-Caveat Lector-
>
>THE TRUTH AND EDWARD SAID
>By Jeff Jacoby
>
>September 28, 2000
>
>Edward Said, the world's most renowned Palestinian intellectual, was
exposed
>as a fraud last summer. The experience apparently taught him nothing.
>For decades Said had passed himself off as an exile-an Arab born and raised
>in Jerusalem only to be driven out by the Jews in the runup to the
>Arab-Israeli war of 1948. He had told the story often, lacing his narrative
>with poignant detail.
>"I feel even more depressed," he reminisced in March 1998, "when I remember
>my beautiful old house surrounded by pine and orange trees in Al-Talbiyeh
in
>east Jerusalem." In a BBC documentary he recalled his years at St.
George's,
>an Anglican prep school in Jerusalem; he and a boy named David Ezra, Said
>recollected, used to sit together in the back of the classroom. He told
>another interviewer in 1997 that he could still identify the rooms in his
>family's former house "where as a boy he read 'Sherlock Holmes' and
>'Tarzan,' and where he and his mother read Shakespeare to each other." All
>this was lost when his family fled from Talbiyeh in December 1947, driven
>out, as he explained, by the "Jewish-forces sound truck [that] warned Arabs
>to leave the neighborhood."
>But as Justus Reid Weiner showed in Commentary, the influential journal of
>opinion, Said's tragic tale was largely a fabrication. The Saids, it turned
>out, had lived in Egypt, not Palestine. Edward Said grew up and went to
>school in a posh neighborhood in Cairo, where his father had a thriving
>business. Now and then the family would visit cousins in Jerusalem; Edward
>was born during one such visit in 1935. But on his birth certificate, the
>Saids' place of residence was listed as Cairo; the space for indicating a
>local address in Palestine was left blank.
>Weiner looked into the expulsion of Talbiyeh's Arabs in 1947. It never
>happened. He checked the student registries at St. George's. There was no
>mention of Edward Said. He even interviewed David Ezra, the student with
>whom Said sat in the back of the room. Because of his bad eyesight, Ezra
>told Weiner, he had always sat up front.
>Said occupies a lofty perch in the world of letters: He holds an endowed
>chair in English and literature at Columbia University, he is a highly
>sought-after lecturer, and he has served, at various times, as president of
>the Modern Language Association, a member of the Council on Foreign
>Relations, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
>But he is known above all as a zealous champion of the Palestinian cause.
>For many years he sat on the Palestine National Council, the PLO's
>"parliament in exile," and was a close advisor to Yasser Arafat. He has
>savaged Israel and pressed the Palestinians' case in every forum
imaginable,
>from op-ed columns to radio broadcasts to congressional testimony. And his
>words were accorded great moral force, for wasn't Said himself a victim of
>Zionist usurpation? Hadn't he himself suffered displacement and exile?
>When the world learned that he wasn't and he hadn't, his moral authority
>shriveled. It was as if, one observer put it, "we found out that Elie
Wiesel
>spent the war in Geneva, not Auschwitz."
>One might have thought that the embarrassment of it all would convince Said
>to stop lying about himself. And yet his fabrications continue.
>During a visit to Lebanon in July, Said was seen hurling rocks over the
>border into Israel. Throwing stones at Israelis has been a popular pastime
>among Arab tourists in southern Lebanon ever since Israel withdrew in May.
>This stoning has drawn little international attention, even though several
>Israelis have been wounded, some permanently. But when Agence France Press
>released a photo of the world's most famous Palestinian intellectual
joining
>in the violence, it made the papers everywhere. Said was sharply condemned,
>even in quarters where he is normally only praised. The Beirut Daily Star
>was appalled that a man "who has labored . . . to dispel stereotypes about
>Arabs being 'violent'" would let himself "be swayed by a crowd into picking
>up a stone and lofting it across the international border." On Said's own
>campus, the Columbia Daily Spectator blasted his "hypocritical violent
>action" as "alien to this or any other institution of learning."
>His response was to shrug off the incident as merely "a symbolic gesture of
>joy"-and to lie. His rock, he said, had been "tossed into an empty place."
>Witnesses told a different story. London's Daily Telegraph reported that
>Said "stood less than 10 yards from Israeli soldiers in a two-story,
>blue-and-white watchtower from which flew five Israeli flags."
>As for the damning AFP photograph, Said professed surprise: "I had no idea
>that media people were there, or that I was the object of attention." But
>AFP had a very different explanation-as two Columbia professors, Awi
>Federgruen and Robert Pollack, found out when they contacted the press
>agency. What they learned, they wrote in the Spectator, was that "the
>photograph of [Said] throwing the rock was in fact delivered to this news
>agency by none other than Professor Said himself."
>For a man who has written that intellectuals are bound "to speak the truth,
>as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible," Said seems to have a
>hard time sticking to the facts about himself. Perhaps that is because he
>knows that there is no professional price to pay for his deceptions.
>When Weiner exposed Said's elaborate falsehoods last year, Columbia
>responded by doing-nothing. "Amazingly, Professor Said was not sanctioned
or
>reprimanded by the [university's] president," writes Weiner in a new essay
>in Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.
>"Nor has the dean, the board of trustees, or the university senate publicly
>addressed Said's dissimulation."
>To anyone familiar with Columbia's history, this lack of interest in a
>professor's deceit is remarkable. For Said is not the first famous member
of
>the English Department to be caught in a series of public lies. In the
>1950s, a junior instructor named Charles Van Doren won national acclaim for
>his brilliant run on the NBC quiz show "Twenty-One" That acclaim turned to
>scorn when it emerged that the show was rigged, and Columbia made it clear
>at once that it would not keep a known liar on its faculty. "The issue is
>the moral one of honesty and integrity of teaching," said Dean John G.
>Palfrey, and "if these principles are to continue to have meaning at
>Columbia," Van Doren could not remain. The young teacher was contrite, but
>to no avail. He left Columbia and never taught again.
>No such punishment-indeed, no punishment at all-was meted out to Said, even
>though his fraud was clearly worse. (As Weiner points out, "while Van Doren
>had to be coaxed by the producers of the program to compete dishonestly,
>Said initiated and carried out his deceit by himself.") Why the double
>standard?
>When it comes to mere mortals, Columbia still insists on honesty. Just a
few
>months ago a 19-year-old Columbia student who falsely told a professor that
>he had been in a car crash (in order to get more time on an assignment) was
>suspended for two years. Yet Said, whose concocted tale of exile and
>dispossession was far more elaborate and misled far more people, has faced
>no discipline whatsoever.
>A professor who spreads untruths is like a doctor who administers poison or
>a judge who takes bribes. Each betrays his calling. Each is a menace to
>society. Doctors who kill can be stripped of their license; corrupt judges
>can be impeached. But a professor who deceives-at Columbia, at any rate-is
>free to go on deceiving. Is it any wonder that Edward Said is still telling
>lies?
>(Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
><mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> .)
>
>2. The Latest Palestinian Books of Peace:
>
>Palestinian Media Watch Special Report: Virulently Anti Semitic book
>in use in the new Palestinian Authority curriculum
>
>by Itamar Marcus [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Thursday, September 28, 2000
>In early September the Palestinian Autonomous Authority [PA] issued
>15 new textbooks, comprising the full curricula for grades 1 and 6. The
>Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace [CMIP] has reviewed these books
>and the
>preliminary findings, that have been published in the world press,
>show that these new books do not educate for peace. They do not reconcile
>with
>the existence of Israel as a neighbor state, Israel is still classified
>in these texts as a colonialist country that conquered "Palestine" in
>1948.
>The maps of the Middle East in these books omit mention of Israel all the
>land
>between Lebanon and Egypt is labeled "Palestine".
>
>However, far more severe is the virulent anti-Semitism found in old
>book "Our Country Palestine" (by Mustafa al-Deba'a, published in 1947 and
>expanded in 1965) which is in use in the new curriculum under the
>heading "activity" to teach about the children's towns ["Our Beautiful
>Language" for sixth grade, p.110]. With the aim of endearing "Our Country
>Palestine" upon the
>children, the new textbook devotes three pages to the book, heaping
>praises
>on
>both it and its author, proclaiming it a "Great Book" and elevating it and
>the
>story of how it was written to the level of a sort of Palestinian Epic.
>The
>"activity" includes going to the school or city library for the book.
>
>The following are examples of the teachings from prominent locations
>in this "great book":
>
>A banner on the title page of Volume I:
>"There is no alternative to destroying Israel"
> >From the introduction to Volume II:
>
>"Perhaps Allah brought the Jews to our land so that their demise
>would be here, as it was in their wars with Rome"
>
> >From the back cover of Volume I:
>"[the book] will demonstrate the fraudulence of the Jewish claim, that
>Palestine is theirs by historical right, which is the greatest lie
>known to humanity. The Jews were foreigners who strayed to it, and their
>existence there was terminated 2,000 years ago. The Arabs, on the other
>hand,
>settled it in pre-historic times and subsequently ruled unceasingly for
>thousands of years..."
>
> >From the introduction (p. ix):
>
>"The Arabs, and not the Jews, are those who have the connection [to
>the land] and the right. The return of the Jews to Palestine and
>permitting
>them to establish a Jewish State contradicts history..."
>
>The book is dedicated to:
>"...those who are battling for the expulsion of the enemy from our
>land!"
>
> >From the introduction (p. viii):
>"It is undeniably conclusive from this part of the book that the
>Jewish claim to historic rights to Palestine has no justification, it is a
>deceitful and disproved claim with no parallel in history, it is a blatant
>lie...
>as to the attachment of the Arabs to Palestine and their historic right to
>it,
>this is eternal and clear... they have resided in it since the dawn of the
>land's history, before there were Jews in the world, their attachment has
>never been severed and continues to this day..."
>
>And:
>"The Jews entered our homeland and left it just as other transient
>nations have entered it and left it"
>
>The book describes the evil of Jewry and their desire to dominate in
>language that is reminiscent of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion",
>including exposing the Jewish goal "...to establish a global Jewish
>empire,
>whose territory will be not only from the Nile to the Euphrates and from
>Medina to Kuwait - the true goal of the Jews is to rob the majority of all
>the
>Arab homeland. [p. 11]
>
>And:
>"The Jews have no places left in Palestine they claim are holy sites
>to them except the Wailing Wall... the Moslems permitted the Jews, out of
>kindness and generosity, to visit this wall... as to what the Jews claim
>it
>is
>theirs, house of worship and cemeteries located in Palestinian territory,
>well
>these are the property of Christians and Moslems... Palestine, the gift of
>the
>heavens to the earth is today the subject of the heart's aspirations for
>Christian's
>and Moslems representing half the world's population- and the struggle
>waged in it is not between Moslems and Jews alone, rather it is between
>Christianity and Islam on the one side, and Zionism on the other." [p. 9,
>10-11]
>
>Banner on the chapter The Beer Sheba Region:
>"The thieves wish to settle millions of Jews in the Beer Sheba
>region..."
>
>Subheading of the chapter: The Jews in Our Country:
>"Palestine was never anything but an artificial environment for the
>Jews."
>
>[Vol. I, p. 543 -quote from Gustav Lubon]
>
>* 30-
>
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