by Bruce Bawer
He died 20 years ago, but after October 7, Edward Said is bigger than ever.
Writing in The Guardian on February 15, one Moustafa Bayoumi said that Israel’s current actions in Gaza are so “evil” that many observers just aren’t sure how to react. So what are they doing? According to Bayoumi, they’re turning to the late Edward Said (1935-2003), a Palestinian propagandist who was a professor at Columbia University for forty years, “as their guide.”
Who was Edward Said? He was one of the leading founders of postcolonial studies, an academic discipline which, simply put, seeks to discredit Western scholars’ writings about non-Western societies – because they’re tainted by racism and imperialism, naturally – and to blame the failings of those non-Western societies, whatever they may be, on the malevolent Western powers that once upon a time so cruelly colonized them. The goal of all this was simple: to demonize the West – and exalt the rest.
Said, author of Orientalism (1978), never saw a non-Western society whose worst attributes he couldn’t excuse, lie about, or ignore. But, as the son of a Palestinian Christian father and a Lebanese Christian mother, he was especially preoccupied with Arabs and Islam. For many years Said, who identified as a Palestinian-American, even claimed – in numerous essays, interviews, reference books, and a BBC documentary – to have been brought up in Jerusalem and fled from there to Cairo with his family when he was twelve; in fact, as a 1999 Commentary article by Justus Reid Weiner revealed, Said was raised in Cairo and only spent brief periods in Jerusalem.
Indeed, the Jerusalem house in which he claimed to have grown up, and in which “the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber lived” after the Saids were supposedly forced to leave for Cairo (“Buber of course was a great apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but he didn’t mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced”), belonged in fact to Said’s aunt – and it was she who evicted the Bubers, not the other way around. Far from being a poor child refugee, Said was the son of a rich Cairo businessman who sent him to an elite prep school in Massachusetts and then to Princeton and Harvard.
Weiner wasn’t alone in exposing Said’s deceptions. In a 1982 article for the New York Review of Books, Bernard Lewis, the longtime dean of Islamic Studies, punched innumerable holes in Said’s arguments. Orientalism, Said contended, was principally a project of former imperial powers – Britain and France. In fact, Lewis pointed out, the historical study of Arabic and other Eastern cultures originally “had its main centers in Germany and neighboring countries,” none of which had ever been colonial powers in north Africa or south Asia. Lewis proceeded to make a devastating case that Said, in his treatments of Islam and of Western coverage thereof, exhibited a “disdain of facts” and betrayed “surprising gaps” in his knowledge of Islam and Arabic.
Weiner’s eye-opening revelations and Lewis’s severe critique should’ve put a big dent in Said’s vaunted reputation as an expert on the Middle East and a pious devotee of the Truth. But he was one of those leftist heroes whose fans would’ve stuck by him no matter what.
And why was that? Because Said gave Israel-haters and lovers of Palestinians – and, more broadly, lovers of Arabs and Islam – just what they wanted. Routinely, and with exquisite finesse, he dodged, to the fullest extent possible, the dark, violent, and supremacist reality of the Islamic religion, as spelled out in the Koran, while instead focusing on, and castigating, negative – and honest – Western depictions of that world. In doing so, he presented himself as a supremely serious, knowledgeable, and civilized student of both Western and Islamic cultures even as he characterized Western writers who spelled out the facts about Islam as at best simplistic and uninformed, and at worst racist.
Chronically, he asserted or implied that atrocities committed in the name of Islam were reactive, a response to Western oppression or abuse; it was not for Said to expatiate upon the doctrine of jihad or the stringent canons of sharia law. On occasion, even as he refrained from dwelling on the moral depravity of even the worst Islamic atrocities, he made what seemed to amount to aesthetic judgments about Western accounts thereof. In a 1988 article for the New Left Review, for example, he referred to “the unpleasant tingling induced by the word terrorism” – but chose not to address the far greater “unpleasantness” of experiencing a terrorist act like, say, 9/11 or the Boston Marathon bombing or the 2015 mass shooting at the Bataclan Theater in Paris.
In that same New Left Review article, Said went on: “I find the entire arsenal of words and phrases that derive from the concept of terrorism both inadequate and shameful.” As I commented in a 2002 Hudson Review essay about Said, “the arsenals that matter, where contemporary terrorism is concerned, are composed not of ‘words and phrases’ but of guns, knives, and bombs.”
But for Said such explicit references to Islamic weaponry were, it seemed, downright vulgar – undeserving of the attention of a serious scholar with a fine-tuned ear for, shall we say, discordant and disagreeable language. A learned sage such as himself, he made clear, should approach acts of mass jihadist butchery by attending not, in the manner of some lowbrow tabloid sensationalist, to the messy facts on the ground – all those blasted-apart young Ariana Grande fans at the Manchester Arena! all those pedestrians mowed down by a truck on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice! – but by soberly seeking out “explanation[s]” and “mitigating circumstances” and placing such acts in the context of “other dysfunctions, symptoms and maladies of the contemporary world.”
Said filled whole books, including Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), with such abhorrent, reality-avoiding drivel – sentence after sentence of Latinate words that effectively transported the reader from the coarse, concrete facts of terrorism into the more sophisticated realm of the abstract, the cognitive, the analytical. He also spouted this sort of bilge very frequently on American network TV, where – dapper, smooth-talking, invariably wearing an elegant suit and tie – Said seemed the very embodiment of scholarly seriousness and intellectual probity and was invariably presented not just as one more tendentious commentator but as the very face and voice of the noble Palestinian cause.
This, then, is the man whose works are now, Mahmoud Bayoumi tells us, being cited by people who consider Israel’s current campaign of self-defense “evil.”
In his Guardian essay, Bayoumi quotes with approval a recent statement by Timothy Brennan, a biographer of Said, who wishes that Said were here today to explain to everybody what “the Zionist project really is in practice.” Of course, on October 7, the world saw what the Hamas project really is in practice. What we’ve been seeing ever since is a sovereign nation exercising its right to defend itself from savages. That, ladies and gentlemen, is “the Zionist project,” and it can be summed up in two words: “Never again.”
But for disciples of Said such as Bayoumi and Brennan, the proper rhetorical approach to the present situation is to drop the events of October 7 down the memory hole – or to come as close as is reasonably possible to doing so – and to act as if the IDF charged into Gaza without provocation and out of sheer villainy.
Indeed, in his heyday as a slick apologist for villainy and a merchant of lies, Said was downright awe-inspiring in the extent to which he ignored brutal Islamic actions while accusing the West – Israel included – of precisely those kinds of actions. In his Guardian essay, Bayoumi quotes the following passage from Said – not as a sample of his hero’s extraordinary duplicity, but as an example of the Great One at his eloquent best:
I cannot understand how raw, naked evidence can be overridden by American intellectuals just because the “security” of Israel demands it. But it is overridden or hidden no matter how overpoweringly cruel, no matter how inhuman and barbaric, no matter how loudly Israel proclaims what it is doing. To bomb a hospital; to use napalm against civilians; to require Palestinian men and boys to crawl, or bark, or scream “Arafat is a whore’s son”; to break the arms and legs of children; to confine people in desert detention camps without adequate space, sanitation, water or legal charge; to use teargas in schools: All these are horrific acts, whether they are part of a war against ‘terrorism’ or the requirements of security.
First of all, full points to Bayoumi for – in the wake of October 7 – quoting a passage in which Said put the term “security” in scare quotes, as if Israel’s concern for its own security were a myth, a lie, a ludicrous pretext. Having thus dismissed that concern, Said went on to accuse Israel of several kinds of transgressions. Recall that Said has elsewhere charged Westerners with crying “terrorism” without ever seeking “explanation[s]” or “mitigating circumstances” or context; but when it came to charging Israel with a litany of crimes, Said had no interest in discussing what might have led Israel to commit them – if, indeed, it did commit them.
If Bayoumi – who, not incidentally, is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader (2001) as well as of The Selected Works of Edward Said: 1966–2006 (2021) – quotes Said’s j’accuse, it’s obviously because he wants us to see it as applying to Israel’s conduct of its current war on Gaza. Typically absent, however, is any acknowledgment that Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians, let them elect Hamas to run it, and looked the other way for years while Hamas spent international humanitarian aid on weaponry and tunnels. Absent is an admission that the Israeli government allowed Gazans to hold jobs in Israel proper, where many of them worked for families who trusted them and, in many cases, surely loved them – families to which, early on the morning of October 7, those trusted and beloved Gazans led Hamas terrorists, step by wicked step, so that they might commit acts of rape, slaughter, and dismemberment.
Hospital bombings? If Israel bombs a hospital, it’s because Hamas has used it as a cover; if Israel has killed civilians, it’s because Hamas has used them as human shields. Breaking the bones of children? It’s Hamas, not the IDF, that targets civilians. And whereas hospital staffs in Gaza have been shown to be heartless Hamas collaborators, Israeli hospitals consistently respond to Palestinian terror with compassionate medical care for sick and injured Palestinians. Then there’s the fact that Palestinians are taught from infancy to hate Israelis beyond all reason – whereas October 7 would never have happened if so many Israelis living near Gaza hadn’t been brought up to think far better of their Palestinian neighbors than they turned out to deserve.
Of course, as the pro-Hamas protests in the streets of North American and European cities have shown us in recent months, millions of people in the West firmly reject all of the above facts. Many of them are Muslims. Others are non-Muslims who attended schools and colleges where the postcolonial pap dreamed up by Edward Said is absolute, unquestioned orthodoxy. Islam is, in point of fact, a totalitarian, triumphalist ideology of bloodthirsty conquest; but Said managed to convince a large swath of the English-speaking world that it is, on the contrary, a peaceful faith whose adherents are innocent victims of irrational prejudice. The deeply unfortunate fact is that while Said is no longer with us, the intellectual snake pit that he constructed out of wholesale slander and evasion is, thanks to countless ideologically twisted professors, and to keepers of the flame like Bayoumi, a more powerful – and inimical – force than ever.
Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/merchant-of-lies/
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