I am so unhappy at t he death of the great Edward Said, I just dont know what to do with myself. Probably it was some kind of an evil Zionist conspiracy. So, i will go with my friends and protest outside the Federal Building.

You forgot you need to also burn a few American flags while you are at it ;)

WooHoo!! 33 Points!

Tell us how you *really* feel :-)

People:

Curb your enthusiasm. Said may be gone but his toxic writings live on, and are fated to form the core reading of Middle Eastern Studies in our most prestigious universities for decades.

Just think of the lies by the Kennedy clique, and by writers such as David Halberstam, Regis Debray, Gloria Emerson, Harrison Salisbury and others that are now the accepted version of the war in Vietnam.

I am shocked and disgusted by these vicious reactions and this blog claims to stand for the 'liberal tradition'?

The only extenuating circumstance I can find for this attitude is that you, collectively, are the victims of the most manipulated press in the Western world which, according to an international survey of press freedom, ranks below that of Costa Rica.

Arie Brand

The following obituary appeared today in the Israeli paper Haaretz which shows far more liberal-mindedness in this regard than this blog.

Edward Said dies at 67

By Danny Rubinstein

Palestinian-born intellectual Edward Said died yesterday in New York after a long struggle with leukemia. He was 67.

Said was the most eloquent and
best-known spokesman of the
Palestinian problem, at least
in the West. However, his
influence far exceeded the
Palestinian and Arab question
and marked new directions in
the study of the Orient, Islam
and perhaps the developing
world at large.

Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 to a Christian Arab family. His father emigrated to the United States at the turn of the century and returned to Jerusalem in the 1920s, where he had a profitable business in writing instruments. The family built a house in Jerusalem's Talbieh neighborhood - where Brenner street is today. The house became a source of contention after the family lost it following the 1948 war.

Said was raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, where his father had extensive business. In 1951, he went to the United States to attend Princeton and Harvard universities. He specialized in English literature, comparative literature and musicology. He was appointed professor at Columbia University in New York City, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

The turning point in his career occurred in 1967, following the Six-Day War, at which point he became identified with the Palestinian cause and the leadership of the PLO. He wrote a great deal on the subject, but what made him world-famous was his book "Orientalism," whose impact on academia was enormous. The book placed Said at the center of an international intellectual debate.Published in 1978, "Orientalism" was a brilliantly written critique of the West, its academia, colonial officials, authors and artists, whose study and research of the Oriental experience, Said said, did not only serve to enrich knowledge but also assist in the occupation, the control and the subjugation of the Orient. Thus, according to Said, the Arab existence was presented to the West as static, passive and backward, facing a superior West.

Said was sharply against the Oslo accords, and in his provocative style called the Palestinian Authority established by Yasser Arafat a combination of corruption and dictatorship. In recent years, a vast chasm developed between Said and the Palestinian leadership. During certain periods, senior members of the Palestinian Authority asked to have his writings banned.

For more than a decade, Said battled leukemia, but never stopped writing, choosing to participate in conferences and speak out with the vehemence that characterized him.

In recent years, he visited Jerusalem on a number of occasions and asked to see the house his family lost in 1948. He made many Israeli acquaintances and had many Jewish friends in the United States. However, among the American Jewish establishment, he was considered public enemy number one.

Back in early 1953, when I was a 19-year-old kid about to be called to active duty in the US Army from my reserve unit, the Korean war was still on in full force.

One day in late winter, news came through that Stalin had died. Across the ocean in our front lines in Korea, somebody put up a quartette of small signs similar to the ones along the roads that advertised "Burma Shave" cream in that era:

-- "Joe is dead"

-- "So they said."

-- "Hurrah, hurrah"

-- "That's one less red."

So in exactly that spirit, I respond to the news of the death of Edward Said. East coast snob. Educated aristocrat. Enemy of all that western civilization represents.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

If you were a real liberal, Arie, that would make you open-minded enough to consider the possibility that what you've been told about Said isn't the truth. But you, apparently, don't know the meaning of the word "liberal."

The Haaretz obit is a whitewash job, and gets some of its facts wrong. Including with the claim that Said was born in Jerusalem, which he wasn't--it was something he was proven to have lied about, actually.

I could go on, but I sense that you're far too prejudiced a person to bother paying attention to anything that doesn't match your preconceived notions. In other words, you're no liberal.

I will paste here the first few paragraphs of the obituary in the NYT. So the New York Times got it wrong as well as far as that birthplace is concerned, Dean? What a pity that it apparently cannot draw on your superior sources of information. But then I think the NYT is a bit wary of professional smearers who you apparently take at face value. Incidentally are these also the sources where you obtained that Orwellian Newspeak according to which I am a 'reactionary'and you are a 'liberal'?

Arie

NYTimes.com > Obituaries

Edward W. Said, Polymath Scholar, Dies at 67
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: September 26, 2003

Edward W. Said, a polymath scholar and literary critic at Columbia University who was the most prominent advocate in the United States of the cause of Palestinian independence, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 67.
The cause was leukemia, which Dr. Said had been battling since 1991.

Dr. Said was born in Jerusalem during the British Mandate in Palestine and immigrated to the United States when he was a teenager. He spent a long and productive career as a professor of comparative literature at Columbia and wrote several widely discussed books, among them "Orientalism" and "Culture and Imperialism."

The New York Times is famous for errors like this one, Arie, and for passing on falsehoods about figures like Said. Hell, they still haven't even repudiated Walter Duranty.

If you were a real liberal, Arie, you would be asking people like me why we have reached the conclusions we have about Said. Not simply telling us we're wrong, wrong, wrong, and casting aspersions at our character. That's what shows you to be acting like an unthinking reactionary.

I linked one article for you on Said's bogus heritage and I can give you reams more information on why he's was a lifelong liar and an anti-semite, even if he had a few self-hating Jewish friends. And yes, it's ever so nice that he eventually recognized that his old buddy Arafat was a thug and an oppressor--took him long enough, and didn't stop him from continuing to cast aspersions at Israel and the West, drawing idious moral equivalency arguments between them.

Perhaps if you learned some manners, and learned to act like a real liberal (i.e. ask first why someone has an opinion before bashing them for it) I'd be willing to share some more information with you.

I suggest that you go read this, and then, if you want to learn some manners and learn some things things you didn't know, you come back here and ask for more information..

Dean, all this huffing and puffing, and the reference to manners you were yourself the first to violate, won’t help you. You came up with a specific claim (Haaretz was wrong in stating that Said was born in Jerusalem)and the further claim that the NYT was wrong about this as well.

Here are a few more snippets of today’s obituaries:

Boston Globe:

“Dr. Said was born in Jerusalem Nov. 1, 1935, and was primarily reared in Cairo and Lebanon. In dispute was how much time he and his family had spent in Jerusalem, and the extent to which Dr. Said may have tried to conceal the length of their residence there.”

(so according to the Globe the fact that he was born there is not ‘in dispute’)

Christian Science Monitor:

“Said, a Christian Palestinian, was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Cairo and Lebanon, and moved to the US when he was in his late teens. While he was outspoken in his support of the Palestinian cause, he was just as outspoken in his condemnation of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, whom he considered corrupt and inept.”

Los Angeles Times:

“A Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem, raised in Cairo and schooled in the United States, Said lived as an exile, an outlook that infused his extensive writings.”

Sydney Morning Herald:

“Said was born in Jerusalem into a prosperous Palestinian family. His
father, Wadie, a Christian, had emigrated to the US before World War I. He volunteered for service in France and returned to the Middle East as a respectable Protestant businessman - with US citizenship - before making an arranged marriage to the daughter of a Baptist minister from Nazareth.”

NRC Handelsblad (Dutch):

“Hij werd geboren in Jeruzalem, in een christelijk-Palestijnse familie, en ging naar de Britse school in Kairo. Op 15-jarige leeftijd werd hij naar Amerika gestuurd waar hij in Harvard Engelse letterkunde studeerde.”

Die Zeit (German):

“Said war 1935 in Jerusalem geboren worden, als die Stadt noch unter der britischen Mandatsmacht stand, und er ist dort selbst und in Kairo aufgewachsen. Nach der Teilung Jerusalems im Jahr 1947 zog Saids Vater, ein erfolgreicher Geschäftsmann, mit der Familie in die ägyptische Hauptstadt um.”

They are all wrong are they?

Arie Brand

Arie - you are not convincing me that Edward Said is some kind of great individual to be mourned. he has managed to totally skew the debate to a point of absurdity - and obviously you are one of those people who chooses to believe that his po-mo, pseudo-marxist deconstruction constitutes actual intellectual debate that help our understanding of issue of the Mid East.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say!!!
You can rant all you want, but you lose all credibility when you say that somehow the press in the USA is less open and free than in Costa Rica.

Arie - it is you who is acting like a jerk and definitely not like a liberal. You are assuming that we are reactionary idiots, not blessed with your superior intellect, and hence all our opinions are wrong. Since it seems we dont agree with you, you try to beat us over the head and tell us how disgusting we are.
Good try, and you are one fine specimen of what the left is all about - call people names when you can convince them to accept your ideas.
Liberal means being open-minded. And the lack of that quality is exactly what you have demonstrated on your posts. Ever bother to think why so many people might not agree with the conventional leftist dogma passed off as scholarship in adcademia and the media? Seems instead of thinking, you have just written Dean and others like him off, and of course you also find us "disgusting"!!!! How "liberal" and "open-minded" of you!!!! Good job, Mr Liberal!!!

Dean, Arie is right: Said was born in Jerusalem; the Jacoby article you link yourself says so, and I don't think anyone has ever seriously disputed it. What has been disputed is whether he grew up in Jerusalem — whether it was his family's primary home, or just a place they occasionally visited. I think the main claim of the Commentary article was that Said had consistently misrepresented himself as a Palestinian forcibly expelled from Jerusalem, whereas at the time of the founding of Israel he had spent most of his life in Egypt.

Rob, so I lose all credibility when I claim that that according to an international survey of press freedom the US press ranks below that of Costa Rica? Yes, I assume that if an outsider had broken into Plato's cave and told the prisoners there that what they were seeing on the wall were only shadows they would have hooted at him too.
Unfortunately, the claim is not mine but, as I said, contained in an international survey of press freedom drawn up by "Reporters Without Borders" who you probably will write off as some bunch of raging reds conspiring against the US of A. There are, of course, some facts which do not fit into that view. For instance, these reds put Cuba somewhere at the bottom of the list. But never mind.

What I reacted to was the vicious and rancorous tone of comments at the death of an 'opponent'and I pointed out that an Israeli commentator showed, in that regard, much more decency than you.

The rancorous tone is now directed at me in the style of 'you think you are so superior, he?' Yes, well, now you ask me, as a matter of fact I do - and I will continue feeling that way as long as I detect that tone in your contributions.

I will add the Costa Rica statement. It is not entirely clear from this comment which criteria were employed to get to this ranking because the fifty questions that were put to 'people in the know' are not attached to it. I would imagine that they also focused on the concentration of media ownership and, as an Australian citizen, I feel we owe you some apology for inflicting Rupert Murdoch on you - you know the guy who forbade the showing of a documentary on human rights violations in China because he is interested in the Chinese market. His 'Fox News' must be unique in the Western world. I think Dr.Goebbels would have loved to have that crew in his own outfit.

Cheers,

Arie

InternationalReporters Without Borders publishes the first worldwide press freedom index.

The first worldwide index of press freedom has some surprises for Western democracies. The United States ranks below Costa Rica and Italy scores lower than Benin. The five countries with least press freedom are North Korea, China, Burma, Turkmenistan and Bhutan.

Surprises among Western democracies : US below Costa Rica and Italy below Benin.

Reporters Without Borders is publishing for the first time a worldwide index of countries according to their respect for press freedom. It also shows that such freedom is under threat everywhere, with the 20 bottom-ranked countries drawn from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. The situation is especially bad in Asia, which contains the five worst offenders - North Korea, China, Burma, Turkmenistan and Bhutan.

The top end of the list shows that rich countries have no monopoly of press freedom. Costa Rica and Benin are examples of how growth of a free press does not just depend on a country's material prosperity.

The index was drawn up by asking journalists, researchers and legal experts to answer 50 questions about the whole range of press freedom violations (such as murders or arrests of journalists, censorship, pressure, state monopolies in various fields, punishment of press law offences and regulation of the media). The final list includes 139 countries. The others were not included in the absence of reliable information.

In the worst-ranked countries, press freedom is a dead letter and independent newspapers do not exist. The only voice heard is of media tightly controlled or monitored by the government. The very few independent journalists are constantly harassed, imprisoned or forced into exile by the authorities. The foreign media is banned or allowed in very small doses, always closely monitored.

Right at the top of the list four countries share first place - Finland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands. These northern European states scrupulously respect press freedom in their own countries but also speak up for it elsewhere, for example recently in Eritrea and Zimbabwe.

The highest-scoring country outside Europe is Canada, which comes fifth. Some countries with democratically-elected governments are way down in the index - such as Colombia (114th) and Bangladesh (118th). In these countries, armed rebel movements, militias or political parties constantly endanger the lives of journalists. The state fails to do all it could to protect them and fight the immunity very often enjoyed by those responsible for such violence.

Costa Rica better placed than the United States. The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there. Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court. Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings. The highest-ranked country of the South is Costa Rica, in 15th position. This Central American nation is traditionally the continent's best performer in terms of press freedom. In February 2002, it ceased to be one of the 17 Latin American states that still give prison sentences to those found guilty of "insulting" public officials. The murder in July 2001 year of journalist Parmenio Medina was an exception in the history of the Costa Rican media.

Cuba, the last dictatorship in Latin America, came 134th and is the only country in the region where there is no diversity of news and journalists are routinely imprisoned. In Haiti (106th), journalists are targeted by informal militias whose actions are covered by the government.

Italy gets bad marks in Europe The 15 member-countries of the European Union (EU) all score well except for Italy (40th), where news diversity is under serious threat. Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is turning up the pressure on the state-owned television stations, has named his henchmen to help run them and continues to combine his job as head of government with being boss of a privately-owned media group. The imprisonment of journalist Stefano Surace, convicted of press offences from 30 years ago, as well as the monitoring of journalists, searches, unjustified legal summonses and confiscation of equipment, are all responsible for the country's low ranking.

France, in 11th place overall, comes only 8th among EU countries because of several disturbing measures endangering the protection of journalists' sources and because of police interrogation of a number of journalists in recent months.

Among those states hoping to join the EU, Turkey (99th) is very poorly placed. Despite the reform efforts of its government, aimed at easing entry into the EU, many journalists are still being given prison sentences and the media is regularly censored. Press freedom is especially under siege in the southeastern part of the country.

Elsewhere in Europe, such as Belarus (124th), Russia (121st) and the former Soviet republics, it is still difficult to work as a journalist and several have been murdered or imprisoned. Grigory Pasko, jailed since December 2001 in the Vladivostok region of Russia, was given a four-year sentence for publishing pictures of the Russian Navy pouring liquid radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan.

The Middle East and Israel's ambivalent position. No Arab country is among the top 50. Lebanon only makes 56th place and the press freedom situation in the region is not encouraging. In Iraq (130th) and Syria (126th), the state uses every means to control the media and stifle any dissenting voice. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein especially has set his country's media the sole task of relaying his regime's propaganda. In Libya (129th) and Tunisia (128th), no criticism of Col Muammar Kadhafi or President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali is tolerated. The political weakening of the Palestinian Authority (82nd) means it has made few assaults on press freedom. However, Islamic fundamentalist opposition media have been closed, several attempts made to intimidate and attack local and foreign journalists and many subjects remain taboo. The aim is to convey a united image of the Palestinian people and to conceal aspects such a demonstrations of support for attacks on Israel. The attitude of Israel (92nd) towards press freedom is ambivalent. Despite strong pressure on state-owned TV and radio, the government respects the local media's freedom of expression. However, in the West Bank and Gaza, Reporters Without Borders has recorded a large number of violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which guarantees press freedom and which Israel has signed. Since the start of the Israeli army's incursions into Palestinian towns and cities in March 2002, very many journalists have been roughed up, threatened, arrested, banned from moving around, targeted by gunfire, wounded or injured, had their press cards withdrawn or been deported.

Good and bad examples in Africa Eritrea (132nd) and Zimbabwe (122nd) are the most repressive countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The entire privately-owned press in Eritrea was banned by the government in September 2001 and 18 journalists are currently imprisoned there. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is notable for his especially harsh attitude to the foreign and opposition media. At the other end of the spectrum, Benin is in 21st place despite being classified by the UN Development Programme as one of the world 15 poorest countries. Other African states, such as South Africa (26th), Mali (43rd), Namibia (31st) and Senegal (47th), have genuine press freedom too.

Reporters Without Borders defends imprisoned journalists and press freedom throughout the world, as well as the right to inform the public and to be informed, in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Reporters Without Borders has nine national sections (in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom), representatives in Abidjan, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Montreal, Moscow, Nairobi, New York, Tokyo and Washington and more than a hundred correspondents worldwide.

Good try Arie - you aint convinced me of anything yet. And, feel superior all you want, cuz, I dont give a damn as to what your opinion of me is. And as for international surveys are all concerned, we all know how "credible" they are.

What you need to learn is this - that a lot of people, myself included, happen to disagree with your opinions, and you are not doing very much to impress me with your shrill invective. I guess you ought t o treat this as a learning situation, and try to get into an honest discussion with someone like Dean or myself, to try to examine why we hold the opinions we do, instead of essentially acting like a petulant kid. That is what a true liberal would do. Calling Dean and I names, and cutting and pasting junk does not an argument make.

Rob, the discussion is now being continued by you at prep school level ('calling Dean and me names'). So, who is acting like a petulant child?

And as to a 'learning situation': I have probably contributed to a great many more blogs, in various countries, than you have. So go and try that superior tone on somebody else.

Cheers,

Arie

Arie, I am soooo impressed - you have contributed to so many Blogs. How stupid of me to not acknowledge your superior intellect. And since you troll various sites and blogs posting inane comments, and cutting and pasting junk - I am supposed to be impressed? Get a life dude. Now, if you were a fellow faculty of the late Prof Said's at Columbia or at some other estimable university, or if you were a columnist at a reputable publication, i might consider your views worth looking into, but, since trolling various blogs are what you are all about, I rest my case. Go use y our superior intellect somewhere else- save the world by turning it into a leftist, peace-commune, and leave the less intellectually endowed like me to wallow in our "ignorance". Surely, with your superior intellect, you can do more than troll blogs?

Cut it out, guys.

Arie is, on one level, right about what facts he has cited. Said, as far as I can tell, was born in Jerusalem, while his family was visiting relatives. And RSF did rank the USA 17th in journalistic freedom, over not only Costa Rica (a commendable country in many ways, from what I've heard), but also a good portion of European Union countries, including Germany and France.

But Arie is still a jerk, whatever his politics. He tries to make one inaccuracy into a personal indictment against all argument on Said's credibility. A ranking of 17 out of 139 for press freedom becomes "the most manipulated press in the Western world" (making the UK, Ecuador, Japan, Spain, Greece, Chile, Austria, Poland, and Italy "non-Western", evidently). He slanders Fox News by comparing it to the Nazi propaganda office, a claim so absurd as to be transparently vicious.

And, where he has produced evidence, there is also good reason to cry foul. RSF ranks the USA, with its Constitutional protection against government censorship, below Germany and France, with their explicit content bans regarding Nazi material. There is reason to be troubled about American journalists in jail for not revealing sources, but I fail to see how outright government censorship of unpopular topics is anything but a total disaster, freedom-wise. Then again, RSF is French; is it any wonder that Europe owns the top of the list?

I'm not very comfortable with the idea that we should disrespect our opponents, even ones as apparently malicious and destructive as Said. But, as I myself have demonstrated in the past, anger wins few arguments. Arie's second post was his best; the rest are forgettable, and should be forgotten.

I shouldn’t bother to post this comment, but I am appalled that a site claiming to represent leftist views can be filled with such utterly vindictive comments concerning the death of anyone. Regardless of politics, Edward Said brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the forefront of academic discussions. I would have thought, with all the talk of open-mindedness, so-called “liberals” could appreciate this contribution. But more importantly, rejoicing over the death of a man who desired nothing more than peace is absolutely disgusting. Comment if you like, I will not return to this blog to read them.

I will join Josh in quitting. I was misled by that banner that claimed that the august minds gathered here represented the 'liberal tradition'.If I thought the folks on this particular thread were a representative sample of American citizenry I would despair but it is merely a matter of 'birds of a feather...' etc.

All the same I had a decent conversation with Mark Noonan. Mark what are you doing among these people?

Vale,

Arie

Dean,

You say above to arie:

"If you were a real liberal, Arie, you would be asking people like me why we have reached the conclusions we have about Said. Not simply telling us we're wrong, wrong, wrong, and casting aspersions at our character. That's what shows you to be acting like an unthinking reactionary."

Indeed, ordinarily, one wishes to broaden one's horizons by examining other peoples' thoughts. But I find it very hard to imagine that a human being who rejoices at the death of another, such as you do in your first post, is even capable of coherent thought, so I can understand why arie was hesitant to seek reasons for your opinions.

If the above is unintelligible, here's a summary:

I doubt that you can form a clear thought, and hence, place no value on your "opinions".

Parting shot

MINORITY REPORT by Christopher Hitchens
Chritopher Hitchens

The Commentary School of Falsification

... an essay of extraordinary spite and mendacity. Sarcastically titled "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said," it appears in the September issue of Commentary under the byline of one Justus Reid Weiner, of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. After a claimed three years of research into Edward Said's own account of his and his family's history, Weiner alleges:

1. That Said did not live in a house owned by his family in Mandate Palestine, and was not expelled.

2. That he did not "really" attend St. George's school there.

3. That he grew up and was educated in luxurious conditions in Cairo.

4. That he has never tried to bring any claim for compensation for the "loss" that he did not really suffer.

The implication is that Said the mythomaniac discredits the entire Palestinian "narrative" of diaspora and dispossession. But it takes only about three minutes to demonstrate that Weiner's three years
were a malicious waste of time. In order, then:

1. Said's cousin Yusuf (the nephew of his father) confirms that the house on Brenner Street in Jerusalem was the home of an extended family, and that the name of the family member on the title deed--the legal owner was Edward's aunt--is irrelevant. Not only Edward but also his sister Jean were born in the house, occurrences unlikely to have taken place on random visits. Yusuf Said lives in Toronto but was never contacted by Weiner, who anyway has a difficulty with kinship ties and describes Boulos Said as a brother to Edward's father, instead of a cousin. As to the expulsion, Edward has never claimed to have suffered in person, but only to have been withdrawn from school and sent to Egypt, to be followed by every single adult member of his extended family, which was indeed ethnically cleansed and deprived of large holdings in land and business.

2. I know myself, from speaking to former teachers and pupils, that Said was--as was his father before him--a pupil at St. George's school in Jerusalem. An Armenian classmate named Haig Boyagian and a former instructor, Michel Marmoura, are both in North America and easily located. Weiner makes the cretinous error of citing another schoolmate, David Ezra, who, while mentioned in Said's recollections, does not recall things as Edward recalls them. Maybe so, but misremembering a boy from the school is not quite the same, dummy, as the impossible task of inventing him.

3. I quote from the concluding interview of Edward Said: A Critical Reader, published by Blackwell in 1992, in which Said says: "To go back to the early years of my awareness of Cairo: I grew up there, spending a large part of my youth in the place, but strangely not as an Egyptian." Elsewhere, and within easy reach of any reader, he has written of "the Cairo-Jerusalem-Beirut axis, which is the one I grew up in." Nor has he ever concealed the fact that his haut-bourgeois family was well enough cushioned from the disasters that overtook the evicted Palestinian peasantry. (It seems to me a bit much that Weiner, whose "Center" in Jerusalem is largely underwritten by Michael Milken of the junk-bond fortune, should dwell so enviously
on this acknowledged fact.) Having spent much time in both Lebanon and Egypt, Said chooses to describe the period he spent in alestine as a youth as "formative." That seems like a matter for him--born of two Palestinian parents--to decide.

4. From a wealth of material about the family's long and bitter struggle for compensation I select the fact that cousin Yusuf, only three years ago, took his title deeds to Israel and re-registered his claim, while yet another family property was being torn down to make way for the new Jerusalem Hilton.

All of the above, and much besides, is spelled out with almost painful honesty in Said's forthcoming memoir Out of Place. He deals with numerous anomalies, such as the fact that his mother, born in Nazareth, finally got a passport that gave her place of birth as Cairo. (Is it too much to ask that those with family histories extending to Riga and Vilnius be aware of discrepant documents and - tangled records?) Aware of the book's full disclosure, Weiner now says that its veracity should be credited to him. In other words, that an exhaustive book commissioned in 1989, begun in 1994 (after Edward had learned that leukemia had set a term to his life) and completed in 1998 was undertaken to rebut a half-baked article in Commentary that had not yet been written! Such conceit--and such elegance, too. Weiner's emulators, like the New York Post editorialist who referred to Said as "the Palestinian Tawana Brawley," manifest the same distraught vulgarity. No other magazine I know of would have published such an article without trying to confront its subject. Commentary is evidently immune to such scruples. It ought to be taught, as G.K. Chesterton said in another connection, that when a man decides that any stick will do, he picks up a boomerang.

Hi,
In my blog I am writing in Said's memory. Would you mind visiting me and leaving your comments?http://oddamongbrians.blogsky.com