-Caveat Lector-
>From Steven E. Plaut, PhD
I have long argued that the real dangers to Jewish existence today come
from the Left and not the Right. True, the lunatic Right produces some
vandals who trash synagogues and even every few years someone who shoots up
a shul or community center. But the greater danger today is from the Left.
The "Christian Right" is by and large pro-Israel, whereas liberals and
leftists want nothing better than to see the Zionist entity erased.
Now by now you all know about the remarkable work done by Justus Weiner
in revealing the skeletons in the closet of Edward Said, the long-time
professor of terror. Said has long been the darling of the Left, arguing
that no one who is not an Arab has the right to study, analyze or even
discuss Arab societies, and that any attempt to do so amounts to
colonialism. Which is why he, Said, a mediocre professor of literature at
Columbia U., has automatic credentials making him far more qualified an
authority on Arabs than the scholars in the Middle East departments of
Columbia, Princeton, and elsewhere.
Said is also a long-time anti-Semite who wants all the Jews tossed in
the sea, and thinks Arafat is a sell-out, playing Vichy to Israel's Nazi
Germany. He has never heard of an anti-Jewish atrocity of which he does
not approve.
The election of Said to head the PC bastion, the Modern Language
Association, makes perfect sense, in as much as the MLA is a Loony Farm of
deconstructionism, you know - the doctrine whereby there are no facts,
truths, or science, just "narratives" and words that mean nothing, and the
only thing about which we can truly be sure is that both the US and Israel
need to be destroyed. A view that Said's "Orientalism" can complement
nicely.
Anyway, the full exposure of Said's record of falsehood is in the new
Commentary magazine, although I attach a condensed version that appeared in
the Wall St Journal below, as well as Jeff Jacoby's superb commentary on
all this.
But before turning to that, there is something else you should know
about and probably do not. This is that the liberals/lefties are already
sending out their button men to DEFEND Said, to assault Weiner, to assault
his Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (which is in fact a liberal,
Labor-leaning, public policy think tank mainly interested in federalism),
and of course to assault Zionism, Jews and Israel. SO what if Said lied
nonstop for decades? What do the FACTS matter when Said's intentions were
so pure and progressive? And besides, Said is quibbling with Weiner over
one or two minor details of the latter's expose, like who the house in
Jerusalem Said vacationed in really belonged to, an uncle or a cousin. If
Weiner got such a detail or two wrong, THOSE facts would of course be of
cosmic importance, say the lefties.
Well, so far the most incredible defense of Said has come from Alexander
Cockburn, a paleoleftist and true believer, who writes for Nation and lots
of other pink rags. Cockburn is a longtime hater of Israel and makes
little secret of his desire to see Israel's name on the obituary pages.
A few days ago, Cockburn wrote a columne that appearded, in among other
places, the New York Press of Sept 1-7, 1999, a New York "alternative"
weekly (you know - one of those Tikkun's for gentiles, with lots of print
about drugs and rock & roll).
Cockburn's piece is called "Edward Said as Jew", and the idea is that
poor fibbin' Said is being persecuted so cruelly and unjustly that he is
the quintessential Jewish victim of the Middle Ages. Everything Weiner and
crowd say about Said is just an application of traditional anti-Semitic
stereotypes to this deconstructionist giant. And to prove it, old Burncock
notes that the think tank in which Weiner worked on the project got some
funds from Junk Bond King Michael Milken (I do not know if this is true,
but if it is - so does the Hebrew University, crawling with post-Zionist
leftists, so what?). So it is all a plot by Milken and Big Capital to
discredit the greatest Palestinian intellectual of all times, indeed the
greatest Palestinian Arab since Jesus Christ himself.
SO what if the details of his life were falsified by the Great Said?,
says Burncock. Why should this make him any less a legitimate spokesman
for Palestinian grievances and suffereings. But what REALLY angers
Commentary - says Cockburn - is that Said reigns as head of the MLA circus,
and Commentary just despises educated people from the Third WOrld who speak
a lot of languages and who even play piano (really, Cockburn says this -
check for yerself at www.nypress.com).
So telling lies for decades is now the most honorable and progressive
of activities, the most decent thing a good progressive can persue.
August 26, 1999
Commentary
The False Prophet of Palestine
By Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar in residence at the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs. This article is adapted from the
September issue of Commentary magazine.
Few spokesmen for the Palestinian cause in our day are as
articulate, or as well-known, as Edward W. Said. The holder of an
endowed chair in literature at Columbia University, president of
the Modern Language Association, a prolific author of books and
articles both scholarly and popular, a frequent lecturer and
commentator on radio and television, a sometime diplomatic
intermediary and congressional witness, Mr. Said has earned a
reputation not only for polemical brilliance but for a fierce
pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel zealotry. His most famous book
"Orientalism," with its bold thesis that the Western study of Islam
is itself a form of "colonialism," has had a profound and
radicalizing influence on literary studies.
A great deal of Mr. Said's moral authority derives from his
personal credentials. As a living embodiment of the Palestinian
cause, he has made much of his own birth, childhood, and
schooling in Palestine, telling a story of idyllic beginnings and
violent dispossession.
Here is Mr. Said's own oft-recited outline of his early life (in
Harper's, 1992): "I was born, in November 1935, in Talbiya, then
a mostly new and prosperous Arab quarter of Jerusalem. By the
end of 1947, just months before Talbiya fell to Jewish forces, I'd
left with my family for Cairo."
And again (in the London Review of Books, 1998): "I was born in
Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there and, after
1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt."
This same rendering of his early years recurs many times in
writings both by and about Mr. Said. It undergirds his
self-definition as an archetypal exile--one who, like his people,
was separated from his homeland in a sudden act of historic
violence.
But except for the detail of his birth, it is a tissue of falsehoods.
Here are the bare bones of the truth: Mr.
Said's father, Wadie, grew up in Jerusalem
but evidently emigrated in 1911 to the U.S.
During World War I, Wadie reportedly served
with American forces in Europe before
returning to the Middle East with a U.S.
passport to start what would become a
successful business career. For at least nine
years prior to his son's birth in 1935, Wadie
Said was residing permanently in Cairo,
where he and his family remained until 1962.
And Jerusalem? In that city lived Wadie
Said's sister and her family. To these
relatives, as to other destinations throughout
the Middle East, the affluent Cairo-based Saids made periodic
visits. In November 1935, during one of those visits, Edward
Said was born. On his birth certificate, prepared by the Ministry of
Health for the British Mandate, his parents specified their
permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they maintained
no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a local
address.
As for the family residence in Talbieh (Talbiya), Mr. Said had this
to say in an interview with the Jerusalem Times in March: "I feel
even more depressed when I remember my beautiful old house
surrounded by pine and orange trees in Al-Talbiyeh in east [he
means west] Jerusalem. . . . I went there a few days ago and took
several photographs."
During a visit in 1992, according to Mr. Said, he was able to
locate this house with the aid of a hand-drawn map and "a copy
of the title deed." But if Mr. Said really had in hand a copy of the
title deed, then he could not have helped noticing the absence on
it of his parents' names, his siblings' names and his own name.
The house in question belonged first to Mr. Said's grandfather
and then to his aunt and her five children. Until 1942, it was wholly
rented out to others, and thereafter one apartment in it was
occupied by Mr. Said's aunt and her children (and, no doubt,
occasional family visitors).
Nor is this the only way in which Mr. Said's account of an
upbringing in "his" beautiful old house has proved baseless. He
has spoken with characteristic vehemence about a famous later
tenant. Pressing his role as victim, he has stated: "The house
from which my family departed in 1948--was displaced--was also
the house in which the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber
lived for a while, and Buber of course was a great apostle of
coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but he didn't mind living in
an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced."
The truth is the other way around. It was Mr. Said's aunt who
evicted Buber, and not in 1948 but in 1942--the very period when
the young Edward Said was supposedly residing in the house.
That brings us to another element in Mr. Said's reconstruction of
his Jerusalem childhood: his schooling. According to his standard
version, he attended St. George's Anglican preparatory school in
eastern Jerusalem. In a recent BBC documentary, Mr. Said is
seen touring this school and turning the pages of an old,
leather-bound student registry from his youth, where he points to
the entry for one of his Jewish "friends."
Interestingly, we are not shown or told about any listing for Mr.
Said himself in the St. George's student registry. And for good
reason: Neither in the particular registry shown on camera nor in
the school's other two registry books is there any record of his
having attended this institution as he has claimed (although he
might have been a temporary student on one or more of his brief
visits with his Jerusalem cousins). Nor does the Jewish student
he claims to recall remember Mr. Said.
What about the family's departure as "refugees" from Jerusalem
to Cairo? Mr. Said has repeatedly placed this event in
mid-December 1947, citing the "panic" caused in Talbieh by the
threat of Jewish forces. Yet, in the 51/2-month period leading up
to the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948, voluminous
documents record only two incidents of intercommunal violence
marring Talbieh's calm, and neither of these resulted in the
permanent departure of local Arabs. The inevitable conclusion is
that just as Edward Said and his immediate family were not
long-term or permanent residents in Talbieh in the 1930s and
'40s, so they were not resident there during the final months of the
British Mandate. They cannot be considered "refugees" or
"exiles" from Palestine in any meaningful sense of those two very
weighty and politically charged terms.
Nor, of course, did they arrive in Cairo for the first time in late
1947. As scores of public records attest, Cairo is where the
young Mr. Said grew up. There he resided with his family in
luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and
played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the son of
one of its few Arab members until he was sent in 1951 to
complete his schooling in America.
Mr. Said himself has now confirmed all this in his forthcoming
memoir, "Out of Place." In this book, the man who for decades
has presented himself to the world as a professional refugee,
who has powerfully described the traumatic effect on himself and
his family of their sudden, panicked exile from the beloved city of
his birth and childhood, sharply reverses course. Jerusalem, it
turns out, was not the soul and center of Mr. Said's youth; it was
an occasional vacation spot. But nowhere in his new book does
Mr. Said acknowledge that he is now telling a tale egregiously
different from the version he has woven over three decades.
As Mr. Said would have it, his alleged 50-year exile from
Palestine has been the "central metaphor" not only of his
personal biography but of his very identity, driving his campaign
for redress from Israel; he has repeatedly expressed interest in
seeking reparations for "his" property in Jerusalem. In fact, he
has no claim against Israel, and tellingly has never filed one. He
does have one against Egypt, where his father's stores were first
burned down by a revolutionary mob in 1952 and then
nationalized by President Gamal Nasser. About these losses,
however, Mr. Said has been silent.
Edward Said has written that the intellectual's responsibility is "to
speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible."
In his own case, the plain, direct and honest truth is radically at
odds with the parable he has been at pains to construct over the
decades. That parable, designed to augment the passions that
have animated the revanchist program of so many Palestinian
nationalists, is a lie.
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: The fictions of Edward Said, 8/30/99
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 15:29:41 -0400
>X-MIMETrack: Serialize by Router on BGM/GLOBE(Release 5.0.1|July 16, 1999)
at 08/29/99
> 03:30:25 PM
>
>
>PROFESSOR OF LIES
>By Jeff Jacoby
>The Boston Globe
>
>August 30, 1999
>
>
> If he were a columnist for the Boston Globe, he would be fired.
>
> But Edward Said is not a journalist, he is an academic, and the
>standards
>of truth and accuracy in academia are lower than those in journalism. So it
>is a safe bet that Said has little to fear from the fact that he has just
>been exposed as a liar. He will not be fired from Columbia University,
>where
>he is a tenured professor, nor will he be ousted from the renowned Modern
>Language Association, whose presidency he assumed in January.
>
> For 20 years, Said has been the Palestinians' most illustrious
>spokesman.
>Articulate, zealous, brilliant, he has savaged Israel and championed the
>PLO
>in every imaginable medium: books, newspapers, speeches, interviews, radio
>broadcasts, even a BBC documentary. He was a close advisor to Yasser Arafat
>and the author of Arafat's infamous 1974 United Nations speech. For many
>years Said was a member of the Palestine National Council, the parent body
>of
>the PLO. He resigned in 1991 and today calls Arafat a traitor for signing
>peace agreements with Israel.
>
> What has always made Said's pleas on the Palestinians' behalf so
>poignant
>is that he spoke from personal experience. He told of growing up in
>Palestine before the Israeli War of Independence, and of how his family was
>uprooted by Zionist violence and forced into exile. "I was born in
>Jerusalem," he wrote last year, "and spent most of my formative years there
>and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt." In an
>interview with the Christian Science Monitor he recalled how his family had
>fled "in panic" in December 1947, when "a Jewish-forces sound truck warned
>Arabs to leave the neighborhood" in which they lived.
>
> Said's life story has infused his advocacy with moral authority. As
>Salman Rushdie puts it, by writing about "the anguish of living with
>displacement, with exile," Said "enables us to feel the pain of his
>people."
>
> Said has described with sad nostalgia his childhood home at 10 Brenner
>Street. "I feel even more depressed," he told an English-language
>Palestinian
>newspaper in March, "when I remember my beautiful old house surrounded by
>pine and orange trees in Al Talbiyeh in east Jerusalem."
>
> Some time after his family was pushed out by the Jews, Said has noted,
>the famed Jewish philosopher Martin Buber moved in. "Buber of course was a
>great apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews," Said told a West Bank
>audience last year, "but he didn't mind living in an Arab house whose
>inhabitants had been displaced." The home of his youth thus serves as a
>parable for the Palestinian condition itself.
>
> Only one thing is wrong with Said's deeply affecting autobiography. He
>made most of it up.
>
> The story of Said's childhood, and with it his credibility, has been
>exploded by Justus Reid Weiner, an Israeli scholar who spent three years
>checking out Said's tales. "Virtually everything I learned," Weiner writes
>in
>the September issue of Commentary, "contradicts the story of Said's early
>life as Said has told it."
>
> He grew up, it turns out, not in Jerusalem, but in Cairo's richest
>quarter. The "beautiful old house" in Jerusalem was his aunt's, not his
>father's. Said's parents sometimes visited this aunt; during one such visit
>in 1935, Edward was born. On his birth certificate, the family's place of
>residence is given as Cairo.
>
> The expulsion from Talbieh in December 1947 never happened. A sound
>truck
>urging Arabs to evacuate *did* go through the neighborhood in February
>1948,
>Weiner learned. But only a few Arab residents left, and they soon returned.
>Meanwhile, the Jewish men in the sound truck were arrested by the British.
>
> Martin Buber and his family, who came to Palestine as refugees from
>Germany in the 1930s, did indeed live at 10 Brenner Street -- as tenants of
>Said's aunt, who rented them a basement apartment in 1938. Said's acid
>description of Buber living in the home of a displaced Arab is an exact
>inversion of the truth. For in 1942, six years *before* the war, Said's
>aunt
>broke the lease and expelled her Jewish tenants.
>
> Weiner's devastating article -- " `My Beautiful Old House' and Other
>Fabrications by Edward Said" -- drives a stake through Said's integrity. If
>the man lies about his own past, what won't he lie about?
>
> In fact, Said lies routinely, especially when Israelis or Arabs are on
>the agenda. It would take a far longer column to catalog all his
>falsehoods,
>but *two are enough to give a taste of his inventiveness:
>
> (*) During the intifada, when scores of innocent Palestinians were being
>killed by fellow Arabs as "collaborators," Said defended the murderers.
>"The
>UN Charter and every other known document or protocol," he wrote, "entitles
>a
>people under foreign occupation ... to deal severely with collaborators."
>The UN Charter says nothing of the kind.
>
> (*) Said has accused Israel's founders of literally taking lessons from
>Hitler. During World War II, he has written, the Zionists "were in touch
>with
>the Nazis in the hope of emulating their Reich in Palestine." A more evil
>libel is hard to imagine.
>
> Said's foremost scholarly work, "Orientalism," is littered with factual
>errors, as the historian Keith Windschuttle recently showed. "In Search of
>Palestine," Said's 1998 BBC documentary, brims with false accusations and
>gross distortions. But the most shameful lie of all is Said's formulation
>of
>the creed he lives by: "to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as
>honestly as possible."
>
> Nothing could be more untrue.
>
>
>
> (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His e-mail address is
>[EMAIL PROTECTED])
>
>
>
> =====================
>
>
>
>
>
>
*********************************************************************
Steven E. Plaut, PhD
Graduate School of Business
University of Haifa
Haifa 31905 Israel
FAX 972-4-824-9194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*********************************************************************
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