University Professor Edward Said [correctly pronounced Sa'eed] is one of those Palestinian intellectual giants whose life was a bridge between East and West. He is virulently hated by the Zionists for his achievements, including his rejection of the Oslo process - he knew back in the mid 1990s that the Zionists were lying and that the Oslo accords were a trap for the Palestinians. The English pricks of the toilet paper The Telegraph still refer to this University Professor at Columbia University (the hightest honor the college bestows) as a charlatan, years after his death. Why? Because his insights on Palestine, on Israeli-Arab relations, on "Orientalism" as a cover for colonialism, and the future of Israel-Palestine make him a herald, a prophetic visionary of the deadend in which Zionists find themselves today with their supremacist and exclusivist ideologies.
Excerpts from a May 1997 Christian Science Monitor article on Said by Robert Marquand in his "Conversations with Outstanding Americans" column:
On the Oslo peace process: "The whole idea of trying to produce two states is probably at an end. The Oslo peace processis really in tatters...The lives of Israelis and Palestinians are hopelessly intertwined. There is no way to separate them. You can have fantasy and denial, or put people in ghettos. But in reality there is a common history. So we have to find a way to live together. It may take 50 years. But ... the ISraeli experience will gradually turn back towards the world they really live in, the Islamic Arab world, and that can only come through the Palestinians".
On Palestinian-Israeli relations: "I believe it is possible for us [Palestinians] to have a reconciliation with the Jews of Israel. But not unless we recognize their complex history, and they recognize ours. I don't think that has happened, and that is why there is no reconciliation".
On his intellectual courage: What makes Said outstanding, say admirers, is his Renaissance nature, his passionate intellectual voice on behalf of the voiceless, and his courage in speaking unpopular views. "He's an elightenment figure of an unusual type, and has been so under difficult circumstances" says writer and linguist Noam Chomsky, a longtime friend. "He's lived under police protection for a long time. It hasn't been easy". He has received death threats from Jewish extremist groups since 1985.
On identity: While many people [ignorant Americans usually] often assume he's a Muslim, he is an Episcopalian who attended Protestant schools and married a Quaker. Yet he writes piercingly about distortions of Islam in the Western press - while supporting writer Salman Rushdie who has lived under an Iranian Shiite "Fatwa" - death sentence. "My experience is one of a minority inside a minority," says Said from his book-lined Columbia University office. "Growing up, my family were Protestants in a Greek Orthodox community ... Our truest reality is expressed in the way we cross over from one place to another. We are migrants, perhaps hybrids, in, but not of, any situation in which we find ourselves. This is the deepest continuity of our lives".
For Said, the duty of the educated person is to constantly resist the narrowing confines of an ethnic or national identity - which leads to apartheid, racism, hatred, violence and war. His scholarship itself argues that no peoples or places are ever wholly "pure". They are always hybrids, products of cultural ferment and imitation, the interchanges of East and West, North and South. ":This is not to deny one's Islamic, Christian or Jewish roots", he says, but it means not allowing one's identity to freeze -blocking growth, the evolution of ideas, a larger sense of human identity".
On his seminal masterpiece, "Orientalism": In it he argues that European powers colonized other regions partly by a systematic creation of myths about Africa and Asia that denied these places a 'narrative' of their own in western centers of learning. A kind of "intellectual dispossession", he argues. The thesis of Orientalism proposes the existence of a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture", which originates from Western culture's long tradition of false, romanticized images of Asia, in general, and the Middle East in particular. Said wrote that such cultural representations have served as implicit justifications for the colonial and imperial ambitions of the European powers and of the U.S.
On his native Palestine: "Palestine and its past seems to me to have a kind of universal quality to it that makes it interesting for reasons that have little to do with the place itself ... It is a question of justice. What happened to the Palestinians, their experience of denial and dispossession since 1948 has a kind of drama toit as a tragedy.... THE OSLO ACCORDS WILL NOT LEAD TO A JUST PEACE . When you go there and see this 'peace' on the ground, you realize the Israelis have produced a document that has tied up the Palestinians into little bantustans without any sense of fulfilled expectations." He refused to lend his presence to the Oslo signing ceremony. He feels that the issues of land and peace in historic Palestine run so deeply through the question of justice and history that silence is a betrayal...The very corruption of the Oslo process means that basic unresolved questions like the Palestinian exile of 1948 must come up again. It is not lost on him that such issues resonate at a time when Jews themselves are making inroads in reparations, recovering Nazi gold in Swiss banks, stolen Jewish art in France, synagogues in Poland. "One can admire the way Israelis have always reminded the world of what they went through in the Holocaust and with anti-Semitism, and their persistence in making sure this history is put first in the table. Palestinian leaders have simply accepted the effacement of our history in 1948. That must be put in front of Israelis. I DON'T THINK THERE CAN EVER BE PEACE UNLESS THERE IS AN ATONEMENT, AN APOLOGY, SOME RESTITUTION FOR WHAT THEY DID. THEY DID IT! THEY DESTROYED A SOCIETY, DISPOSSESSED A PEOPLE AND HAVE OPPRESSED THEM EVER SINCE. THIS HISTORY MUST BE FACED, JUST AS IT WAS FOR THE JEWS AFTER WORLD WAR II."
His biography:
1935-1947: A Palestinian born in the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbiya to a prominent and wealthy family. His father becomes a US citizen after escaping the Ottoman Turkish draft in 1911. His mother is half-Lebanese, born in Nazareth. His early schooling at Saint Georges, an Anglican academy in Jerusalem. The family leaves for Cairo when Jewish forces take Talbiya and loses family home and business.
1948-51: Attends British-run Victoria College in Cairo during King Farouk's last years in power. Spends summers in Lebanon. After a "rowdy" spell, his father sends him to Mount hermon Academy in Massachusetts.
1952-57: Graduates from Princeton University. Spends a year in Cairo giving piano recitals and concerts, but opts to study literature at Harvard.
1957-1963: Focuses on new field of comparative literature. Earns doctorate from Harvard where he wins the Bowdoin Prize for work on Joseph Conrad. He is offered a post at Columbia.
1963-70: Establishes himself as a leading professor and gains tenure. Begins writing on Middle East after the six-day war in 1967. Visiting scholar at Harvard.
1970-76: Marries (second wife) Mariam, starts a family that includes son Wadie and daughter Najla. His year as a scholar in Beirut and a fellowship at Stanford produce his breakthough masterpiece, "Orientalism", his main theoretical work.
1977-82: Elected to the Board of the Palestinian National Council. Achieves popular acclaim with "The Question of Palestine", and "Covering Islam".
1983-88: Visiting professor at Yale and Johns Hopkins: Four books, one film, eight endowed lectures, including Cornell and Chicago. Seminal support for a two-state solution in Palestine.
1988-92: Breaks with Yasser Arafat. Calls Oslo peace accords a "sell-out". Visits Jerusalem after 45 years in exile.
1993-2003: Renounces "two-state" solution in favor of a "single state" with equal human, civil, political rights for all. Dies 24 September 2003 at 67 years of age in New York City. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Broumana, Mount-Lebanon, Lebanon. His headstone indicates he died on 25 September 2003.
The Zionists hate him because he elevated the Palestinian question in the Middle East to the same level as the Jewish question in the Europe of the early 20th century. By equating Palestinian sufffering with the Jewish suffering, he forced a balanced look at the Israel-Palestine question. Zionists have long tried to erase Palestinian identity so as to create their own "pure" Jewish state. Ongoing events after October 7, 2003, have proven Edward Said was right all along.
But Zionists continue to fume with rage at his existence in the intellectual mainstream. In 2016, California State University, Fresno, started examining applicants for a newly created Professorship in Middle East Studies named after Edward Said. After months of examining applicants, Fresno State canceled the search due to pressure from pro-Israeli Zionist individuals and groups.
For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said
No comments:
Post a Comment