VIDEO:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/replay.html?event_id=46

This Video has both his entire talk and the very important Q&A session immediately after it.

I watched the video and ran an mp3 capture while watching. It's an informative talk -- worth checking out.

I'll upload the mp3 files in the event someone might want to use them for CD-ROM, etc.

The first file here is the introduction to Said's talk. The first speaker is the UCB's Chancellor, who introduces Professor Nezar AlSayyad, the chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Professor AlSayyad then introduces Said.

Introduction
Runtime: 9:32

If you come by this mp3 at radio.indymedia.org click on the following to pull up the page with full context:

http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/03/1578978.php

Here's the Q&A session.

Runtime: 24:20

for radio.indymedia.org visitors needing context, click on this:

http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/03/1578978.php

Here's Dr. Said's presentation
Runtime: 1:03:53

for radio.indymedia.org visitors needing context, click on this:

http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/03/1578978.php

Professor of Lies, Hate and Terror





By Rachel Neuwirth | February 28, 2003

I was saddened that Professor Edward Said of Columbia University could present false statements as he did a week ago at UCLA. Said leveled charges against Israel and America, barely mentioning the endless terrorism aimed at Israel by the Arab world and the Arab/Palestinians in particular. Said presented the "Palestinians" as mere victims, never mentioning the countless acts of terrorism aimed at Israel and America.

The world faces the diabolical threat of untethered militant Islam, and Said's biased words make naive young audiences believe that his utterances are "profound insights."

Said blamed the failure and misery of the Arab Palestinians on Israel and America alone, barely mentioning the ills of the Arab societies.

How can anyone make peace with those who consistently lie and transmit intense animosity? The Arab-Israeli conflict cannot be resolved without a regional acknowledgement of and commitment to Israel's right to exist securely as a Jewish state.

The malevolent content of Said's words made me uneasy. Said spoke in eloquent, humanistic axioms, but at the same time he attempted to equate the vicious suicide/homicide culture of many Arab Palestinians with the defensive actions the Israelis have been forced to impose. Said said that uprooting trees and demolishing buildings is more dehumanizing than the culture of suicide/homicide.

A rabbi asked whether Said would sign off for peace if the Palestinians were handed all the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and he said "No!"

I'm not sure Said's intention was not to deceive young, impressionable students. He deliberately did convey false impressions and a false history. He must have been under a lot of stress, too, because he even assailed one young questioner by calling him a lout!

Said's bias was evident in his frequent use of "Zionist" instead of "Israeli." Does he not realize how this takes the humanity out of Israel, giving it a pejorative label instead of a national identity?

Said never mentioned that in 1948, five Arab countries launched a war against a one-day-old Israel. Instead he focused on the main consequence of that war: the creation of Arab refugees, stating that Israel “short of genocide” expelled 800,000 of them. This not only disagrees with UN estimates of a bit over 400,000 refugees but also ignores the fact that most of the Arabs/Palestinians were encouraged to leave by the Arab World itself!

He also failed to mention that, as with all other Arab-Israeli wars, it was the Arabs who initiated the 1948 war!" Said in fact claims that all the Israeli-Arab wars were initiated by Israel!

Arab leadership had an opportunity to create a Palestinian state as envisioned (1) by the Peel Commission in 1938, (2) by the UN itself in 1947, and (3) again in 2000 when Israeli PM Barak offered most of the disputed (not "occupied") territory. But, their leadership does not look out for the best interests of its people nor is it truly interested in making peace with Israel.

Prof. Said, can you tell us who were the Arab Palestinians' leaders prior to Yasser Arafat? Can you fill us in with specifics about that "ancient Palestinian" history? Can you also tell us how the Arabs of "Palestine" are so different in language, culture, and history from that of neighboring Arabs?

Many Arab-Palestinian children dream of becoming killers of Jews. Can you explain this? Is it perhaps because they are indoctrinated by their parents, their schools, their mosques... their society?

Said depicted the land of Israel/Palestine as if Arabs once owned all of it. But the Ottoman Empire and absentee landlords owned more than 70% of the land of historic “Palestine”.

The Palestinian Arabs have largely turned their society into something barbaric, comprised of countless terrorist factions overseen by a despotic mafia. The beauty of their poetry, music, art, literature, and legendary hospitality are now eclipsed by their hatred and their reputation for terrorism and deceit.

Said has made a career out of the "Palestinian" experience. I think he has failed them, however. With his deceptive words and poisonous rhetoric, Said does not pave the road to peace. Peace will never come to Israel or Said's people if they base their identity and ideology upon lies and hatred and continue their suicidal/homicidal evil.

A Monumental Hypocrisy

We Must Raise Our Voices, March in Protest, Now and Again and Again

By EDWARD SAID

It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out what "the country" is thinking and planning, but patience and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech, designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN into going to war, seems to me to have been a new low point in moral hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in Munich this past weekend went one step further than the bumbling Powell in unctuous sermonising and bullying derision. For the moment, I shall discount George Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen). Bush is, he has said, in direct contact with God, or if not God, then at least Providence. Perhaps only Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state and defence seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over their words and activities.

First, a few preliminaries. The US has clearly decided on war: there seem to be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take place or not (given all the activity started, not by the Arab states who, as usual, seem to dither and be paralysed at the same time, but by France, Russia and Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless to have transported 200,000 troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, leaving aside smaller deployments in Jordan, Turkey and Israel can mean only one thing.

Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said, are chicken hawks, that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any fighting themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney and others of that entirely civilian group were to a man in strong favour of the Vietnam War, yet each of them got a deferment based on privilege, and therefore never fought or so much as even served in the armed forces. Their belligerence is therefore morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, anti-democratic in the extreme. What this unrepresentative cabal seeks in a war with Iraq has nothing to do with actual military considerations. Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities of its deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent and credible threat to neighbours like Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan (each of which could easily handle it militarily) or certainly to the US. Any argument to the contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition. With a few outdated Scuds, and a small amount of chemical and biological material, most of it supplied by the US in earlier days (as Nader has said, we know that because we have the receipts for what was sold to Iraq by US companies), Iraq is, and has easily been, containable, though at unconscionable cost to the long-suffering civilian population. For this terrible state of affairs I think it is absolutely true to say that there has been collusion between the Iraqi regime and the Western enforcers of the sanctions.

Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change--a process already begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzs of this country--there is simply no end in sight. Isn't it outrageous that people of such a dubious caliber actually go on blathering about bringing democracy, modernisation, and liberalisation to the Middle East? God knows that the area needs it, as so many Arab and Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people have said over and over. But who appointed these characters as agents of progress anyway? And what entitles them to pontificate in so shameless a way when there are already so many injustices and abuses in their own country to be remedied? It's particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be on any subject touching on democracy and justice, should have been an election adviser to Netanyahu's extreme right- wing government during the period 1996-9, in which he counseled the renegade Israeli to scrap any and all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and try to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible. This man now talks about bringing democracy to the Middle East, and does so without provoking the slightest objection from any of the media pundits who politely (abjectly) quiz him on national television.

Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite its many weaknesses, its plagiarised and manufactured evidence, its confected audio-tapes and its doctored pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein's regime has violated numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can be no arguing with that and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so monumentally hypocritical about the official US position is that literally everything Powell has accused the Ba'athists of has been the stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948, and at no time more flagrantly than since the occupation of 1967. Torture, illegal detention, assassination, assaults against civilians with missiles, helicopters and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, mass killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatilla to mention only the most obvious), denial of rights to free passage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians as human shields, humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a mass scale, destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal settlement, economic pauperisation, attacks on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous abuses: all these, it should be noted with emphasis, have been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the United States which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but also has given the country upwards of $135 billion in economic aid on a scale that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by the US government on its own citizens.

This is an unconscionable record to hold against the US, and Mr Powell as its human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of US foreign policy, it is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of this country, and to make sure that the enforcement of human rights and the promotion of freedom--the proclaimed central plank in the US's foreign policy since at least 1976--is applied uniformly, without exception or condition. How he and his bosses and co- workers can stand up before the world and righteously sermonise against Iraq while at the same time completely ignoring the ongoing American partnership in human rights abuses with Israel defies credibility. And yet no one, in all the justified critiques of the US position that have appeared since Powell made his great UN speech, has focused on this point, not even the ever-so- upright French and Germans. The Palestinian territories today are witnessing the onset of a mass famine; there is a health crisis of catastrophic proportions; there is a civilian death toll that totals at least a dozen to 20 people a week; the economy has collapsed; hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, or move about as curfews and at least 300 barricades impede their daily lives; houses are blown up or bulldozed on a mass basis (60 yesterday). And all of it with US equipment, US political support, US finances. Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard, is a man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinians' lives that have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal army. And he has the gall to say that he acts in God's name, and that he (and his administration) act to serve "a just and faithful God". And, more astounding yet, he lectures the world on Saddam's flouting of UN resolutions even as he supports a country, Israel, that has flouted at least 64 of them on a daily basis for more than half a century.

But so craven and so ineffecti>

Transfer interrupted!

hat they don't dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need US economic aid. Many of them fear their own people and need US support to prop up their regimes. Many of them could be accused of some of the same crimes against humanity. So they say nothing, and just hope and pray that the war will pass, while in the end keeping them in power as they are.

But it is also a great and noble fact that for the first time since World War Two there are mass protests against the war taking place before rather than during the war itself. This is unprecedented and should become the central political fact of the new, globalised era into which our world has been thrust by the US and its super-power status. What this demonstrates is that despite the awesome power wielded by autocrats and tyrants like Saddam and his American antagonists, despite the complicity of a mass media that has (willingly or unwillingly) hastened the rush to war, despite the indifference and ignorance of a great many people, mass action and mass protest on the basis of human community and human sustainability are still formidable tools of human resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if you wish. But that they have at least tampered with the plans of the Washington chicken hawks and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of religious monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe in wars of religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go to lecture or speak out against these injustices I haven't found anyone in support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition to US action in Iraq to our support for human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan and everywhere in the Arab world--and also ask others to force the same linkage on everyone, Arab, American, African, European, Australian and Asian. These are world issues, human issues, not simply strategic matters for the United States or the other major powers.

We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White House has openly announced will include three to five hundred cruise missiles a day (800 of them during the first 48 hours of the war) raining down on the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce "Shock and Awe", or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as its boastful planner a certain Mr (or is it Dr?) Harlan Ullman has said, a Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi people. Note that during the 1991 Gulf War after 41 days of bombing Iraq this scale of human devastation was not even approached. And the US has 6000 "smart" missiles ready to do the job. What sort of God would want this to be a formulated and announced policy for His people? And what sort of God would claim that this was going to bring democracy and freedom to the people not only of Iraq but to the rest of the Middle East?

These are questions I won't even try to answer. But I do know that if anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth it would be a criminal act, and its perpetrators and planners war criminals according to the Nuremberg Laws that the US itself was crucial in formulating. Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome the war and praise George Bush. Who knows what more evil will be done in the name of Good? Every one of us must raise our voices, and march in protest, now and again and again. We need creative thinking and bold action to stave off the nightmares planned by a docile, professionalised staff in places like Washington and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. For if what they have in mind is what they call "greater security" then words have no meaning at all in the ordinary sense. That Bush and Sharon have contempt for the non-white people of this world is clear. The question is, how long can they keep getting away with it?

A Monumental Hypocrisy

We Must Raise Our Voices, March in Protest, Now and Again and Again

By EDWARD SAID

It has finally become intolerable to listen to or look at news in this country. I've told myself over and over again that one ought to leaf through the daily papers and turn on the TV for the national news every evening, just to find out what "the country" is thinking and planning, but patience and masochism have their limits. Colin Powell's UN speech, designed obviously to outrage the American people and bludgeon the UN into going to war, seems to me to have been a new low point in moral hypocrisy and political manipulation. But Donald Rumsfeld's lectures in Munich this past weekend went one step further than the bumbling Powell in unctuous sermonising and bullying derision. For the moment, I shall discount George Bush and his coterie of advisers, spiritual mentors, and political managers like Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Karl Rove: they seem to me slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fliescher (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen). Bush is, he has said, in direct contact with God, or if not God, then at least Providence. Perhaps only Israeli settlers can converse with him. But the secretaries of state and defence seem to have emanated from the secular world of real women and men, so it may be somewhat more opportune to linger for a time over their words and activities.

First, a few preliminaries. The US has clearly decided on war: there seem to be no two ways about it. Yet whether the war will actually take place or not (given all the activity started, not by the Arab states who, as usual, seem to dither and be paralysed at the same time, but by France, Russia and Germany) is something else again. Nevertheless to have transported 200,000 troops to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, leaving aside smaller deployments in Jordan, Turkey and Israel can mean only one thing.

Second, the planners of this war, as Ralph Nader has forcefully said, are chicken hawks, that is, hawks who are too cowardly to do any fighting themselves. Wolfowitz, Perle, Bush, Cheney and others of that entirely civilian group were to a man in strong favour of the Vietnam War, yet each of them got a deferment based on privilege, and therefore never fought or so much as even served in the armed forces. Their belligerence is therefore morally repugnant and, in the literal sense, anti-democratic in the extreme. What this unrepresentative cabal seeks in a war with Iraq has nothing to do with actual military considerations. Iraq, whatever the disgusting qualities of its deplorable regime, is simply not an imminent and credible threat to neighbours like Turkey, or Israel, or even Jordan (each of which could easily handle it militarily) or certainly to the US. Any argument to the contrary is simply a preposterous, entirely frivolous proposition. With a few outdated Scuds, and a small amount of chemical and biological material, most of it supplied by the US in earlier days (as Nader has said, we know that because we have the receipts for what was sold to Iraq by US companies), Iraq is, and has easily been, containable, though at unconscionable cost to the long-suffering civilian population. For this terrible state of affairs I think it is absolutely true to say that there has been collusion between the Iraqi regime and the Western enforcers of the sanctions.

Third, once big powers start to dream of regime change--a process already begun by the Perles and Wolfowitzs of this country--there is simply no end in sight. Isn't it outrageous that people of such a dubious caliber actually go on blathering about bringing democracy, modernisation, and liberalisation to the Middle East? God knows that the area needs it, as so many Arab and Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people have said over and over. But who appointed these characters as agents of progress anyway? And what entitles them to pontificate in so shameless a way when there are already so many injustices and abuses in their own country to be remedied? It's particularly galling that Perle, about as unqualified a person as it is imaginable to be on any subject touching on democracy and justice, should have been an election adviser to Netanyahu's extreme right- wing government during the period 1996-9, in which he counseled the renegade Israeli to scrap any and all peace attempts, to annex the West Bank and Gaza, and try to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible. This man now talks about bringing democracy to the Middle East, and does so without provoking the slightest objection from any of the media pundits who politely (abjectly) quiz him on national television.

Fourth, Colin Powell's speech, despite its many weaknesses, its plagiarised and manufactured evidence, its confected audio-tapes and its doctored pictures, was correct in one thing. Saddam Hussein's regime has violated numerous human rights and UN resolutions. There can be no arguing with that and no excuses can be allowed. But what is so monumentally hypocritical about the official US position is that literally everything Powell has accused the Ba'athists of has been the stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948, and at no time more flagrantly than since the occupation of 1967. Torture, illegal detention, assassination, assaults against civilians with missiles, helicopters and jet fighters, annexation of territory, transportation of civilians from one place to another for the purpose of imprisonment, mass killing (as in Qana, Jenin, Sabra and Shatilla to mention only the most obvious), denial of rights to free passage and unimpeded civilian movement, education, medical aid, use of civilians as human shields, humiliation, punishment of families, house demolitions on a mass scale, destruction of agricultural land, expropriation of water, illegal settlement, economic pauperisation, attacks on hospitals, medical workers and ambulances, killing of UN personnel, to name only the most outrageous abuses: all these, it should be noted with emphasis, have been carried on with the total, unconditional support of the United States which has not only supplied Israel with the weapons for such practices and every kind of military and intelligence aid, but also has given the country upwards of $135 billion in economic aid on a scale that beggars the relative amount per capita spent by the US government on its own citizens.

This is an unconscionable record to hold against the US, and Mr Powell as its human symbol in particular. As the person in charge of US foreign policy, it is his specific responsibility to uphold the laws of this country, and to make sure that the enforcement of human rights and the promotion of freedom--the proclaimed central plank in the US's foreign policy since at least 1976--is applied uniformly, without exception or condition. How he and his bosses and co- workers can stand up before the world and righteously sermonise against Iraq while at the same time completely ignoring the ongoing American partnership in human rights abuses with Israel defies credibility. And yet no one, in all the justified critiques of the US position that have appeared since Powell made his great UN speech, has focused on this point, not even the ever-so- upright French and Germans. The Palestinian territories today are witnessing the onset of a mass famine; there is a health crisis of catastrophic proportions; there is a civilian death toll that totals at least a dozen to 20 people a week; the economy has collapsed; hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are unable to work, study, or move about as curfews and at least 300 barricades impede their daily lives; houses are blown up or bulldozed on a mass basis (60 yesterday). And all of it with US equipment, US political support, US finances. Bush declares that Sharon, who is a war criminal by any standard, is a man of peace, as if to spit on the innocent Palestinians' lives that have been lost and ravaged by Sharon and his criminal army. And he has the gall to say that he acts in God's name, and that he (and his administration) act to serve "a just and faithful God". And, more astounding yet, he lectures the world on Saddam's flouting of UN resolutions even as he supports a country, Israel, that has flouted at least 64 of them on a daily basis for more than half a century.

But so craven and so ineffecti>

Transfer interrupted!

hat they don't dare state any of these things publicly. Many of them need US economic aid. Many of them fear their own people and need US support to prop up their regimes. Many of them could be accused of some of the same crimes against humanity. So they say nothing, and just hope and pray that the war will pass, while in the end keeping them in power as they are.

But it is also a great and noble fact that for the first time since World War Two there are mass protests against the war taking place before rather than during the war itself. This is unprecedented and should become the central political fact of the new, globalised era into which our world has been thrust by the US and its super-power status. What this demonstrates is that despite the awesome power wielded by autocrats and tyrants like Saddam and his American antagonists, despite the complicity of a mass media that has (willingly or unwillingly) hastened the rush to war, despite the indifference and ignorance of a great many people, mass action and mass protest on the basis of human community and human sustainability are still formidable tools of human resistance. Call them weapons of the weak, if you wish. But that they have at least tampered with the plans of the Washington chicken hawks and their corporate backers, as well as the millions of religious monotheistic extremists (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) who believe in wars of religion, is a great beacon of hope for our time. Wherever I go to lecture or speak out against these injustices I haven't found anyone in support of the war. Our job as Arabs is to link our opposition to US action in Iraq to our support for human rights in Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Kurdistan and everywhere in the Arab world--and also ask others to force the same linkage on everyone, Arab, American, African, European, Australian and Asian. These are world issues, human issues, not simply strategic matters for the United States or the other major powers.

We cannot in any way lend our silence to a policy of war that the White House has openly announced will include three to five hundred cruise missiles a day (800 of them during the first 48 hours of the war) raining down on the civilian population of Baghdad in order to produce "Shock and Awe", or even a human cataclysm that will produce, as its boastful planner a certain Mr (or is it Dr?) Harlan Ullman has said, a Hiroshima-style effect on the Iraqi people. Note that during the 1991 Gulf War after 41 days of bombing Iraq this scale of human devastation was not even approached. And the US has 6000 "smart" missiles ready to do the job. What sort of God would want this to be a formulated and announced policy for His people? And what sort of God would claim that this was going to bring democracy and freedom to the people not only of Iraq but to the rest of the Middle East?

These are questions I won't even try to answer. But I do know that if anything like this is going to be visited on any population on earth it would be a criminal act, and its perpetrators and planners war criminals according to the Nuremberg Laws that the US itself was crucial in formulating. Not for nothing do General Sharon and Shaul Mofaz welcome the war and praise George Bush. Who knows what more evil will be done in the name of Good? Every one of us must raise our voices, and march in protest, now and again and again. We need creative thinking and bold action to stave off the nightmares planned by a docile, professionalised staff in places like Washington and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. For if what they have in mind is what they call "greater security" then words have no meaning at all in the ordinary sense. That Bush and Sharon have contempt for the non-white people of this world is clear. The question is, how long can they keep getting away with it?

The Zev and Ari Show

Time for Full Disclosure

by WILLIAM HUGHES

Professor Edward Said, a champion of the Palestinian cause, was roundly condemned by Zev Chafets, a columnist for the NY Daily News (02/19/03). Thank goodness, Said isn't living in the West Bank or Gaza. If he were in occupied Palestine, Ariel Sharon's goon squad would have probably bulldozed his home into a pile of rumble (and his relatives' homes, too, just for good measure).

What got Chafets riled up was Said's brilliant commentary, entitled, "A Monument to Hypocrisy". It is a marvelous essay that deals with the pro-Israeli influence over the Bush-Cheney administration. It tells how wrongdoings similar to those of Saddam Hussein have actually been the "stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948. Ironically, since Chafets complained about the article so boorishly, more folks will now want to read it for themselves.

Said also wrote, "President Bush and his advisers are slaves of power perfectly embodied in the repetitive monotone of their collective spokesman Ari Fleischer (who I believe is also an Israeli citizen)". Well, Chafets thought that last line belonged in the conspiracy camp of the "Neo-Nazi and White Aryan Resistance" movements. For him, it was bad enough that Said had raised questions about "the Perles and Wolfowitzs" of this country, leading America into a war. But, by suggesting Fleischer was "a citizen of Sharonland," was just too much for him.

The record, however, shows the Washington Post (02/09/02) covered a lot of the same ground Said did, in an article by Robert G. Kaiser, entitled, "Bush Moves U.S. Closer to Sharon on Mideast Policy". It revealed how Israeli Firsters in the government, (the author labeled them "Likudniks", "hard-liners", and "hawks"), like Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, David Wurmser and Dough J. Feith, have urged the abandonment of the Oslo Accords and for the U.S. to focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power. For some reason, President Bush's Dr. Strangelove, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, wasn't mentioned in that piece. Kaiser also said that Mideast experts regularly refer to this pro-Israel clique, "as a cabal. "

So, why the touchy reaction to Said's commentary from Chafets?

Well, Chafets was born in Michigan, but lived for 33 years in his beloved fatherland, Zionist Israel. He served in the Israeli military and was also the chief Press Officer for the late Israeli Prime Minister, the old terrorist himself, Menachem Begin. Did Said strike a raw nerve with his Hypocrisy article with Chafets? I'd say so!

Chafets is a classic dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel. He's also, more importantly, a Zionist. Since Chafets is a journalist, I think that required disclosure to his readers on his off-the-wall Said rant. Chafets insisted, wrongly I think, that Said should have cited an authority for his belief that Fleischer might have been "an Israel citizen." Within the context of that essay, it was only a throw-a-way, speculative line. And anyway, did Chafets cite any authority for his theological-sounding proposition that a pundit must ask to be forgiven for not using a footnote?

As for Fleischer, it doesn't bother me if he is a citizen of Israel. He could have been born on Mars for all I care. Here's what I want to know: Is Fleischer a Zionist? This is the crux of the matter.

The American people are entitled to also know for the sake of our Republic, if Perle, Wolfowitz, Wurmser, Feith and Abrams are Zionists. They all hold sensitive positions in the federal government that require national security clearance. If they are Zionists, then, the next question is: Do they have a conflict of interest or even an appearance of a conflict of interest in carrying out the responsibilities of their office? Answers to these questions are imperative.

Zionism is a political, alien-based ideology, global in scope, racially restricted, and with its spiritual headquarters in Tel Aviv, and not Washington, D.C. Zionists aspire to a land-grabbing Greater Israel.

On Aug. 23, 2002, I demanded that Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-CT), come clean with U.S. Senate about all his Zionist connections. For all the reasons that I gave in that article, and in this one too, Fleischer, and the cited Likudniks should come clean with the American people. Full disclosure of any and all Zionist links by them are long overdue.

As for Chafets, thanks for blowing your top, pal! Now, see what you've done? You're forcing your fellow Zionists out into the light of day, where the lovers of our Republic, like the Sons of Liberty of old, can confront them about their warmongering agendas.

Zionists wanted the same thing 50 and 80 years ago as they want now, a safe little Jewish state where Jews don't have to worry about being attacked just for being Jewish.

Jordan offered Israel a real, honest peace offer, and Israel accepted, and gave Jordan control of the massive Sinai, even though there is OIL in the Sinai. There has been peace between the two nations ever since.

Egypt offered Israel a real, honest peace offer, and Israel accepted. There has been peace between the two nations ever since.

There is ample evidence that Israel wants peace and is willing to make huge concessions to receive it, as evidenced by Israel giving the Sinai away, a MASSIVE chunk of land that would have served as a great buffer, and could have served as future homes once the land was cultivated (it's mostly desert, but it has oil, landing strips, and would have been extremely useful. It's bigger than israel, yet israel gave it away in return for peace).

Palestinians have offered Israel terrorist attacks, lies, and madness. Palestinians have waged an "intifada" against Israel. Israel has no choice but to kill those who are trying to kill them. Arafat should have taken the land for peace offer Israel made 3 years ago. Arafat should have locked up terrorists in the 90's when he had the power to do so and israel was not preventing him from doing so.

The "zionist agenda" is a safe home. But home isn't safe when the neighbors have sworn to kill you, so the only possible response is to take control of the neighbors and smack them around until the evil neighbors are gone and civil neighbors remain.

When the PLO formally recognized Israel within its internationally recognized borders and agreed to a two-state solution in 1993, like most Palestinians, I swallowed hard but accepted it. We believed that this unprecedented historic compromise, though bitter, was necessary to bring about peace. Those who completely rejected the creation of a state limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- a mere twenty two percent of the country in which Palestinians were an overwhelming majority just fifty years ago -- were relegated to the margins of the Palestinian movement, both on the left and the Islamist right.

Israel gave everyone the impression that it would agree to a Palestinian state, and that it was only a matter of working out the technical formalities. But almost 10 years later, Israel has still never recognized the Palestinian right to statehood, much less agreed to the creation of such a state. On the contrary, in practice it has done everything to make the emergence of such a state impossible by continuing to furiously build colonies all over the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The settler population in the West Bank has more than doubled since 1993, and not a day goes by without further colonization.

Because this policy has succeeded in solidifying Israeli control, and has, as intended, rendered a rational partition of the country virtually impossible, an increasing number of Palestinians, including some representatives of the Palestinian Authority, have started to talk once again about bi-nationalism -- the creation of a single democratic state for Israelis and Palestinians -- as the only viable solution to the conflict.

This idea is horrifying to many Israelis, who view it as a plot to "destroy Israel" since the vastly higher birth rate among Palestinians will soon make them a majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, just as they were until 1948.

None are more horrified by this prospect than Israel's traditional "peace camp," represented by the Labor and Meretz parties. And yet, because of its liberal values, the "peace camp" is unable to embrace formal apartheid or ethnic cleansing to "solve the demographic problem" as do Israel's right wing parties. The liberals want both the benefits of Jewish privilege that comes from living in a "Jewish state" while at the same time being faithful to their democratic values. They have shown themselves to be entirely bankrupt morally, intellectually and politically, and to have no serious ideas whatsoever for resolving the conundrum of their hypocrisy. They embrace Palestinian statehood warmly in theory but miss no opportunity to undermine and sabotage it in practice and to present proposals for meaningless and nominal statehood within a greater Israel.

I am one of those who accepted the two-state solution (although I opposed the Oslo Accords because I believed they could not lead to that goal) not enthusiastically, but because it offers Palestinians and Israelis a chance at normalcy from which they could one day -- like the European Union -- build a future of peace and prosperity from the ashes of war and hatred...

For Palestinians, giving up the seventy-eight percent of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 is giving up a part of themselves. It is gut-wrenchingly hard, and for some impossible. I respect that. For millions of Palestinians this is the land from which they, their parents or grandparents were expelled, in which homes and farms, shops and factories, churches and mosques, an entire society, was uprooted in exchange for decades of dispossession, misery in refugee camps, and demonization by Israel and its apologists. But, like millions of others, I was prepared to accept it for the sake of peace.

Palestinian private property remains inviolate and all property seized by Israel, even of those who choose not to return, must be returned to its owners or paid for at the fair market price, including use and interest. Clinton Administration Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat set out some sensible principles for dealing with property confiscated from European Jews and others by Nazi Germany, which could be adopted here. The same principles should apply to any Jews who were forced to leave Arab states as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

These conditions represent an enormous historic compromise. They call for two states, a Jewish Israel on seventy eight percent of the territory of historic Palestine and a State of Palestine on just twenty two percent. They call for full recognition of Israel within secure and recognized borders, the implementation of UN resolutions, sharing of Jerusalem and a just resolution to the refugee problem that respects refugee rights as well as Israel's needs.

From this basis, Israelis, Palestinians and later perhaps Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese and Syrians, might after a couple of generations feel they can join together in something like the European Union. That would be a choice freely made among sovereign peoples. I could live with this, and, though I do not speak for anyone but myself, I believe that other Palestinians could too -- indeed this is basically what millions of them thought they were endorsing when they elected Yasir Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority.

The problem is that there is not one major Israeli party or leader who is willing to put such a vision to the Israeli people. Even the most "dovish" want to keep most of the settlers where they are, annex large chunks of the West Bank, keep control of most of Jerusalem, and reject categorically any discussion of the right of return. No allowance is made for the massive compromises already made by the Palestinians, and more still are demanded. Israeli sociologist Jeff Halper argues that it is already too late and Israel's "matrix of control" in the occupied territories cannot, in effect, be dismantled. If Halper is right, then nothing any Israeli leader says will save the two-state solution. But if he is wrong and it can be saved, time is very short and we must hear a commitment to completely end the occupation from the Israelis now. After all, they are the principal beneficiaries of this solution.

The whole world is waiting, not least the Arab world which again held out its hand to Israel last March when the Arab League unanimously reaffirmed its commitment to a two-state solution.

Sadly, though, the political field in Israel looks unlikely produce anyone who will seize this golden opportunity. I believe, therefore, that Israel will likely miss the boat on the two-state solution, and we will have to think about what it will be like to live together in one state, and more importantly how to get there peacefully because no road map exists. For me, that is not a bad thing. I have no problem with the idea of living with Israelis, as long as we are equal before the law and in practice. I do not see the births or immigration of Jews as a "demographic time bomb" to be regarded with horror, nor am I frightened of having next door neighbors who speak a different language or worship in different ways. I embrace human and cultural diversity, no less in the land where my parents were born, than I do here in the United States.

I am prepared to accept two states as a practical solution to the conflict and do everything in my power to make it work. However, the mere trappings of nationalism -- flags, anthems, stately buildings, and passports -- mean absolutely nothing to me in themselves and I would just as soon do away with them. What matters is the content: does the flag represent true independence and sovereignty? Does the anthem represent common humanist values? Do the buildings enclose genuinely democratic institutions that do justice? Does a passport give its holder the freedom to travel the world and live securely in his homeland? These are the questions that matter.

Palestine/Israel could be two countries with a border between them that may one day lose its significance, just as the border between France and Germany has lost its power to divide people. Or, it could be one country for two peoples. I do not really care as long as we choose one path quickly and stick to it, and that, in the end, Israelis and Palestinians enjoy peace, democracy and human rights together, not at each other's expense.

True peace, whatever way we choose to achieve it, has a price. The powerful must give up some of their power and share it with the weak, or conflict is inevitable. Both a genuine two-state solution, as well as a single democratic state, would require that Israelis relinquish their monopoly on power in a manner they have never seriously considered thus far. Peace only came to South Africa when whites realized this and gave up their monopoly on power. Israel is far from that point and still seems to be looking for a way to avoid the choice. That means discussion about how to live together will remain only academic, while conflict and bloodshed rage on.

Lets review facts:

(1) When any innocent people die, it's sad

(2) Palestinians brought this on themselves by declaring their intiafa and waging terrorist attacks almost daily against israel while israel was mostly withdrawn from the west bank and gaza. Terrorist attacks against israel in 2000 and 2001 is what brought israel back into more west bank and gaza towns

(3) hamas are not freedom fighters, they seek the destruction of israel. israel does not want to destroyed. yet hamas are the most popular palestinian organization and enjoy enormous support. same with islamic jihad, hizbollah, and countless other lunatic palestinian organizations.

(4) if palestilians don't want buildings to fall on top of them, all they have to do is call off their intifada, get some responsible leadership, and give up their dream of destroying israel.

(5) palestinians were doing much better a few years ago. Attacks against israel have just resulted in israel extending their troops and making most of the fighting take place outside of israel, making it harder for palestinians to intentionally blow up israeli civilians as they ride a bus or eat pizza at a pizza place.

(6) if you're rooting for palestinians to have freedom, help them get responsible, honest leaders, convince them to give up their dream of destroying israel, and somehow help get rid of hamas, who have sworn to destroy israel no matter what

I'm not going to bother spending my valuable time debating you because you can't be changed, and you probably aren't interested in discussion anyway.

The simple fact is that anyone that makes even a modest effort to study what this mess is all about will see your "facts" as horse pucky. Sure, the Palestinians have some share of the blame here. They're not innocent to say the least. But your "facts" are laughably devoid of historical context, and there isn't anything you can do to stop the huge tide of people educating themselves about the TRUTH. The truth, in the end, always wins, despite the efforts of people like yourself.

Best regards,

A Jew against Zionism and against colonialism (and one that other Jews call "a self hating Jew", showing their idiocy to the world)

Video of Israelis breaking through Palestinian walls to go from one house to the next. This is reminiscent of what the Nazis did in the Warsaw Ghetto.

One of the Israeli soldiers screams "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" at an ISM member.
Video:
http://www.indybay.org/uploads/eyes_palestine_starhawk.ram

If you're against zionism, does that mean you want the jews of israel to "go back to where they came from?" Honestly, are you insane? Where should they go? They bought the homes they live on there, and the actual land not owned by individual jews is owned by the state. So should the millions of jews who purchased homes in israel try to go back to the arab countries that robbed them and discriminated against them and kicked their jews out? Should the jews of israel go back to russia, where they can enjoy constant attacks and discrimination? Should the jews of israel go back to germany, and see the homes they used to live in that were taken away and now have other owners? About 1/3 of the world's jews now live in israel, where the fuck do you want them to go? Hamas want them to go to hell, do you agree with them? This anti-zionism stuff is MADNESS, israel is there, israel isn't leaving, and you are either rooting for the millions of jews of israel to finally live in peace, or you are rooting for hamas to kill them. There is no in between in that regard. The only in between is whether a palestinian state should be created next to them, a state that will eventually try to destroy israel like the palestinians dream, or not.

--"If you're against zionism, does that mean you want the jews of israel to 'go back to where they came from?' "

They should give equal rights to the Palestinians who live amongst them and get out of the Occupied Territories or give the Palestinians in those territories equal rights as well.

In addition, they've got to allow all Palestinians expelled a right to return or at the very least compensate them in real world property value for all the property the Israelis robbed them of.

Palestinians have a right to exist and Israelis are currently stealing what little remains of their land in the Occupied Territories.

...Israelis must make a clear distinction between what happened to them in the past and what is happening now and what they themselves are doing, Said submitted. "As a Palestinian, I should make my case defending Palestine by referring to the history of discrimination against the Jews," but it is precisely because of the history of discrimination against the Jews that they must not revisit it upon the Palestinians. Said ended his lecture by offering an account that could serve as a model for coexistence, namely his own friendship and collaboration with the Israeli musician Daniel Barenboim. Since their chance meeting at a London hotel, Said and Barenboim have co- authored a book the title of which,
Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, bespoke both their differences and affinities, and have also jointly held a music workshop in Weimar, Germany, attended by Arab and Israeli students. And Barenboim was currently training two Palestinian prodigies, including a young and remarkably talented relative of Said's, he added with a flourish...

...a young woman asked Said why he had not mentioned B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories). Nor, answered Said, had he mentioned several other such NGOs, which he now cited, but then his point was not to provide "a laundry list". Another young woman stated that she was against the occupation, but asked what Said had to say about terrorism, she herself having experienced the fear of suicide bombings, and whether he would be willing to sign yet another document (the purport of which I did not catch). "Answer the question!" a young man sitting in the balcony shouted at Said at one point. "I won't answer the question for you, you lout!" was Said's retort. Said reiterated his position that he is against militaristic solutions and that the only document he would be willing to sign would be for the end of occupation -- which drew a great deal of applause from the audience....

...Said was also keen to elicit a humanistic tradition within Islam, one that antecedes the Western revival of humanism, and cited in this context ijtihad (or systemic original thinking and interpretation), the presence of which surmounts the kind of divisions now talked about as the "clash of civilisations". Said also reflected on how the fact that he -- as "a Christian by birth, and a Muslim by culture" -- relates to all this German Jewish tradition is reassuring in that this too is another instance which demonstrates that divisions can be surmounted...

...Ellen DuBois, professor of History, UCLA, asked whether there was not a tension in Said's work between a critique of identity politics and a reliance on notions of identity, and enquired about the place of this tension in Orientalism. Said's response was that he rejects American-style identity politics, that his book Orientalism was misappropriated by Islamists, and that his own investment is in more humanistic possibilities of affiliation while affirming the need to assert identity in certain situations. "The challenge," Said concluded, "is about being among difference."

If you demand compensation for arabs who allegedly used to live in israel but were "kicked out" why don't you also demand compensation for all the jews who used to live in arab countries but were "kicked out?"

Why do you demand fairness for the arabs who lived in israel but after war no longer live there, but you say nothing for the jews who used to live in arab countries and had to flee for their lives?

Also, I assume you are aware that 75% of the "palestinian territory" under britain and the ottoman empire became the country now known as JORDAN. Why don't you demand that jordan give their arab brothers citizenship? Israel and the west bank and gaza make up just 25% of the "palestinian territory," the other 75% is jordan.

Israel accepted jewish refugees into it. Arab countries rejected the arab refugees ("palestinians"). there is no language called palestinian, had jordan and egypt accepted arab refugees like israel accepted jewish refugees this problem would have been over 50 years ago.

There aint no language called American...

Thank you for posting. You keep the thread before people, and for every person that pays any attention to your message there will be 25 that go to the top and consider the original content -- Said's presentation -- with greater authority than your comments.

Keep up the good work ;-)

Lucky

A long queue outside Royce Hall at 3.30pm on February 20 marked the venue for Edward Said's lecture, which was to start at 4pm. One of two lectures on consecutive days that Said was to give at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), this first lecture, sponsored by the Burkle Center for International Relations (BCIR), was entitled "Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights". With Royce concert hall filled to capacity, Geoffrey Garret, vice provost of the UCLA International Institute and director of BCIR, introduced Said. Garrett elaborated on Said's three lives -- the scholar, the activist and commentator, and the musician -- any of which, he said, would have been more than enough for any of us. The Said who came to the lectern had a new look: he now has a beard which, as he commented the following day, is a function of illness and medical treatment these past months.

Arriving at Palestine by way of Iraq, Said opened his talk by commenting that this is a fraught moment for human rights, with the US marshalling its military force to disarm Iraq and change its regime, and Arab governments mostly intimidated. What should be of top priority is the women and children of Iraq and the impact of a war on them -- an issue, he added, that does not impinge on George Bush and his administration. Had Iraq been the biggest world exporter of oranges, the abuses it has been accused of would not have been of concern to anyone. By the year 2025, Said went on, the US will need to import more than 70 per cent of its oil from the Gulf and, as against this, issues of human rights and education may seem trivial.

What is of paramount importance concerning both Iraq and Palestine, Said asserted, is the universal applicability of human rights. Since World War II these rights have been made clear, but governments need to be consistently reminded of them, and of the fact that no religious edict should supersede human rights, he stated.

"As an American," he said, "I feel that the US has no divine mandate" to intervene within Iraq. Here, Said had recourse to the work of American historian Howard Zinn which endorses the conception of the US as a multi-cultural society, as opposed to the white English model. That the US is an immigrant society is a fact that needs to be upheld, he added.

But Said wanted "to note other positive realities", namely that since 1948, Palestinians had moved from the status of non-persons to that of a universally acknowledged people and a collectivity through mobilising memory in face of disaster. While he did not want to be "fetishistically competitive about this claim", Said nevertheless wanted to assert that Palestinian visibility is not merely as victims but as a people actively putting forward a wrong that needs to be righted.

Despite the Oslo declaration and "the peace process" being nothing but a rubric for colonising more of Palestine, Palestinians' sense of solidarity and "nationness" are unmitigated. Citing Nadia Abu El-Haj's Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israeli Society, Said pointed out how even excavation of the material artefacts of the land had been skewed towards asserting the more or less exclusive presence of the Israelites in the area. Other scholarly works he mentioned in this context were Nur Masalha's A Land Without a People and Imperial Israel and the Palestinians. "Yet, Israel is always encumbered by the memory of Palestinians," who have been collecting objects of memory, such as title deeds, keys, fabrics and embroidery. Palestinian cinema, novels and literature were thriving, he added.

None of this was a given: during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Palestinian archives and repositories were destroyed, which is currently continuing in the West Bank, he added. Likewise, Arab states -- Said specifically cited Egypt and Lebanon -- have dehumanised Palestinians; and even in states such as Syria and Jordan where their status is better, they still face problems. Inside Israel, Palestinians are underrepresented; and the infringements of human rights and assassinations of Palestinians continue. And in all the talk about academic freedom in the US, not once was a single word said about the closure of universities in Palestine, Said noted. However, "today it is Palestine not Israel that is the progressive cause," which, Said affirmed, indicates the long way we have come since Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir supported Israel. Also, in 1982, Said had stated that every time Palestinians talked about their plight, the very basic narrative of their dispossession had to be recapitulated from its beginning -- which is no longer the case.

Israelis must make a clear distinction between what happened to them in the past and what is happening now and what they themselves are doing, Said submitted. "As a Palestinian, I should make my case defending Palestine by referring to the history of discrimination against the Jews," but it is precisely because of the history of discrimination against the Jews that they must not revisit it upon the Palestinians. Said ended his lecture by offering an account that could serve as a model for coexistence, namely his own friendship and collaboration with the Israeli musician Daniel Barenboim. Since their chance meeting at a London hotel, Said and Barenboim have co- authored a book the title of which, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, bespoke both their differences and affinities, and have also jointly held a music workshop in Weimar, Germany, attended by Arab and Israeli students. And Barenboim was currently training two Palestinian prodigies, including a young and remarkably talented relative of Said's, he added with a flourish.

Following Said's words occasionally became difficult thanks to a woman standing -- not sitting -- a few rows behind me who at regular intervals would yell "Terrorist! Nazi!"; she was eventually escorted out of the auditorium. Her exertions were also matched by those of a deliberately raucous crowd of young students sitting together up in the balcony.

When the floor was opened to discussion the first speaker was Chaim Seidler-Feller, Rabbi of UCLA's Hillel, a Jewish student association. Among other things Rabbi Seidler-Feller accused Said of being guilty of the accusations he himself brings against Bush and the American administration of seeing things in black and white, denied many of the lecturer's claims, and repudiated the figure cited in the lecture of 800,000 Palestinians dispossessed of their land. The rabbi was repeatedly urged by Garrett, who was moderating the discussion, to ask a question rather than make a statement, and to do so in a few seconds. He finally asked where the 800,000 figure had come from, and whether Said would be willing to sign some statement with him. Said's rejoinder was that the rabbi had just proved his own point about Israel's denials and accusations, and its unwillingness to take responsibility for what its creation has meant for Palestinian society. The 800,000 figure, Said added, came from a number of Israeli historians, including Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe.

Next, a young woman asked Said why he had not mentioned B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories). Nor, answered Said, had he mentioned several other such NGOs, which he now cited, but then his point was not to provide "a laundry list". Another young woman stated that she was against the occupation, but asked what Said had to say about terrorism, she herself having experienced the fear of suicide bombings, and whether he would be willing to sign yet another document (the purport of which I did not catch). "Answer the question!" a young man sitting in the balcony shouted at Said at one point. "I won't answer the question for you, you lout!" was Said's retort. Said reiterated his position that he is against militaristic solutions and that the only document he would be willing to sign would be for the end of occupation -- which drew a great deal of applause from the audience.

The lecture Said gave the following day for a much smaller audience, entitled "Empire Revisited", was sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA, and took place at Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades. One of the speaker's introducers at the Villa Aurora lecture was Aamir Mufti, an associate professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA, who had studied under Said at Columbia University. Mufti elaborated on his relationship with Said, first as student-mentor and now as friends, gave an overview of the speaker's scholarship and commented that if the Palestinians did not have their Nelson Mandela (this drawn from something in Said's previous lecture) they had their Edward Said.

Given that the villa had hosted a number of German Jewish intellectuals and writers during and after World War II, Said began by reflecting on his engagement with the German tradition. He spoke of Theodor Adorno's notion of "late style" and how he has drawn on it in his work. But it was to Erich Auerbach, author of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature and "the last of the great philologists of the German tradition", that he wanted to turn. Said has been rereading Mimesis these past months, as he has been asked to write an introduction to a reprint of the book to be published by Princeton University Press. To those familiar with Said's work, it was unsurprising that he chose to begin his comments by referring to the passage in Auerbach's "Epilogue" where the German scholar, by way of apology for what may be construed as the shortcomings of his book, describes the circumstances of its production. He wrote the book, Auerbach explains, during World War II in Istanbul, where he did not have access to secondary sources and where the libraries are not equipped for European studies. The passage is one that Said has cited as paradigmatic of his own notion of secular criticism and in his reflections on exile. At the lecture, Said dwelt on Auerbach's discussion of Dante and Christianity, which he found particularly moving in this book by a German Jew. In Auerbach's discussion, the turning point in the separation of styles -- the "high style" being used in Greece and Rome for gods and kings, and the "low style" for commoners -- is Christianity. The presence of Jesus accomplishes this synthesis and Dante is the greatest accomplishment of the Western tradition, as he represents the present and the timeless within the same moment or formula and goes beyond Aquinas into the human sphere.

But Said was also keen to elicit a humanistic tradition within Islam, one that antecedes the Western revival of humanism, and cited in this context ijtihad (or systemic original thinking and interpretation), the presence of which surmounts the kind of divisions now talked about as the "clash of civilisations". Said also reflected on how the fact that he -- as "a Christian by birth, and a Muslim by culture" -- relates to all this German Jewish tradition is reassuring in that this too is another instance which demonstrates that divisions can be surmounted. Had he met Adorno, he commented in an aside, it is unlikely that the German would have given him the time of day, as he put it.

Ruminating on his personal trajectory, Said spoke of how he had witnessed the end of empire in India and different parts of Africa, Bandung, and the Nasser and Nkrumah years. The great symbol for the decolonisation struggle was Frantz Fanon in whose work there was a Manichean world of rigid opposition, the only way out of which was revolution -- an issue in Fanon, Said added, which has been misread and over- emphasised.

Later, in the 1970s into the 1980s, there would be a counter- movement asserting that it was not true that empire was evil, and that the atrocities of postcolonial nation-states were much worse, with Mobutu's regime and Algeria being the examples usually referred to. An integral part of this backlash was the work of V S Naipaul -- whose counterpart in the Arab context, Said suggested, is Fouad Ajami, who once referred to himself as an "Arab Naipaul" -- and one of its motifs was a misreading of Joseph Conrad, who was recast as being the first to point out that the heart of darkness is in Africa. Then came postcolonial criticism in the 1980s, with its redefinition of canons to include the cultures of the subaltern, Said recounted. Yet, the revisionist histories continue, Said added, citing among other examples Linda Colley's Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850, which reduces the story of empire to stories about European elites captive by non-Europeans and David Cannadine's Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire, which suggests that empire was not about exploitation but collaboration between the English and the native elite. Referring to current events that were the subject of his first talk, and taking a quick shot at commentator Michael Ignatieff's article entitled "The American Empire (Get Used to It)", Said asserted that discussions of empire are of the utmost moment.

The discussion that followed was short. Vincent Pecora, professor of English at UCLA, drawing on various strands from Said's work and his two lectures, brought out the importance of religion, albeit not in a doctrinal sense, as a key aspect of cultures, and commented on its relative absence in Said's scholarship. Said's response was that although he had been brought up among many different religions, he himself is secular, that religion in the Middle East, for example, is often about other issues, such as politics, and that for him philology is a point of entry into cultural analysis which allows for reading religious meaning in broader historical, secular terms.

Ellen DuBois, professor of History, UCLA, asked whether there was not a tension in Said's work between a critique of identity politics and a reliance on notions of identity, and enquired about the place of this tension in Orientalism. Said's response was that he rejects American-style identity politics, that his book Orientalism was misappropriated by Islamists, and that his own investment is in more humanistic possibilities of affiliation while affirming the need to assert identity in certain situations. "The challenge," Said concluded, "is about being among difference."