[Reader-list] Edward Said and the War Against Terrorism

[Yazad Jal]

A different point of view on Edward Said.
-yazad

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Edward Said and the War Against Terrorism
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 8, 2002
by Ronald Radosh

A FEW WEEKS AGO, writing about the statement by 60 intellectuals on why
the US is at war, I wrote that I found their position "unnecessarily
defensive," and that reading their arguments, one had to wonder why it
was even necessary for them to spell out in such great lengths why the
American response to September 11 met the criterion of a "just war."
 Now, in this "Thoughts About America," written for Al-Ahram Weekly
(March 2), Edward Said has given us good reasons for why such a
statement was necessary. We can also be thankful that the
ultra-left-wing Z Magazine on line has seen fit to reprint Said's essay,
because it reveals for all those who have praised the Columbia
University Professor for his brilliance and comprehension to get the
full measure of what he really thinks, and what kind of arguments he
offers. Reading Said, it is, quite frankly, hard for me to believe that
anyone can take him seriously from this point on.

Said, for those who are not aware, is one of the most influential of
all contemporary radical theorists. One of the founders of what is
called post-colonial studies, an offshoot of neo-Marxist French cultural
criticism, he devised the theory of "the Orient" as a discourse
constructed by Western imperialism. His 1978 book Orientalism perhaps
single handedly created the idea that the concept of the Orient became
the mechanism by which the West sought to dominate and gain authority
over the Arab world. To Said, it was only a concept which never existed,
but which was created by Westerners as a tool to subjugate the region.
Said's work has been subject to brutal criticism by the distinguished
scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, who has argued that Said has
oversimplified the dichotomy between East and West, as well as having
exaggerated the nature of colonial reality. Most recently, Martin Kramer
has argued in Ivory Towers on Sand that the entire field of Middle
Eastern studies became ideologically distorted as a result of Said's
work. His Orientalism, as Hillel Halkin writes, was nothing but "a crass
and politically motivated attack on the entire tradition of Arabic
studies in the West," and hence "quickly became...the Bible of Middle
Eastern Studies."

Said essentially became the person most responsible for creating the
idea that a paradigm of development in the Middle East was an evil
construct of Western capitalism, and hence had to be resisted. Said,
once a member of the Palestinian National Council, broke a few years ago
with Yasser Arafat because he found him too moderate. And a few years
ago, as readers of this page are aware, Said was exposed as having lied
in his own memoir, in which he depicted himself as an Arab who was born
and raised in Jerusalem and driven out by the Israelis after the 1948
war. His story, as we learned, was completely false. He and his family
lived in Egypt, not Palestine, and Said attended a posh private school
in Cairo. And in July 2000, Said was photographed throwing rocks over
the Lebanese border into Israel, attempting to hit Israelis on the other
side. The Columbia Daily Spectator, his own university's student paper,
commented that his "hypocritical violent action" was "alien to this or
any other institution of higher learning."

Edward Said's damage, however, is far deeper when he uses the pen. There
are plenty of thugs available to throw rocks, and undoubtedly, he did so
to show his solidarity with those he calls part of the "resistance." A
good example is what he has written in his very latest screed. He
writes, for example, that he deeply resents having to accept the picture
of the US being involved in a just war "against something unilaterally
labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisors." Think a moment about
that sentence. Said implies that there is no terrorist war, only a
unilateral declaration of such by the Bush administration. Indeed, Said
continues to present the preposterous claim that the Bush administration
is in effect an "American Taliban," that brands all those who dissent as
guilty of anti-American behavior. Said, of course, sees America on a
course of future aggression, symbolized by the desire to target Saddam
Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq. And of course, Said refers to the
Taliban and Al Queda prisoners being held at Guantanamo base as an
abduction of individuals about whom the US has decided "unilaterally"
that the Geneva Convention does not apply to them.

To Said, the problem is not that we in the West and in our own country
are faced with a major and dangerous terrorist foe, a foe inspired by
radical Islam---but rather the problem is "how to deal with the
unparalleled and unprecedented power of the United States," whose
rulers--a "small circle of men,"--have decided to unleash an unjust war
against the entire Muslim world. We have, in clear words, his main
point: The enemy of the world is the United States and our
democratically elected leaders. Among other crimes, it has carried out
what he calls the "Israelisation of US Policy," symbolized by what he
sees as a kowtowing to Arial Sharon. And to make his point, he magnifies
what is in reality an insignificantly small number of Israeli reservists
who signed a statement against serving in the Palestinian areas as proof
that Palestinian terror bombings--which he of course calls--"resisting
occupation," has "finally brought fruit."

 To Said, the Bush administration is wearing the mantle of
"righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destinies," while its
enemies are "equally absolute evil." Let us pause a moment. The face of
evil, is in fact, clear. Contrary to Edward Said, its face is that of
our enemies---the Taliban, al Qaeda, and its terrorist allies in nations
like Iraq and Iran. What Said attempts to do is to deflect our attention
away from this very real threat, and to make it appear that the Bush
administration simply views any nation with different views as an enemy,
or as he puts it, "eradicating everyone who opposes the US." In his
eyes, since there is no actual threat, you have bureaucrats like
Condoleezza Rice chomping at the bit to use all the weaponry available
to them simply because they see the world "as a distant target" for our
"real and virtually unopposed power."

What shocks Said is that many intellectuals seem to have woken up, and
actually support the war against terrorism, even though many of them
consider themselves to be on the Left. Even Thomas Friedman of the New
York Times is faulted by Said for supposedly tiresomely sermonizing to
the Arabs, without showing any of the "slightest tone of
self-criticism." Evidently, Mr. Said has not read the many Friedman
columns in which the author regularly argues that Israel has to give up
its settlements, or most recently, accept the phony Saudi "peace plan"
which was first made known to Friedman---who thrilled at the scoop, has
accepted it as a meaningful plan despite its plan deficiencies.
 To Said, to be an intellectual means that one has to be "critical of
great power." But what if great power happens to be correct, and on the
right side of the moral, political and military issue? What he thinks
intellectuals should do is offer a "restraining and a comparative
perspective;" in other words, use their intellectual power to morally
disarm the public, so that America's enemies will have the advantage.
That is why he is so upset about the rather weak endorsement of the war
by the 60 American intellectuals. That these people, so many of them
self-defined critics of US policy, have come to their senses---is itself
unacceptable to Said. Of course, Said misstates the credentials of the
statement's authors. The noted political scientist and author Jean
Bethke Elshtain, is called a "conservative feminist academic;" a
description so far from accurate it is virtual parody, while Michael
Walzer, the editor of Dissent magazine, is called a "supposed
socialist."

I guess that means that a "real" socialist is one who agrees with Said,
that the US is the sole enemy of the world's peoples. Walzer's sin, of
course, is that he seeks to "justify everything Israel does" and that he
has "vaguely leftist principles," unlike Said---who opposes everything
Israel does and whose "leftist principles" are 100 percent redder than
the rose. Somehow, all the various criticisms Walzer has made over the
years about Israeli policy and his well known opposition to the Israeli
political Right is non-existent. Why is Walzer now proclaimed by Said to
be one who has "give up all pretension to leftism?" The answer: he sees
America "as a righteous warrior against terror and evil." That in and of
itself is revealing. What Edward Said means is that to be on the Left
means one must define oneself as opposing the US war against terrorism.
That means that all those Leftists who now firmly support the war, like
Todd Gitlin, are objectively in the enemy camp. The familiar logic, to
those of us who know the mindset of the Old Left, is that of Stalinism.
You are either a supporter of the Party line, or "objectively" an "enemy
of the people."

It is most interesting that Said continues to take offense at the
concept that the Bush administration seeks to make clear all the time--
that the war is not a war against Islam. Said is offended because he
believes that this is just rhetoric, and that in fact, the US is using
the phony war against terror as an excuse to depict the United States as
the "aggrieved party," when he thinks everyone knows that the principles
the US supposedly stands for (human rights, freedom of conscience and
religion, etc.) are "more contravened than followed," and moreover, "the
murder of Arabs and Muslims" are "neither mentioned nor tabulated." One
might wonder when and where the US has moved to slaughter these Arabs
and Muslims? To Said it is clear. He uses in making up his tally the
"hundreds of thousands killed with American weapons by Israel"--and
those "innocent civilians" supposedly killed in Iraq because of US
sanctions. And of course, he admonishes us; we cannot forget "the
millions killed in Vietnam."  Finally Edward Said's conclusions are what
are most amazing about his essay. In considering that these
intellectuals, however tepidly, now support the US war against
terrorism---he sees a replication of the creation of a new generation of
Cold War liberal intellectuals. The statement of the 60 academics, he
writes, is "the opening salvo in a new cold war declared by the US" that
equals that of those extremist Arabs who argue that they are at war with
"the West and America." That is strange, since the whole thrust of his
entire statement is in fact that the US is at war with Islam, despite
the assurances of the Bush administration. One would think that he
should save his energy for debating those of the Arab peoples who are
proclaiming such a war, instead of opposing the US response to
terrorism. Said also engages in a bit of conspiracy theory: he argues
that the statement of the 60 "wasn't published here" because "it would
be so severely criticized by American readers." Wrong again: the article
got wide publicity in the United States, was featured in a Washington
Post news article, and was circulated on line with a plea for more
signatures and funds for placement of advertisements. Moreover, Said
slanders its authors by declaring the statement to be part of an
"extremely well-funded Pentagon scheme to put out propaganda as part of
the war effort," meant only for "foreign consumption." This is the kind
of charge the Left always makes. No evidence is needed. It is enough to
plant the seed for his gullible Arab audience, which already believes,
as we know, that the Mossad staged the Sept. 11 attack on the United
States.

In fact, Edward Said's "Thoughts About America" is important for one
reason: it is in fact exactly what he writes the statement of the 60 in
support of the war is, an essay representative of "a new and degraded
era in the production of intellectual discourse." Finally, unlike those
British intellectuals who on the eve of World War II argued for pacifism
and appeasement of Hitler, some American intellectuals are breaking with
their long held left-wing themes, and facing reality. To Edward Said,
this means that they have "flagrantly" aligned themselves with power,
instead of pressing "restraint" and "understanding." Somehow, believing
that Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and the Mullahs of Iran would
respond to a plea for "understanding," at this point, rings a little bit
hollow.

Most significantly Said ends by comparing the intellectual's support of
the United States to "the bad old days of the intellectual war against
communism," which he sees as having been filled with "too many
compromises, collaborations and fabrications" and which he says was
"subsidized and underwritten by the government (the CIA especially)"
which sponsored magazines like Encounter and also "underwrote scholarly
research, travel and concerts as well as artistic exhibitions." (That
evil old USA; the KGB spent millions of rubles subsidizing Communist
Parties throughout the West, and the US responded by sending our
cultural representatives abroad, and by providing the funds for an
intellectual response to Communism by independent anti-Communist liberal
and socialist intellectuals, who also filled the pages of the subsidized
journal with many critical articles about life in the United States.)
To Said, the few embattled anti-Communist intellectuals, who
unfortunately were far outnumbered by the growing band of anti
anti-Communist intellectuals---people who filled the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel in New York for the infamous 1949 Waldorf Peace Conference run by
the American Communist Party---were a group of "militantly unreflective
and uncritical intellectuals" whose opposition to Communism he calls a
case of "complicity" with the CIA and something which brought a
"disastrous dimension" to the intellectual's world. They became part, he
says, of "the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate critics,
and restrict thought." This, of course, is unadulterated left-wing
revisionist history---the old now familiar charge that liberal opponents
of Communism were all McCarthyites.

In fact, those brave intellectuals who dared to break with the
stranglehold the Left had on the cultural apparatus since the 1930s were
the real intellectual heroes; they risked not getting published, facing
opprobrium, and yet they dared to tell the truth about the Communist
tyranny so many of their colleagues swallowed hook, line and sinker.
Those intellectuals, who have responded as American patriots, even
though many of them are critics of aspects of US policy and are opposed
to conservative politics, are in fact acting as intellectuals should
act. They have carefully assessed the situation facing our country,
looked at the real threat now being posed, and have stood with those
daring to face up to what is necessary. It is writers like Edward
Said-(I hate to use the term intellectual to describe his drivel)---who
want those in the intellectual and academic communities to in fact
repeat the "shameful" antics of the anti anti-Communist intellectuals of
the 40s and 50s, and to apologize for tyrants and to continue to condemn
the United States. As Said says, "we must be on our guard against and
resist" such advice.

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Ronald Radosh is author of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New
Left and the Leftover Left, (Encounter Books,2001,) and is a columnist for
FrontPageMagazine.com.