[(Continued from p.8)]
murders. Said eventually withdrew his support from the PLO head not because Arafat had become one of the major war criminals of modern times but because the Oslo Accords showed him becoming "soft" on Israel, willing to sell the world that famous used Buick called "recognition of Israel's right to exist." When Operation Iraqi Freedom seemed near its end Said was incensed by reports that a new Iraqi government might make peace with Israel.
Said's career in his last years seemed to lurch from scandal to scandal.
Said's intense hostility to America also powerfully influenced that sizable contingent of our academics whose motto is "the other country, right or wrong." He called Operation Iraqi Freedom the crusade of an "avenging Judeo-Christian god of war," fitting into the pattern of America "reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust." And, as usual, he blamed the Jews for what he hated: "The Perles and Wolfowitzes of this country" have led America into a war "planned by a docile professionalized staff in ...Washington and Tel Aviv" and publicly defended by "Ari Fleischer (who I believe is an Israeli citizen)." (A New York Post journalist who attempted to find the source of Said's phony claim about Fleischer located it in the website of the White Aryan Resistance Movement.)
Far from making him an untouchable, Said's past membership in an international terrorist organization, his Disneyland versions of history, his thinly-veiled antisemitism and blatant anti-Americanism made him a star in the academic, literary, and intellectual worlds. He was elected president of the Modern Language Association, made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, adored by NPR and BBC, given countless awards, honors, visiting lectureships; and newspapers like the New York Times, the Guardian, and Ha'aretz were in thrall to him.
Said's career in his last years seemed to lurch from scandal to scandal. In the September 1999 issue of Commentary, Justus Reid Weiner revealed that Said had "adjusted" the facts of his life to create a personal myth, often told and poignantly embellished, to fit the myth of Arab dispossession. For decades he had presented himself as an exile, an Arab who grew up in Jerusalem but who, at age twelve, when Israel was established, was (along with his family) driven out of the Talbiyeh neighborhood of Jerusalem. (It goes without saying that Richard Bernstein, in his New York Times obituary, dutifully regurgitated Said's fiction.)
In fact, as Weiner massively documented and irrefutably demonstrated, Said's tragic tale was largely a fabrication. He grew up in a wealthy section of Cairo, son of a Palestinian Arab who emigrated to the U. S. in 1911, became an American citizen, then moved to Egypt. Said was educated in Egypt, not Jerusalem. His family occasionally visited cousins in Jerusalem, and Said was born during one such visit in 1935.
In July of 2000 Said was in the news again. During a visit to Lebanon in July, he was spotted hurling rocks over the border at Israelis. Expressing dismay at the Agence France Presse photograph of his pitching exploits (a peculiar way of realizing his intellectual vocation) Said exclaimed: "I had no idea that media people were there..." Not the action, but its detection, caused him to regret what he had done.
Columbia University, Said's employer, saw nothing wrong with his fabrications or his stone-throwing. This is the same Columbia which in 1959 immediately "accepted the resignation" of a young English Department instructor named Charles Van Doren for being involved in a rigged NBC quiz show called Twenty-One. Columbia's then Dean John Palfrey said that "The issue is the moral one of honesty and integrity," and that "If these principles are to continue to have meaning at Columbia," Van Doren could not remain there. Palfrey's principles have long since been forgotten at Columbia, now often referred to as Bir Zeit on the Hudson, and at scores of other universities as well.
Each of us will respond to the news of Said's passing in a different manner. Some will be mindful of the Biblical warning against rejoicing over the fall of one's enemies; others may be inclined to recall a different sacred text: "in the destruction of the wicked there is joy."
Edward Alexander's most recent book is Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition (Transaction Publishers).
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November 2003 - 9 - Outpost