cutting down a tree with your mind doesn't work and writing on paper from trees cut down by others doesn't count either.

I wish people like Martha who toss words like "genius" around so freely would try and give us at least a thumbnail sketch of what it was, exactly, that made Said a genius ... Dr. Manhattan provides a cogent, substantive, link-filled critique of Said's political positions. You can agree with it or disagree with it, but just getting huffy because your "genius" is getting criticized is really a pretty weak response. Was Said a brilliant literary scholar who was out of his depth in politics? Was he, in fact, right on in his political views? C'mon Martha, give me something, just a little something, to prove to me that maybe you actually read something by the man, and/or thought about it ... is that really too much to ask?

You have to wonder how Said -- a secularized Western intellectual from a Christian family -- would have fared among the Islamicists in any imaginable Palestinian state. Even his exaggerated and one-sided theory of "orientalism" is really about Western intellectual history, not about the Arab world. Whether he knew it or not, Said needed an Arab Palestine to remain an unrealized dream, lest he be forced to admit that this is what he really was in exile from.

Edward Said: a man who trumpeted the virtues of truth, while lying about himself; a scholar who publicly promoted free inquiry, while equally publicly condemning those who engaged in it when it disagreed with him; a man who only discovered that Yassir Arafat was corrupt when it suited his own political ends to do so.

He graced this planet most by leaving it.

I guess that Said's main problem with "Orientalism" is that it actually worked.

The Western view was close enough to reality to allow Westen dominance of the Middle East. You cannot dominate people you do not understand even with military means. Yet Western dominance of the Middle East not only continues but expands.

It is in fact the Middle East which does not understand the West. The Middle East cannot come to grips with the fact that Western doubt masters Middle Eastern faith. The faith based cultures of Japan and Germany learned this truth the hard way. It appears that the East is desirous of repeating the experiment.

I predict that after much pain and suffering doubt will reign supreme.

The key to Said was his attempt to use Western doubt as a means of attacking the West. It worked. For a while.

What Said left out was that doubt should lead to truth. Or at least closer to the truth. If Said had been a real scholar doubt and truth should have been as intertwined as the snakes in a caduseus. With Occam's Razor to split the difference.

Said never got beyond doubt.

It's difficult not to be heartened by Edward Said's demise. He represented so many malignant elements in one human form: origins in elite wealth and privilege, romanticized autobiography of victimization, vulgar misapplication of empty continental crypto-Marxist psycho-literary theory, nihilistic intellectual dishonesty, royal lifestyle of the vanguard shakedown cultural left, refusal to personally engage the politics or the people in whose name he spoke, refusal to acknowledge or forego the freedom and luxury of the culture he condemned, cowardice of a violent gesture from a safe distance, and on and on. It might take Dante (or Dostoevsky) to fully comprehend the mind of this wicked voice for the wretched who lived an aristocrat's life among us.

Hi,
I have submitted several postings on the sad and premature demise of Edward Said in my blog.
Would u ming visiting it and leaving your comments?
Thnx