welsh
Junkmaster
Folks- here's something worth noting-
From the Economist-
Edward Said, eloquent spokesman for Palestine, died on September 25th, aged 67
The Independent
“YOU'RE treated like a diplomat of terrorism, with a place at the table,” remarked Edward Said when Salman Rushdie asked him (in a conversation reproduced in “The Politics of Dispossession”, published in 1994) what it was like for him, the distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, to be Palestine's voice in the United States. Mr Said repudiated terrorism, in all its forms, but was a passionate, eloquent and persistent advocate for justice for the dispossessed Palestinians, struggling to make his case to people whose sympathies are largely given over to the nation, Israel, that carried out the dispossessing. He understood that sympathy, and the sea of old guilt that lies beneath it. But, as he wrote wryly, and with unusual understatement given the snide character-assassination he constantly suffered, “To be the victim of a victim does present quite unusual difficulties.”
Literature and politics came together in “Orientalism”, Mr Said's best known and most influential book, published in 1978. Entwining political and cultural imperialism, the work argues that western writers and academics have misrepresented, and still misrepresent, the Islamic world in a manner that has eased the way for the West to dominate the East. All this, naturally, was deeply unpopular with the formidable scholars he denigrated. But “Orientalism”, translated into dozens of languages, became a foundation text for a great boom in post-colonial studies.
Not always with beneficial results. Students from the Middle East, reading his words, have seized the chance of finding yet another excuse to pile their misfortunes on to the broad shoulders of the imperialist West. But Mr Said himself was a punishing critic of the sordid, totalitarian Arab regimes that litter the region. “It is the role of the Arab intellectual”, he wrote, “to articulate and defend the principles of liberation and democracy at all costs.”
Among sordid regimes, he came to class Yasser Arafat's Palestinian government. In the 1980s, Mr Said, a member of the Palestine National Council at the time, was influential in urging Mr Arafat towards the two-state solution in which Palestine and Israel could coexist. But he grew disillusioned with a leader who tolerated corruption and ineptitude, marginalised some of the finest Palestinian minds, and who, in 1993, signed up to an agreement that Mr Said saw as certain disaster for the Palestinians, in that it offered the Israelis security while they colonised more land.
As the Oslo process dribbled wretchedly on, he kept up a barrage of pointed, hard-to-answer abuse. Sometimes it was fair to ask what alternative he was offering. But, in the end, his prophecies of doom came to pass. By then, perhaps despairing of a decent splitting of the land, Mr Said had taken to musing, in the last years of the leukaemia that took 12 years to kill him, on a single democratic state in which Jews and Arabs could live peaceably together.
He also turned to music, his great love (he was a gifted pianist). And, in contrast to the acrimonious conjunction of literature and politics, music and politics came happily together when he and his close friend, Daniel Barenboim, a renowned Israeli conductor with no time for political grandstanding, established a youth orchestra of Arabs and Israelis, and Mr Barenboim held master classes in the occupied West Bank.
A legion of friends notwithstanding, Mr Said always saw himself as an outsider, drawn to minorities and losers. He had, wrote Hanan Ashrawi, one of those fine Palestinians who has been pushed to one side by the Arafat regime, “a gentle identification with the oppressed, and an intimidating rage against the oppressor.”
Born in West Jerusalem, in a district that since 1948 has been part of Israel, he was brought up in Cairo and in the United States. He inherited an American passport from his father's service with the American army in the first world war, and was christened Edward in 1935 after the British prince of Wales who later, as Edward VIII, abdicated for love of an American. As a Christian-Palestinian he felt alienated in colonial Egypt; as an Arab he was an outsider in America. Gradually, though not fully until after the 1967 war in which Israel occupied what remained of Palestine, he began to feel the “desolation of being without a country or place to return to.”
A scrapper, too
And this remained with him, as he began his long fight for justice for his people, a people who, as he wrote, have been “excluded, denied the right to have a history of their own”. He was a humanist, which he defined as using “one's mind historically and rationally for the purpose of reflective understanding”. He was also, from time to time, a scrapper, letting loose blasts of over-the-top polemic.
In the end, nothing worked. The current American administration sometimes says reasonable things about Palestine, though usually in made-in-Israel terms, but it has never followed them through. A couple of months ago, Edward Said wrote sadly in the Los Angeles Times: “We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, American power. What America refuses to see clearly, it can hardly hope to remedy.”
From the Economist-
Edward Said, eloquent spokesman for Palestine, died on September 25th, aged 67
The Independent
“YOU'RE treated like a diplomat of terrorism, with a place at the table,” remarked Edward Said when Salman Rushdie asked him (in a conversation reproduced in “The Politics of Dispossession”, published in 1994) what it was like for him, the distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, to be Palestine's voice in the United States. Mr Said repudiated terrorism, in all its forms, but was a passionate, eloquent and persistent advocate for justice for the dispossessed Palestinians, struggling to make his case to people whose sympathies are largely given over to the nation, Israel, that carried out the dispossessing. He understood that sympathy, and the sea of old guilt that lies beneath it. But, as he wrote wryly, and with unusual understatement given the snide character-assassination he constantly suffered, “To be the victim of a victim does present quite unusual difficulties.”
Literature and politics came together in “Orientalism”, Mr Said's best known and most influential book, published in 1978. Entwining political and cultural imperialism, the work argues that western writers and academics have misrepresented, and still misrepresent, the Islamic world in a manner that has eased the way for the West to dominate the East. All this, naturally, was deeply unpopular with the formidable scholars he denigrated. But “Orientalism”, translated into dozens of languages, became a foundation text for a great boom in post-colonial studies.
Not always with beneficial results. Students from the Middle East, reading his words, have seized the chance of finding yet another excuse to pile their misfortunes on to the broad shoulders of the imperialist West. But Mr Said himself was a punishing critic of the sordid, totalitarian Arab regimes that litter the region. “It is the role of the Arab intellectual”, he wrote, “to articulate and defend the principles of liberation and democracy at all costs.”
Among sordid regimes, he came to class Yasser Arafat's Palestinian government. In the 1980s, Mr Said, a member of the Palestine National Council at the time, was influential in urging Mr Arafat towards the two-state solution in which Palestine and Israel could coexist. But he grew disillusioned with a leader who tolerated corruption and ineptitude, marginalised some of the finest Palestinian minds, and who, in 1993, signed up to an agreement that Mr Said saw as certain disaster for the Palestinians, in that it offered the Israelis security while they colonised more land.
As the Oslo process dribbled wretchedly on, he kept up a barrage of pointed, hard-to-answer abuse. Sometimes it was fair to ask what alternative he was offering. But, in the end, his prophecies of doom came to pass. By then, perhaps despairing of a decent splitting of the land, Mr Said had taken to musing, in the last years of the leukaemia that took 12 years to kill him, on a single democratic state in which Jews and Arabs could live peaceably together.
He also turned to music, his great love (he was a gifted pianist). And, in contrast to the acrimonious conjunction of literature and politics, music and politics came happily together when he and his close friend, Daniel Barenboim, a renowned Israeli conductor with no time for political grandstanding, established a youth orchestra of Arabs and Israelis, and Mr Barenboim held master classes in the occupied West Bank.
A legion of friends notwithstanding, Mr Said always saw himself as an outsider, drawn to minorities and losers. He had, wrote Hanan Ashrawi, one of those fine Palestinians who has been pushed to one side by the Arafat regime, “a gentle identification with the oppressed, and an intimidating rage against the oppressor.”
Born in West Jerusalem, in a district that since 1948 has been part of Israel, he was brought up in Cairo and in the United States. He inherited an American passport from his father's service with the American army in the first world war, and was christened Edward in 1935 after the British prince of Wales who later, as Edward VIII, abdicated for love of an American. As a Christian-Palestinian he felt alienated in colonial Egypt; as an Arab he was an outsider in America. Gradually, though not fully until after the 1967 war in which Israel occupied what remained of Palestine, he began to feel the “desolation of being without a country or place to return to.”
A scrapper, too
And this remained with him, as he began his long fight for justice for his people, a people who, as he wrote, have been “excluded, denied the right to have a history of their own”. He was a humanist, which he defined as using “one's mind historically and rationally for the purpose of reflective understanding”. He was also, from time to time, a scrapper, letting loose blasts of over-the-top polemic.
In the end, nothing worked. The current American administration sometimes says reasonable things about Palestine, though usually in made-in-Israel terms, but it has never followed them through. A couple of months ago, Edward Said wrote sadly in the Los Angeles Times: “We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, American power. What America refuses to see clearly, it can hardly hope to remedy.”
