Posted on 09/26/2003 4:50:22 PM PDT by UnklGene
Said's dangerous thinking (Filed: 27/09/2003)
A secularised culture cannot wholly suppress the devotional urge. Ignorant or impatient of genuine saints, the Left tends to sanctify intellectuals instead. The late Edward Said, who died on Thursday aged 67 (News, Sept 26), was such a figure.
His academic career was devoted to fuelling the Palestinians' sense of grievance and the post-colonial guilt of the West. His passionate advocacy of the Palestinian cause led him to make excuses for Arab terrorism, including the attacks of September 11.
He rejected the 1994 Oslo peace accords as a "Palestinian Versailles" and denounced Yasser Arafat, for whom he had once written speeches, as a "Pétain" who had betrayed his people. Three years ago, he was photographed hurling stones at Israeli soldiers.
Yet the tributes to Said took his sanctity for granted. In the Independent, Robert Fisk described him as "both an icon and an iconoclast". In the Guardian, Adhaf Soueif claimed that, "at the last two of his public events that I attended with him - one in Brighton, one in Hay - people were coming up afterwards just to touch him".
This reverence was mainly the product of a carefully cultivated image as a Palestinian refugee. Then, in 1999, an Israeli scholar discovered that this image was largely falsified. Said grew up comfortably in Cairo. His family had been persecuted, not by the Israelis, but by Nasser's Egypt.
Having reinvented himself, Said did the same for his field. He persuaded a generation of academics that the West had created an ideology, "orientalism", to justify its domination. Jane Austen had unwittingly "sublimated" slavery in Mansfield Park.
Said was wrong about orientalism and wrong about Muslim terrorism. Thanks to the influence of his post-colonial perspective, the Islamist threat was underestimated by those who should have foreseen it.
Kofi Annan says he admired Said's "vision of peace". There was no such vision. Edward Said was an important thinker, but he was no peacemaker.
Excellent news. May he roast in hell.
'Nuff said.
Double entendre intended.
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