(Continued from p.10)
Whitman's letter is, I believe, an extension of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict masked as an argument against public misbehaving: it is drenched in the usual hypocrisy about norms of conduct, a tactic employed by publicists who try to hide their real agenda." Said also asks why Whitman waited so long to protest (that Said would be president in 1999 was established in a 1996 MLA election) and concludes by dismissing Whitman's criticism as "oedipal rebellion" because Whitman had been an undergraduate student at Columbia and apparently taken at least one course with Said.Since Said had attacked Edward Alexander (not mentioned in Whitman's chronicle of Said's targets), Alexander wrote a response to the PMLA journal which it declined to publish on the grounds, in the words of the letter to him, that "your name does not appear in the MLA membership records." Alexander is professor of English at the University of Washington, the author of numerous works on Victorian literature, and familiar to advocates for Israel as the author of such books as The Jewish Wars and The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies. Here, for the record, is Alexander's response.
21 December 1998
PMLA Forum
Modern Language Association
10 Astor Place
New York NY 10003-6981
To the editor:
Edward Said (Forum, January 1999) admits to the incivility of discourse that Jon Whitman accuses him of, but claims that all instances of it occurred in his responses to still more uncivil attacks on him. In fact, nearly all Said's vituperation cited by Whitman was in response to compositions overly respectful of Said, even though falling short of the sycophancy that he is accustomed to from New York Times interviewers. Does this heavily petted intellectual believe that any criticism of his views constitutes an act of lese majeste meriting execution?
I am flattered that Said singles out a little essay of mine, published nearly ten years ago, as the epitome of "relentless verbal attacks" on him. That essay was not about his bad manners. Rather, it treated his famously preposterous statements about Jews: they are not truly a people because their identity in the Diaspora has been wholly a function of persecution; the Holocaust served to "protect" Palestinian Jews "with the world's compassion"; before 1948 "the historical duration of a Jewish state [in Palestine] was a sixty-year period two millennia ago." I also commented on his advocacy of murdering Arab political opponents ("collaborators") and his claim that such murders were sanctioned by the UN Charter -- a claim that would strike a normally attentive sixth-grader as ludicrous, but was perfectly acceptable to the editors of Critical Inquiry who published it. Finally, I raised the question of how Said's membership on the Palestine National Council, an international terrorist organization, might bear upon our old-fashioned view of literature as an art meant to encourage moral awareness and humane understanding.
I do agree with Said that Whitman's letter
of resignation from the MLA is belated -- but by far
more than three years. I recall another letter of
resignation from the MLA, shown to me in about 1971 after
Louis Kampf had been elected president of the
organization. It was written by my then colleague, the late
Elizabeth Dipple. She said that, as a Canadian citizen, she
was forbidden to belong to foreign political
organizations. Perhaps that should have been the last word on
this subject.
Sincerely yours,
Edward Alexander
University of Washington
(For those who have not followed the progressive politicization of the Modern Language Association, the election of Louis Kampf in 1971 was a landmark.)
Since the MLA did not see fit to publish this letter, Said could not rave further against Alexander in its pages. But as a pleasant postscript, it is worth noting that May 1999 brought a hissing fit from Said against Milton Viorst, whose pro-PLO writings date back to the 1970s when Golda Meir was Prime Minister and the PLO was still rightfully and universally recognized as a terror organization devoted to Israel's destruction. Said had tossed off some barbs against Viorst in the pages of the Egyptian daily Al Ahram: from Said's perspective Viorst's crime seems to have been his enthusiasm for the late King Hussein of Jordan. Hurt, Viorst sent a letter to Al Ahram plaintively complaining that despite "having spent much of my adult life reporting on the region and being recognized as a fair observer" [in other words, having long faithfully promoted the pro-Arab line] he had been insulted as "racist" by Said and part "of a Western media conspiracy that degrades the Arab image." Said's response was that Viorst was "as inaccurate and ill-informed a reader as he is a writer. Most of what he ascribes to me is a confection made up to mask his animus against the Arabs and his adoration of King Hussein, one of whose major achievements was to have granted Viorst an interview."*
One cannot help a frisson of pleasure as one reads this exchange in the Egyptian daily. These two deserve each other.
Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost.
* Thanks to the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] for the translation from the Egyptian press.
June 1999 - 11 - Outpost