Posted on 09/28/2003 7:00:41 PM PDT by Pokey78
It's a generally good rule not to speak ill of the dead. I wish Professor Said had observed it in the days after September 11th when his almost every utterance was an insult to his fellow New Yorkers vaporized a few blocks from his ivory tower. He was a hugely influential academic, who found a way to make the institutional "counter-tribalism" (in John O'Sullivan's phrase) of America's elites pay off for him big time. His bestselling Orientalism is a deeply disingenuous work riddled with factual errors and with a selectivity of focus that negates its main claim. But it remains a stunningly successful example of how to parlay western self-loathing into bestseller status. I mentioned Said a couple of times in the early chapters of The Face Of The Tiger mainly for one reason: he didn't seem to understand that the life he enjoyed was only possible in the west. In the Islamic world, where the theories of Orientalism are either unknown or disdained, he would have been a nobody. As I wrote two years ago:
As for the European media's cowboy clichés, take a look at some of the faces under those ten-gallon hats. The names of the dead of September 11th tell their own story: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Hispanic, Arab, Asian – in a word, American. There is a reason why people of every conceivable hue and ethnicity lie beneath the rubble, and it isn’t because of what The Guardian calls America’s “unchecked arrogance”. Western liberal democracy offers its citizens longer, better, healthier lives, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to travel, freedom to trade.
It even offers freedom to come here and become a wealthy, influential, famous cultural figure attacking the very notion of “the west” and “democracy” and their opposing bogeymen, “rogue states” and “terrorism”, as “counterfeit” “confections” concocted by a dark “unseen power” to “create content and tacit approval”. Thus, Edward Said’s latest meditation for The Nation, which with exquisite timing appeared on their website round about the precise moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Could Said, a New York resident, get paid for writing that stuff in Lebanon or Syria, never mind Afghanistan? For a counterfeit confection, the west is providing Said with a pretty nice living...
The 300 firemen who died on September 11th died in part for their fellow New Yorker Edward Said, though he is too stupid and graceless to understand.
I thought of Said again when the air strikes against the Taliban began and Osama issued what appears to be his last date-specific video call to jihad:
Take away all the infidel products and you’d be left with a loser in yak-wool boxers standing in a cave shouting to himself. Osama had an infidel watch (Timex Ironman Triathlon), infidel fatigues (army-surplus US battle dress), infidel hand-mike, infidel camera. This is presumably an example of what Professor Edward Said, the distinguished New York-based America-disparager, calls the “interconnectedness” of the west and Islam. The Prof deplores the tendency, in the wake of September 11th, to separate cultures into what he called “sealed-off entities”, when in reality western civilisation and the Muslim world are so “intertwined” that it’s impossible to “draw the line” between them.
This pitch isn’t getting a lot of respect. “The line seems pretty clear,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. “Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the west’s idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam’s idea.”
Let me be a little more charitable to Professor Said and say that, as a Canadian, I’m all too familiar with the desperate need of certain cultures to overcompensate, however pathetic and tortuous it might seem.
Ding Dong, the pitch is dead.
The 300 firemen who died on September 11th died in part for their fellow New Yorker Edward Said, though he is too stupid and graceless to understand.
One down, two to go.
It's a generally good rule not to speak ill of the dead. I wish Professor Said had observed it in the days after September 11th when his almost every utterance was an insult to his fellow New Yorkers vaporized a few blocks from his ivory tower.
Bumpity, bump, bump, bump.
Marc Antony?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.