When All Is Said and Done

John Meeks of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago had been doing research on Nietzsche and productive (kataphatic) discourse and taught religion at De La Salle Institute when he decided to publish an article on Edward ("stone-thrower") Said.

I found these two extracts worthy of attention:

... in Said’s hands the experience of being a Palestinian, of the irrecoverable [really?  well, that is good news] loss of “home” and homeland and of the atrocities [??? exactly which ones?] that have been passed over in silence by “the news” [are you kidding?] never translate into the ressentiment of an exclusive nationalism based on religion or ethnicity.

For the record, ressentiment is

a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, assigning blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying... a morality which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

But that is exactly what the Arabs of the former Mandate for Palestine territory have done and continue to do.  Theirs is a refined "victimhood" phenomenom.

Meeks continues -

Living as a Palestinian exile made it necessary for Said to exist, as he says, “between worlds” without succumbing to an Orwellian “tourism among the dogs.” [dogs??]...in the work of Edward Said lines of interaction are always brought to the forefront [like his PLO membership]. As an exile, Edward Said claimed to have existed between many worlds. For him this was not a source of tragedy but an opportunity for a truly cosmopolitan future. One vision of this future may be culled from the remembrance of Said by Daniel Barenbaim: addressing a room of music students (Arabs, Germans, and Israelis), Said reminded them of Weimar, city of Goethe and Buchenwald and “did so in a way that did not offend the Israelis, did not distribute collective guilt to the Germans and made the Arabs see the necessity of understanding that period in Jewish history.” He brought the very heterogeneous history of Weimar to students in a manner that justified neither guilt nor victimization but in a manner, as in all of his writing, that makes solidarity among divergent peoples possible. This, finally, is Edward Said’s poesis.

Oh how they fool themselves these academics.

P.S.

Excerpted this from an article just sent to me by Richard Landes:

Edward Said’s masterpiece of cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from othering Muslims.

^