Palestinian Columbia University professor and hater of all things Jewish and American, Edward Said, has bit the big one. Gone. Finit.
Stanley Kurtz reported in National Review that:
In his regular columns for the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram, Said has made his views about America crystal clear. Said has condemned the United States, which he calls, “a stupid bully,” as a nation with a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries, and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.” Said has actively urged his Egyptian readers to replace their naive belief in America as the defender of liberty and democracy with his supposedly more accurate picture of America as an habitual perpetrator of genocide.
Said has also called for the International Criminal Court to prosecute Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, and General Wesley Clark as war criminals. According to Said, the genocidal actions of these American leaders make Slobodan Milosevic himself look like “a rank amateur in viciousness.” Said has even treated the very idea of American democracy a farce. He has belittled the reverence in which Americans hold the Constitution, which Said dismisses with the comment that it was written by “wealthy, white, slaveholding, Anglophilic men.”
He generally represented the worst of modern Middle Eastern studies, and the world is better off without him.
(Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer)
After thoroughly reading about ten articles written by Mr. Said and perusing about twenty others, I have decided how Edward Said’s life can be summed: A complainer. He is an intellectual, liberal snob who just happens to be Jerusalem-born. He wrote article after article regurgitating the liberal grievances born in the schools he attended (Princeton and Harvard). For all of his education, he never suggested a single, positive thing that could be done to improve the situation between Isreal and the Palestinians.
From an article in Al-Ahram in May of this year, Edward Said wrote:
“What we must have are Arab societies released finally from their self-imposed state of siege between ruler and ruled. Why not instead welcome democracy in the defence of freedom and self- determination? Why not say, we want each and every citizen willing to be mobilised in a common front against a common enemy? We need every intellectual and every political force to pull together with us against the imperial scheme to redesign our lives without our consent. Why must resistance be left to extremism and desperate suicide bombers?”
What was worse about his writing than the liberal tone was his complete ignorance of the Palestinian people or their plight. He constantly questioned why this group had not become a united front against Isreal and the U.S. while forming the most utopian of democracies. He didn’t understand that Yassir Arafat is a dictator unwilling to let the Palestinian people become a cohesive unit. To form a true Palestinian democracy would have been to end Arafat’s power.
Not to sound too much like the broken record I am when it comes to the “plight” of the Palestinians, I’m going to say again that even without Arafat, I don’t think that the Palestinians are ready or able to have a country of their own. They’re far too immersed in backwards, militant Islam-fueled hatred to be trusted. Ultimately, a Palestinian state would become yet another terrorism factory that would bomb school buses and pizza parlors and shopping malls across Israel and the West. Their plight is rooted in their very souls and identity, and not likely to be ameliorated within a hundred lifetimes, let alone ours.
Said was worse: a wannabe. Having tasted all that modern America had to offer, he still railed against the U.S. in expensive western suits and spewed hatred and loathing for Israel from the podiums (podia?) of Columbia University.