[IowaHawk]

Diagnosis: bile overdose.

[the_greatest_country_ever]

No more rocks to be thrown,
Nor lies to be said,
Whether Sa-eeed or Said,
We're all much better off that he's DEAD!

[PianoMan]

A prominent abetter of terrorism and anti-Western hate. Good riddance.

[OldFriend]

Truly a New Year's blessing.

[rmlew]

May G_d be more forgiving of the departed Gay Egyptian revisionist PC Academic fraud and terrorist apologist than I would be.
On second thought, burn in Gehenna with the Palestinian baby-killers you loved.

Edward Said's PC attack on Middle East studies (http://www.ivorytowers.org/pages/832320/index.htm), Orientalism, was one of the primary reasons for the blindness of the Academic and Political establishment to the threats of Islamism.
Of course, Said was not satisfied with cleansing Oriental Departments of all oppostion. He also was became head of the Modern Language Association, the Ingsoc of the academic world.

For more information on Said, see:
http://www.ccaa.4t.com/said2.htm
http://www.google.com/custom?q=Edward+Said&sa=Google+Search&cof=LW%3A283%3BL%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontpagemag.com%2Fimages%2Ffp_index_logo.gif%3BLH%3A91%3BAH%3Aleft%3BS%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontpagemag.com%3BAWFID%3A9edb6131425a5b04%3B&domains=frontpagemag.com&sitesearch=frontpagemag.com

Also search Campus Watch
Martin Kramer's Website http://www.martinkramer.org/pages/899526/index.htm

[tubavil]

Should have happened 67 years ago.

[sheik yerbouty]

"Khub in dred"

[LibWhacker]

Finally! Interned (and, incidentally, interred) somewhere on the other side of the River Styx. For the duration. Should've happened a long time ago. Old Said won't be doing America any more harm.

[APRPEH]

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

[Winniesboy]

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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[American in Israel]

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

[Catalonia]

Noam Chomsky is saddened, deeply saddened.

[cookcounty]

" He had suffered from leukemia at least since the early 1990s."

That must be why he always looked so exhausted. I always assumed he looked that way from constantly pushing such tired ideas.

[beckett]

One of the most destructive people of the last half century, steeped in the language of leftism. An artist of the facile lie.

It will be interesting to read Christopher Hitchens' memoriam, which I'm sure he will write. They were close colleagues in youth, less so with the passage of time and the growth of wisdom for Hitchens.

[Stultis]

So, how have Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Edward Asner, Ramsey Clark and Robert Altman been feeling lately?

So many spittle soaked, jackboot licking, freedom hating, bitter old men; so few streptococcus pneumoniae.

[Uncle Miltie]

Hell's new inductee, Edward Said.

[Shryke]

This is the kind of news I like to read about! Especially on Fridays. Good post.