Two items from the London OBSERVER: The title is mine. Both the London
TELEGRAPH and the WALL St. Journal lost credibility when they publicized
claims published in the neoconservative periodical "COMMENTARY"
Here's how "COMMENTARY" describes itself --
<A magazine without parallel, COMMENTARY is also something more than a
magazine. It is the home of neoconservatism, which COMMENTARY
Editor-at-Large Norman Podhoretz has described as a movement to "rebuild
the intellectual and moral confidence in the values on which American
society rests."
COMMENTARY has also been the home of the most honest and sustained defense
of Israel and of the most unflinching critique of the troubled Middle East
peace process.> http://www.commentarymagazine.com/
I have a personal problem with determining what values American society
rests on - greed is perhaps the easiest and compassion perhaps
the hardest to spot.
Cheers
MichaelP
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OBSERVER (London) Sunday August 29, 1999
by ED VULLIAMY, New York
EDWARD SAID in blistering attack on his accusers
Edward Said, the most famous advocate of the Palestinian cause and one of
the world's leading literary and music critics, hits back in The Observer
this week at accusations that he fabricated his past for political effect.
In a blistering counter-charge, Professor Said accuses his enemies of
being funded by a criminal convicted of a multi-billion fraud.
Said is accused by an Israeli researcher, Justus Wiener, of fabricating
his childhood in Jerusalem, of lying about his schooling and about being
forced to leave the city during violence that preceded the founding of
Israel during 1947.
The row had its origins in a small right-wing magazine in New York,
Commentary, which was then reported in the London Daily Telegraph. Last
Thursday, the accusations were prominently repeated in the Wall Street
Journal - in even more strident language, calling Said 'a liar' -
detonating one of the nastiest rows of its kind to rend the New York
intelligensia in years.
In an exclusive interview with The Observer, Said rebuffs the accusations
one by one. He says his family did own the house that Weiner insists it
did not. He says he did attend a Jerusalem school that Weiner accuses him
of imagining. He reasserts his own Palestinian nationality, and also that
of his mother, challenged by Weiner.
Said has researched the funding of the institute - the Jerusalem Centre
for Public Affairs - for which Weiner works, and which sponsored what
Weiner says were three years' full-time research into his childhood.
The centre's own records, shown to The Observer, show its leading
benefactor is Michael Milken, a 'junk-bond' king who was convicted and
sentenced in 1991 for his part in a massive insider trading scandal.
Milken served two years in jail and paid more than $1 billion in fines
before his release in 1993. He remained on probation, however, while the
Securities and Exchange Commission investigated his role as consultant in
three transactions, contrary to a lifetime ban imposed in 1991. Two of the
deals involved Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
Last year, Milken agreed to settle civil actions arising from the cases by
paying $47 million. He now runs a 'non-profit think-tank', the Milken
Institute, which - according to its own documentation - 'explores the
dynamics of world economic growth'. It has no apparent direct links to
hard right-wing Zionism.
Said accuses Weiner of being 'not a scholar or a journalist, but a paid
employee of Milken and a group of right-wing Zionists for whom I am, I
think, a symbol of what they fear most - reconciliation between
Palestinians and Israelis'.
=================================
OBSERVER (London) Sunday August 29, 1999
by Ed Vulliamy
Disarming - and dangerous?
He's a historian, an expert on opera and a pianist. In an exclusive
interview, Edward Said reveals why he believes he has become the American
Right's latest hate figure
To take an axe to Edward Said is to swipe at one of the more fruitful and
elegant trees in the orchard of human intellect. Said is one of the
leading literary theorists of our century, a commentator on music - opera
in particular - a historian, pianist and political essayist. Most
famously, he is the world's most instantly recognisable and tenacious
exponent of the Palestinian cause. He is the living example of that maxim
coined by Theodor Adorno, another radical refugee who came to New York,
then from the Third Reich: 'For a man who no longer has a homeland,
writing becomes a place to live.'
Said has also become a figure of tragic as well as scholarly dignity -
fighting leukaemia, for which he undergoes regular, exhausting treatment
but which he and everyone else knows is counting the years that remain to
him. It was the disease, diagnosed in 1991, that encouraged Said to write
and complete a memoir of his early life.
Last weekend in Salzburg airport, Said picked up the Daily Telegraph to
find that his past had been rewritten by someone he had never heard of.
That he had not been schooled at the school he attended; that he had not
lived in and been obliged to leave Jerusalem; that he and his family were
not refugees from Palestine; that he was 'a liar'.
The Telegraph was 'reporting' a story written in the obscure
arch-conservative American magazine Commentary by an American-Israeli
researcher, Justus Weiner. Weiner published another, even more blistering,
ad hominem attack on Said in the Wall Street Journal, thereby detonating
the row across the Atlantic - one of the most vitriolic to tear at New
York's intelligentsia in years.
Said is usually one of those people who speaks as though he is at a poetry
recital and exudes calm authority. But not last week. Talking in his
apartment with its views of the Hudson River, Said is unquiet, stung,
rummaging through papers that illustrate he is who he says he is, and very
obviously aware of the bleak absurdity of a situation in which he is
forced to do so.
There is, first, a matter of Weiner's etiquette: 'How can a man work for
three years of his life on my childhood and not call me?' Weiner insists
that he left a single message with Said's assistant at Columbia. 'She is
very upset about this,' says Said, producing one of his daily lists of
messages. 'She does one of these every day, and Weiner is lying.'
Weiner did contact a cousin, Robert, and threatened him when he refused to
co-operate. But there was no contact with any of the other, many,
relatives who could have testified to Said's childhood - spent in the
Jerusalem house and other addresses.
This is Commentary 's third attack on Said in a decade. First in the
series was an article entitled 'Professor of Terror', which Said recalls
as 'utterly defamatory, and I suspect an attempt to lure me into a libel
action, so as to get into a process of discovery'.
'I imagine this is the same,' he continues, 'an attempt to get me to sue,
to exhaust me and to bankrupt me. I do not have Michael Milken's money
behind me.' Milken, the former junk-bond dealer jailed in 1991 for insider
trading, is the leading donor of 'Special Gifts' to the Jewish Centre for
Public Affairs, which employs Justus Weiner. 'It's a tough time, but I'm
dealing with it. It just makes me angry for myself and for my people, much
less fortunate than me' adds Said.
Said ploughs through the factual case for the defence, as a matter of
necessary but humiliating routine. Most important, he refutes what he
calls Weiner's 'preposterous and insulting' claim that his memoir,
entitled Out of Place, was written as a rearguard action in response to
Weiner's own research. 'The contract was signed in 1989,' says Said, 'I
had finished it by 1997 and I first heard of Mr Weiner last weekend.'
Weiner - who toured Said's former home in Jerusalem to see if it was big
enough to accommodate two families - insists Said was only born in
Jerusalem because his family were on holiday there at the time.
'What are these vacations that repeatedly happen to coincide with my
mother giving birth?' says Said. On it goes: Said is not to be found in
the register of St George's Anglican school, writes Weiner. But the school
stopped keeping a register in 1946, before Said was enrolled in 1947.
These and many other factual refutations lodged, Said peels his
assailant's skin to get to the kernel of the scandal: to consider the
motivations and propulsions behind the attack. Most obviously: 'I have
been the only Palestinian who has been consistently and continually
arguing the position of the refugees and dispossessed people. Doing injury
to me is a way of doing injury to the Palestinian people.'
But there are finer points than that. 'It is an attempt,' says Said, 'to
pre-empt the process of return and compensation for the Palestinians. It
is a way of furthering the argument that the Palestinians never belonged
in Palestine... If someone like Edward Said is a liar, runs the argument,
how can we believe all those peasants who say they were driven off their
land?... It is part of the attempt to say that none of this actually
happened.'
Second, there is the increasing currency of Said's work in Israel, his
raised personal profile and a growing constituency of support and interest
among liberal, radical and mainstream Israelis. Among the first letters of
solidarity and outrage to reach Said last week were those from the leading
intellectuals Israel Shahak and Dan Rabinowitz, who is chairman of the
Israeli Archaeological Association.
Perhaps the most gratifying tribute to Said came from a respected critic
with whom he has crossed academic and political swords. George Steiner
said he had 'followed the matter' of Weiner's onslaught, but, echoing
Adorno's maxim, said: 'I speak about "My Homeland, the Text" - this is
where my passport is, and this is where Edward Said's passport is also. I
had occasion to meet him recently, and was terribly moved when he said
that he was now even more of an exile than myself, since he was now exiled
from the Arab side as well as the Jewish side.'
Such credibility for Said in Israel is an anathema to Zionists on the hard
right. 'I think I symbolise the things they are really afraid of,' Said
says. 'I don't think about barriers and partitions. I think the
Palestinians and the Jews should live together. But what you have is a
government in Israel, whether Likud or Labour, that advocates apartheid. I
don't believe in partition, and that is why I am dangerous to them.'
These are views that have made Said the foremost Arab critic of the
'peace' agreed to by Yasser Arafat, that have earned him criticism from
his own people as well as Israelis. But hitherto, no one has tried what
Weiner has set out to try: to say that Said is not really a Palestinian at
all. 'They have tried everything,' says Said, 'and now there is nothing
left but for them to try and say that none of it happened and that I am a
liar.'
Said's mother, writes Weiner, is, anyway, Lebanese. 'My mother,' retorts
Said with steel in his voice, 'was a Palestinian. Her mother was Lebanese,
her father Palestinian, and she had a Palestinian passport.' Weiner's
reference to his mother, who died of cancer in 1990, inflames Said's eyes,
with a mixture of grief, pride and angry indignation: 'She was dying in
Washington DC, comatose. The INS [immigration service] was trying to
deport her. My sister Grace was taking legal action to try and stop them.
Had it not been for a judge who was outraged, she would have been deported
while dying. And if that doesn't symbolise being a Palestinian, then I
don't know what does.'
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