She Doesn't Get It

Poor Mariam Said, widow of Edward Said.

She writes a letter published in...yes, the NYTimes arguing against David Brooks on the issue of Samuel Huntington's criticism of the Arab world, b ut still doesn't get it.

Here:

...Mr. Huntington’s essay and subsequent book, in which he asserted that the peoples of the Islamic world were incapable of developing societies rooted in freedom and democracy, which he perceived to be essentially “Western values,” sparked an extensive debate in the Arab world and among Arab communities worldwide. The Arab media covered it extensively, and what they said and wrote was totally ignored or dismissed by their Western counterparts.

My late husband, Edward W. Said, was among the prominent voices in strong opposition to Mr. Huntington’s thesis. He wrote and published in English for the Western world. Very few listened to him. It took revolutions to finally hear our voices.

But her husband, English or not, was a great champion of less-than-Western values. And he perverted the histoprical record vis-a-vis Israel, was a PLO advisor and threw a stone at Israel after it withdrew from Lebanon.

Such a scholar of disorientalism.

^

NYTimes Glosses Over Said Sin

Reporting on the one-woman play "Palestine" by Edward Said's daughter, Najla, the NYTimes recalls an incident:-

Ms. Said’s play revisits a 2000 international incident over a widely published photograph of her father at the Lebanese border, about to throw a stone at an abandoned Israeli guardhouse.

Ms. Said casts his action as part of a stone-throwing competition with her older brother, Wadie, with little political significance. Her father at the time called it “a symbolic gesture of joy” that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon had ended. His detractors urged Columbia to reprimand him or to repudiate his action, but university officials decided that no action was needed.

Actually, Said was throwing a rock at an Israel army post across the border.





Let's be exact about that.

He could have mooned the soldiers, or used his middle-finger, but a rock is violence, not just a symbol but the actual act of violence in of itself.

And that's what roiled us all at the time.

But Najla redeems herself, to an extent, when she is quoted:

“When I hear the word Palestine, I hear my dad’s voice saying it. But I don’t know what it is, because it’s not a place for me...I don’t know it; I have no connection to it. Even my dad was not really connected to the actual, geographical place — for him it was an idea, a struggle for equality and human rights.”

Najla, I, too, don't know what it is.


P.S.

And who is that breaking bread with Said?

Wagner & Said: Off-key

Wagner’s anti-Semitism

Sir, – David Matthews (July 25) terms me “the severest of Wagner’s critics” and quotes Edward Said’s description of me as “a fundamentalist . . . a Khomeini of the arts”. Though I take any insult from Said (himself a noted patron of extremism in the arts and politics alike) as a compliment, the more serious point at issue – whether Wagner’s anti-Semitism can be read into his operas – is one where many more moderate listeners may incline to Said’s view that Wagner’s anti-Semitism stopped at his musical doorstep. I am afraid, however, that this comforting thought is coming increasingly to be seen as a false friend. Analysis of the musical, as well as the dramatic and philosophical content of the operas, clearly shows an anti-Semitic intent. For example, Jean-Jacques Nattiez has exposed how Wagner cleverly inserted a nasty little musical parody of Meyerbeer’s “Jewish” style into Alberich’s exchanges with the Rhinemaidens, even to the point of doubling the voice line in the cellos à la Meyerbeer. And there are of course the well-known more blatant caricatures of Jews in Meistersinger and Siegfried, whose first act was described by no less a Wagnerian than Mahler as soaked in anti-Semitism, both musically and dramatically.

Said, of course, in his usual extremist way, would take it that analysis of this kind would doom one to perpetual stagings of Wagner that would accentuate the anti-Semitic content of the operas. At the notorious Bayreuth conference on Wagner and the Jews in 1998, I was pointedly asked about this. Not at all, was my answer – how boring it would be to have a party-line prescription for a sole, politically correct way of doing Wagner. What Said and his admirers refuse to admit, though, is that anti-Semitism is certainly one of the central themes of Wagner’s operas, along with broader human concerns, and it is certainly worth bringing this out on occasion, as with Patrice Chereau’s centenary Bayreuth production of the Ring. No one – not I, nor my like-minded colleagues including Barry Millington, Marc Weiner and Gottfried Wagner – would wish to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the operas if they wish to remain oblivious to their intrinsic anti-Semitism. But for any self-styled critical expert or even enthusiast to keep on denying that the anti-Semitism is there is a failure of critical honesty and indeed of real understanding of Wagner. As the late Michael Dibdin wrote in reviewing my book, knowing the anti-Semitism is there, “we must continue to listen to Wagner, but listen uncomfortably”.

PAUL LAWRENCE ROSE
Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania.

"I Don't Like Said; and Israel, Too"

That's Edward Said to whom we are referring. The "Orientalism" 'scholar'.

Anyway, there's been a discussion over at the Times' Literary Supplement these past 3-4 weeks over the worthiness of Said's scholarship. And what interested me was this snippet:-

...Said’s attack on Bernard Lewis would have been more effective if it had been more accurate and more thoroughly researched. I disagree with a great deal of what Lewis has written in recent years. I also regard Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as barbarous and unfair and have always thought that our war in Iraq is illegal, immoral and stupid. Yet none of these things impels me to endorse Said’s account of past Western literary and scholarly encounters with the Middle East, for it was in general, as well as in almost every detail, false.

ROBERT IRWIN
39 Harleyford Road, London SE11.

And I was always taught that if you are doubtful, continue pressing your doubt, researching it. Who knows? You might discover that if Said's scholarship isn't genuine scholarship, maybe his politics aren't genuine politics.