are we sure this isnt just another one of his lies....???

Edward Said, My Rock-Throwing Teacher
by Sha'i ben-Tekoa
http://www.deprogramprogram.com/wbswebpage.cfm?pagetextid=nofrontedwardsaid
Letter printed in COMMENTARY MAGAZINE, September 2000
Exactly a year ago, Justus Reid Weiner revealed in Commentary that Edward Said, professor of English at Columbia University-cum-PLO propagandist, had never had the childhood in Jerusalem he long claimed for himself ("'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," September 1999.)

I, for one, was not surprised: I had been a student of Said's at Columbia College before the Six-Day War of 1967--before, that is, he reconstituted himself as an Ancient Palestinian, a nationality allegedly native to the Holy Land since at least the Third Day of Creation. At that time, if he advertised himself as anything, it was as a Lebanese-Egyptian, which jibes with Weiner's revelations. Indeed, Said himself would write in his 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, that "for a long time the general Arab umbrella covered my specific history, adequately it seemed," which was his oblique, Arabesque way of saying that he had not been in the habit of calling himself a Palestinian at all.

But this past July, one morning as I sipped my coffee, a picture of my old professor jumped out at me from my local Israeli newspaper. There he was, in baseball cap and windbreaker, standing at the Lebanese border with Israel, heroically throwing rocks over the fence at Jews in uniform who he knew would not respond.

The picture, taken by a photographer for Agence France Presse, would soon be flashed around the world and occasion a fair degree of comment, including from yours truly on Israeli radio and the World Wide Web, where I do commentary in English for IsraelNationalNews. Said himself issued a statement that he did not see any soldiers in the vicinity but had been "infected" by the "spirit of the place" to make a "symbolic gesture"; nor did he have any idea "that the media people were there or that (he) was the object of attention." According to eyewitness and other accounts, every verifiable part of this statement is false. Again, hardly a surprise--but, thanks to this photograph, a little mystery of many years' standing concerning this scholar-poseur began to resolve itself.

As I say, I studied with Said back in 1966 as one of many New York Jewish intellectuals -in-training at Columbia who secretly aspired to become the next Philip Roth or Norman Mailer. Like others, I had registered for a required survey course in 18th-century English literature with this as yet, if not infamous, then unfamous and untenured thirty-one-year-old lecturer.

The fact that Asst. Prof. Said was an Arab had nothing to do with anything. One evening, a bunch of us invited him to dinner at an off-campus apartment, and a pleasant time was had by all. He was a professor of literature, not Middle Eastern politics, and books, not the plight of any Ancient Palestinians--a people as yet unmentioned in any UN, let alone League of Nations, document--were our table-talk. Virtually no one, pre-1967, used the term Palestinian, and neither did he.

This, remember, was before Israel, fighting for its life, would capture the high ground and come into occupation of what the New York Times stylebook then called "the western bank of the Jordan River." At the time, the future "West Bank" was still entirely under Jordanian rule and perfectly judenrein, with nobody chastising Israel for being an obstacle to a state for any ancient nationality, let alone a "racist, fascist, imperialist aggressor, " as it would soon become known in Said's circles.

For me, Said's survey course was the last straw in my career as an English major. One big reason I quit was the industrial-strength boredom of that class. Not that he was unenergetic, or unprepared, or uninformed when it came to the syllabus: Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, Alexander Pope, that crowd. But there was something missing in his presentation--in him, really-- that only now, 34 years later, have I finally begun to comprehend.

Although he was fluent in English and had grown up in a wealthy, English-speaking household; although he had attended the exclusive New England prep school Mount Hermon (which name appears 14 times in the Hebrew Bible, if never in the Qu'ran, or any Ancient Palestinian text), before going on to earn degrees at Princeton and Harvard, Said never made 18th-century England come alive. There was some kind of fog between, on the one hand, his knowledge of the facts of English culture and civilization and, on the other, his sensibility (to use a fine 18th-century word). What was it?

The photograph of my former Egyptian-Lebanese prof as he reared back, like a pitcher on the mound, to hurl rocks at Jews who he had reason to know would do nothing in retaliation, called to mind two items of English literature. The first was An Account of the Manners & Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) by the famous English Orientalist Edward William Lane, who spent many years living and traveling in the Middle East; in this work, Lane describes how--for fun--Arab riffraff would throw stones in the street at passing Jews, safe in the certainty that they would not hit back. The second was a record of a visit to Jerusalem in 1855 by Moses Montefiore, the British Jewish philanthropist, who had petitioned the Sultan in Constantinople (so he writes) for permission to construct a large awning extending from the Temple Mount plateau over the Western Wall because Arabs--for fun--liked to stand on top and pelt the Jews praying below--who they knew would not hit back.

The Arab intifada too, of the late 1980's, was, after all, a mass, prolonged case of stoning Jews by "street-Arabs," to use a term from the Oxford English Dictionary, who would often heroically employ their little brothers and sisters as shields, knowing that Israel's soldiers would not use deadly force against children and that, on the rare occasion when a child did get hurt, it would at least make great footage on CNN.

Last year, thanks to Justus Weiner and Commentary, Edward Said's veneer as a refugee was peeled away. And now, thanks to Agence France Presse, sans the Saville Row duds of a wealthy academic, striking a pose fit for a redneck pelting blacks, or a street-Arab stoning Jews, he finally emerged as who he is.

Copyright: Sha'i ben-Tekoa 2003

There's another side to Said, far less well known than the obvious characteristics described in this thread. See below. I know I'm going to be unpopular for saying anything positive about him. I also know that Barenboim himself is deeply suspect to some Israelis and some conservatives. And I don't know how far Said's responsibility goes for getting this going. Nonetheless anyone who experienced this event, as I was fortunate enough to do, could not fail to be deeply moved: and for that, at least, I'm grateful.

Source:
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/story.jsp?story=437556

Prom 44: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim, Royal Albert Hall, London/Radio 3
By Robert Maycock
27 August 2003

Ovations for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra started as soon as the first player arrived on the platform. Here was an orchestra co-founded by the Palestinian polymath Edward Said and the Argentine-Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim, made up half-and-half of Israelis and Arabs, performing for the first time in a country that most Middle Easterners despise. The night before, they had played in the Moroccan capital Rabat, their debut in an Arab state. New York and Tel Aviv may take a while longer, but as tours go, this has to count as brave.

You can't tell how many members come from which state because the policy is not to publish their names - understandable, as it must take courage even to face their neighbours when they say what they are doing. Aged 13-26, they rehearsed with tutors from Barenboim's Berlin Staatskapelle for two weeks in Andalusia, now the orchestra's annual base. This intensive study puts them in a similar bracket of musical experience to the pan-European youth orchestras.

They have a similarly high quality, too: outstanding woodwind, strong brass, strings a degree or two less perfect - you'd compare the violins to a British orchestra rather than a Berlin one, but pretty impressive by any standards. As with all youth orchestras under an inspirational conductor, the performances felt as though everybody was giving 150 per cent. Combined with an already charged atmosphere and a packed house on a humid night, the effect was not only to defeat the Albert Hall's vaunted air-conditioning, but to take the audience to uncommon heights and depths of emotion.

In the Unfinished Symphony of Schubert, the approach was alert, generously phrased and finely timed, the two movements well contrasted in pulse as well as character. Next came the Mozart concerto for three pianos - two and a half, really, since there's one easy part, which Barenboim took while he conducted, and two front-line parts, played here by Saleem Abboud- Ashkar and Shai Wosner. It's a work whose usefulness on symbolic occasions gets it many more performances than its unassuming nature would otherwise command. The outstanding feature this time was to place musical unanimity before soloists' egos: three diverse pianists were making common cause instead of competing.

Beethoven's Eroica Symphony was bound to be a different experience because Barenboim has such a distinctive view of it. The long first movement can go at a wide range of speeds, but, in practice, either extreme suits it better than a middle way (this is not a political statement), and Barenboim is an extremist at the slow end. Yet the music had urgency because the detail was kept animated while the overall steadiness was firm and full-toned, and increasingly ruthless in impact.

So, it continued with an ultra-slow, intense Marcia funebre, more lament than funeral march; a serious Scherzo, full of character in the horns' accents and phrasing; and an imposing finale with a hymn-like climax, still too urgently expressed to sound inflated. Encores followed of works by Schubert and Rossini, the players enjoying the chance to show some pace and flair. Indeed, most of them looked amazed at the unreserved welcome that the Proms audience gave them, while governments equivocate.
25 September 2003 18:58

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Said was a brilliant man and accomplished scholar of music. This does not make him good or honest. I do not celebrate death, but I cannot mourn.

He was sick inside. He was also mentally sick, it showed in his anti Israel propaganda and the way he argued

I won't be missing him and neither will Truth and Honesty.

Taken at the Lebanese border. Eddie Said chucking rocks while eyeing the fine young shaheeds on either side of him

JERUSALEM ** The silver-haired man in the smock, cap and stylish sunglasses seems a little too old, a little too portly, a little too distinguished to be hurling stones in the direction of Israeli soldiers.

But there he is, rearing back, right arm cocked, left arm flailing, striding into his toss, projectile poised for flight.

Could it be that Edward Said--celebrated intellectual, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and among the West's most prominent Arab voices--has joined the ranks of Palestinian stone-throwers?

Apparently so.

A photograph taken last week by a French news agency captured Said in mid-toss, firing a rock toward an Israeli position at Lebanon's border with the Jewish state. Since Israel's withdrawal of troops from southern Lebanon in May, the border has become a magnet for Arab tourists who come to gawk, yell insults and throw stones at the Israeli soldiers across the new border fence.

Said, a Palestinian whose wife is Lebanese, was visiting the liberated border area last week on his first trip there since 1982, the year Israel launched its full-scale invasion.

There were people with cameras all over, but Said had no idea that news photographers were among them, he said in a telephone interview the other day from Italy, where he was traveling after leaving Lebanon.

"I'm totally astonished... and somewhat disconcerted by this," he said. "It was a moment of elation, and the fact that there were no Israeli troops there anymore."

Said, 64, is the author of 18 books of criticism, essays, journalism and scholarly musings, as well as a recently published memoir, "Out of Place." His writings appear regularly in Le Monde Diplomatique, the Nation, the London Review of Books and the London Arabic daily Al-Hayat.

Said said he had spent last Tuesday morning touring southern Lebanon, including the notorious El-Khiam prison, where Lebanese sympathizers of Hezbollah, the Islamic guerrilla force that forced Israel's withdrawal, were confined and tortured during the war. After that he was taken to the border village of Kfar Kila where, according to an eyewitness account in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, he stood a short distance away from Israeli soldiers in a two-story watchtower decked out with blue-and-white Israeli flags. With his family by his side, the newspaper said, Said heaved a rock over the border toward the soldiers. It struck a barbed-wire barrier.

In a statement released by Columbia University, Said acknowledged the incident, which he called "a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation has ended."

In a seeming effort to justify his mood at the time, or explain it, he called attention to the brutality and inhumane conditions that prevailed at El-Khiam prison, where he said he found "discarded objects with Israeli markings on them." Before the Israeli withdrawal, the prison was run by Israel's proxy Lebanese allies, the South Lebanon Army.

At the border, Said said in the statement, he was swept up in the moment:

"There were many people there of course... all of them, young and old, elated by the absence of Israeli troops. Many threw stones to see whether in this disputed area they could reach the barbed wire. For a moment I joined in: The spirit of the place infected everyone with the same impulse....

"I had no idea that media people were there, or that I was the object of attention. One stone tossed into an empty place scarcely warrants a second thought. Much is now made of an incident that is basically trivial, as if that could ever outweigh the work I have done over 35 years on behalf of justice and peace, or that could even be compared in the same breath with the enormous ravages and suffering caused by decades of military occupation and dispossession."

Trivial or not, Said's stone throw traveled farther than the Israeli-Lebanese border fence.

The photo, snapped by a photographer from Agence France-Presse, ran last Wednesday in newspapers and Web sites throughout the Middle East. In Israel, the best-selling daily Yedioth Ahronoth devoted half a page to it. On the Web site of the Jordan Times, the photo ran above a caption that read, "SAID VS. ISRAEL."

Some Israelis pounced on Said's stone-throwing as an expression of hatred, not justice and peace. Not surprisingly, they included right-wingers who have crossed swords with Said in the past.

Among these was Justus Reid Weiner, an Israeli scholar who inspired an outbreak of tendentious rhetorical cross-fire earlier this year with an article in Commentary magazine. The 17,000-word article, adorned with 141 footnotes, suggested that Said had exaggerated the extent of his youth spent physically in Palestine.

Critics dismissed Weiner's article as the work of an ideologue bent on discrediting Said. Undeterred, Weiner seized on Said's stone toss as another opportunity to attack his target.

"He often speaks in terms of reconciliation between Arabs and Israelis," Weiner, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said in an interview. "How could this possibly benefit reconciliation? What if the stone he threw hit someone on the other side?"

As it turned out, Said's stone hit no one. Despite the account in the Lebanese newspaper, Said insists he saw no Israeli soldiers in the vicinity. But Weiner was insistent.

"I don't think it should be glossed over," he said. "You sometimes capture the essence of what a person stands for in a momentary gesture they may not have thought out in advance."

On the telephone, Said sounded uncomfortable when asked what meaning could be gleaned from his gesture.

"It's not hatred for Israel," he said. "It was an anti-occupation gesture. I have many Israeli friends. I've lectured in Israel and I continue to have contacts there. It's certainly very much against military occupation of any kind, whether by Israel of Arab countries, Iraq of Kuwait or whatever. I've opposed occupation of any kind."

Until the picture appeared he denied throwing rocks.

I believe it.

He was a very dishonest man, intellectually. And to think how he was revered on college campuses by the pro-palis.

It makes me sick when I realize my child was exposed to profs who idolized this man.

I can't believe the article repeated the lie that Said was born in Jerusalem. It has been conclusively proven that Said was born to an upper-middle class family in Cairo, then under nominal British control. His story, as we learned, was completely false. Said attended a posh private school in Cairo.

Here's the poor little impoverished palestinian refugee, all dressed up in costumes for a studio portrait with one of his sisters. The caption said it was taken in Jerusalem in 1941. I wonder where it was really taken.

He doesn't exactly look like a child who has little access to food or baths; not to mention, since when do refugees sit for portraits.

Also in that memoir of his is a photo of him and a sister in their very posh school uniforms in Cairo. I read somewhere that he was obliged to revise later editions of the memoir after his untruths were revealed.

Hope he had lots of icecubes in his pockets, he is going to need them where he is going.

DU declares Day of Mourning.

MORE....SAID WASN'T EVEN A MUSLIM. WAS BORN ANGLICAN.

. Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture
by William D. Hart
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000
199 pp.; $19.95 paper

Said's critique of religion is the subject of a recent book by William D. Hart, a self-described "pragmatic religious naturalist." Hart's quarrel is not with Said's secularism, but rather with his assumption that secularism is opposed to religion. In Hart's view, one can be both secular and religious; one can accept the truth of naturalism while continuing to value religion for pragmatic reasons. What Said should be criticizing, says Hart, is not religion, but those things that cause harm—dogmatism, arbitrary power, lies—in both religious and secular forms.

The interesting thing is that Said, despite his official secularism, has maintained his respect for certain religious traditions, such as that of his father-in-law Emile Cortas, former head of the Lebanese Quaker community. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), for example, Said defends the established Protestant churches of the Near East, now threatened with dissolution as their ecumenical patrons in the West pressure them, against their wishes, to rejoin the Orthodox fold. For Said, such pressure is merely a continuation of Western imperialism under the guise of anti-imperialism; one cannot correct a past injustice, he insists, by pretending that it never happened.

Another example of Said's respect for particular religious traditions is his public support for the work of liberation theologians like Naim Ateek, former Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem, author of Justice, and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Orbis, 1990), and founder of the Sabeel Liberation Theology Center. In 1998, Said was the keynote speaker at the Third International Sabeel Conference in Bethlehem, "The Challenge of Jubilee: What Does God Require?" Confessing himself to be a "lapsed Anglican," Said added that his friend Naim represents "what so often has been left out of Christianity; namely, Christianity."

How are we to understand the apparent discrepancy between Said's intellectual secularism and his emotional attachment to the older Protestant traditions of the Near East? The truth, as we learn from his memoir, is that Said's family and personal history is inseparable from these traditions; they made him who he is, even as he rebelled against them. If Said thinks of himself as a lifelong exile, perpetually "out of place," it is not only because he is a Palestinian living in New York, but also because he was raised a Protestant in a Muslim world.

Said's family tree is a perfect illustration of the small world of Arab Protestantism. Prior to 1948, the Said family belonged to the Anglican community in Jerusalem whose center was St. George's Cathedral. Edward's mother was from Nazareth, the daughter of a Baptist minister. Her mother was the daughter of Lebanon's first native evangelical minister; her cousin married Charles Malik, the famous Lebanese Christian philosopher and statesman, who played an important role in Edward's intellectual and political development.

Edward was born and baptized in Jerusalem in 1935, but he spent his first sixteen years in Cairo, where his father managed a successful branch of the family business. In Cairo the family's religious life centered on All Saints' Cathedral, where Edward was confirmed by an Anglican bishop in 1949. It was from his English catechist, Said admits,

that I learned to love (and have still managed to hold in my memory) both the Book of Common Prayer and the spirited parts of the Gospels, John in particular…. but I always felt the rift between white man and Arab as separating us in the end, maybe because he was in a position of authority and it was his language, not mine.

After his first Communion, Said recalls,

I found myself trying to feel different, but only experienced a feeling of incongruence. My hope that I might gain insight into the nature of things or a better apprehension of the Anglican God proved fanciful. The hot and cloudless Cairo sky,…. the placidly flowing Nile immediately in front of us in its undisturbed immensity as we stood on the cathedral esplanade: all these were as I was, exactly the same.

Having failed to attain the spiritual insight he had hoped for, Edward entered Victoria College (where the head boy was Michel Shalhoub, later known to the world as Omar Sharif). After two rebellious years, however, he was packed off to boarding school at Mount Hermon in Northfield, Massachusetts, founded in 1881 by the evangelist D. L. Moody. It was at Mount Hermon, it seems, that what remained of Edward's inherited faith was lost for good. Recalling his experience there nearly half a century later, Said's contempt is undiminished:

There seemed to be unquestioned assent to [Moody's] incredible importance: it was my first encounter with enthusiastic mass hypnosis by a charlatan, because…. not one teacher or student expressed the slightest doubt that Moody was worthy of our highest admiration…. And so it was with religion—the Sunday service, the Wednesday evening chapel, the Thursday noon sermon—dreadful, pietistic, non-denominational (I disliked that form of vacillation in particular) full of homilies, advice, how-to-live. Ordinary observations were encoded into Moody-esque sturdy Christianity in which words like "service" and "labor" acquired magical (but finally unspecifiable) meaning, to be repeated and intoned as what gave our lives "moral purpose."

It is apparent, too, that Said felt himself the object of subtle discrimination:

While I was at Mount Hermon I was never appointed a floor officer, a table head, a member of the student council, or valedictorian…. although I had the qualifications. And I never knew why. But I soon discovered that I would have to be on my guard against authority and that I needed to develop some mechanism or drive not to be discouraged by what I took to be efforts to silence or deflect me from being who I was rather than becoming who they wanted me to be. In the process I began a lifelong struggle and attempt to demystify the capriciousness and hypocrisy of a power whose authority depended absolutely on its ideological self-image as a moral agent, acting in good faith and with unimpeachable intentions.

Plainly, the hypocritical power Said hates is not merely that of Mount Hermon, but that of America itself.

As previously mentioned, Charles Malik played an important role in Edward's formation. Their families vacationed together in Lebanon, where Malik, who taught philosophy at the American University in Beirut, encouraged Edward's interest in ideas. When Edward was sent away to school in the U.S., Malik, then serving as the Lebanese ambassador in Washington, took his lonely young relative under his wing. From "Uncle Charles," Said recalls,

I learned the attractions of dogma, of the search for unquestioning truth, of irrefutable authority. From him I also learned about the clash of civilizations, the war between East and West, communism and freedom, Christianity and all the other, lesser religions…. During the forties and early fifties Malik's comforting moral certainty and granitic power, his inextinguishable faith in the Eternal, gave us hope.

But Edward's attitude slowly began to change, until Malik came to represent everything he despised most in politics:

He began his public career during the late 1940s as an Arab spokesman for Palestine at the U.N., but concluded it as the anti-Palestinian architect of the Christian alliance with Israel during the Lebanese Civil War. Looking back at Malik's intellectual and political trajectory, with all that it involved for me as his youthful admirer and companion, relative, and frequenter of the same circles, I see it as the great negative intellectual lesson of my life, an example which for the last three decades I have found myself grappling with, living through, analyzing, over and over and over with regret, mystification, and bottomless disappointment.

Indeed, Said's cosmopolitan, secular, leftist ideology is the reverse image of Malik's communal Christian anti-communism.

Thus it would seem that all of Said's adolescent encounters with the representatives of institutional Christianity—his catechist at All Saints' in Cairo, the heirs of D. L. Moody at Mount Hermon, the charismatic Charles Malik—left him feeling "out of place." Yet it was this involuntary feeling of exclusion, he concludes, that enabled him to become a secular intellectual, one who deliberately chooses to be out of place in order to speak the truth to power, preferring the freedom of exile to the bondage of blood, soil, and creed. The paradox is that this, too, is a secularized religious calling—that of the lonely social prophet, crying out against the sins of racism and imperialism. In this sense, Said remains a true Protestant despite himself. May his baptism in St. George's Cathedral prove efficacious; may his long exile end in a homecoming.

Mark Walhout is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. With Susan VanZanten Gallagher, he is the editor of Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere (St. Martin's).

Yes, I read somewhere today that he was a Christian!

Tomorrow's headline today:

Sad Said Said Dead

Ovations for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra started as soon as the first player arrived on the platform. Here was an orchestra co-founded by the Palestinian polymath Edward Said and the Argentine-Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim, made up half-and-half of Israelis and Arabs, performing for the first time in a country that most Middle Easterners despise.

Yet some are calling him an anti-Semite. Unfortunately there's a contingent on FR that sees no difference between opposition to Israeli policies and anti-semitism. We've heard from a few of them here and some have shown a rather hateful side again.

-Eric

He incited anti-Semitic violence, he worked hard all his life to degrade and politicize American academia, he caused a lot of pain and damage in his career.

He was also a liar.

I can't figure out whether this is ghoulish (keep him on ice boys) or egotistical (he's nothing without me).

Dude, you don't have to choose! You can have it all! He's an egotistical ghoul!

Is this the same guy who wrote a best seller about growing up in Jerusalem that was all a lie?

That was him. He was also fond of saying that the UN Charter allows for guerilla war against occupying forces. Of course, it doesn't. Why would it? We wrote it when we were occupying Germany and Japan. But don't let a little detail like that bother anyone.

B'ibud resho'im rena!

Goodid Riddanceum, yeeha!

We've heard from a few of them here and some have shown a rather hateful side again.

I would say that the person who posted on the Aug. 19 thread about the #2 bus bombing to rant that "all religion is equally evil", even before the ZAKA finished wiping up the babies' blood, showed a rather hateful side.

Lane describes how--for fun--Arab riffraff would throw stones in the street at passing Jews, safe in the certainty that they would not hit back. The second was (...) because Arabs--for fun--liked to stand on top and pelt the Jews praying below--who they knew would not hit back.

Geez, when will Jews (and Christians) learn that turning the other cheek only encourages those who just want to rip your face off?