Check out Edward Said’s latest piece in the Guardian. Check it out for one simple reason: it has nothing, nothing to say. He loathes the current Arab regimes, yet he defends them. He wants an Arab uprising, but he doesn’t know how. He throws one empty hate-filled fusillade at the United States, while never proposing any solution to Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, or any solution to the terrible state of the Arab world’s civil society. Here’s his defense of Arab culture today:
Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of history, to a civilisation about to be crushed and transformed utterly, to a society that, despite its drawbacks and weaknesses, nevertheless goes on functioning? Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school, men and women marry and work and have children, they play and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and companionship, friendship and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the business of living despite everything.
That’s it? An acknowedgment of Arab misrule, but then a celebration of pure banality. Why didn’t he add that Arabs also blow their noses and cut their hair? Is there any society in which these everyday things don’t go on? Of course, those families in Iraq who see their loved ones carted off to a torture chamber or their neighbors subjected to nerve gas attacks probably don’t find this subsistence as alluring as Said does. Then there’s this staggering piece of concession:
Iraqis, we are told by the Iraqi dissidents, will welcome their liberation, and perhaps forget entirely about their past sufferings. Perhaps.
Perhaps? That’s it, professor? Yep, that’s the hedge-betting, weasel phrase designed to innoculate Said from the moral opprobrium of loathing America and Israel more than the evil from Tikrit. As I’ve said before, one of the great unintended benefits of this awful time is that it is exposing the American academic left in ways never done before. They are now forced actually to make arguments in defense of the indefensible. All they have is a disdain for the West, an inability to make moral judgements, and the rest is air.
BAGHDAD BROADCASTING COMPANY: More evidence that the BBC is now actively cooperating with Saddam to create anti-war propaganda. A new series on the threat of a war to Iraq’s archeological treasures:
Speaking at Querna, on the southern tip of Iraq, where the Euphrates and Tigris meet and Adam’s tree is said to mark the Garden of Eden, [broadcaster] Mr Cruickshank said: “An act of war visited on these people would not just be a catastrophe for history and wreck an ancient culture but bestir these peaceful people into a terrible fury.”
Heard of smart bombs? Among the possible targets: “the oldest Christian monastery, situated in Mosul and dating from the 4th century BC.” I guess that would be the oldest Christian monastery, pre-dating Christ by a few hundred years.
AFTER THE LEFT: A worthwhile piece in the Washington Post about anti-war sentiment in Britain. Money quote:
For the traditional left, said Emmanuele Ottolinghi, a research fellow at the Middle East Center at St. Antony’s, anti-Americanism has replaced a belief in socialism as the common denominator that holds disparate groups together. It also binds the left to Britain’s growing Muslim population, anti-globalists and anti-Zionists. “Anti-Americanism is glue that holds them together, and hatred of Israel is one aspect,” he said.
Again, this isn’t about legitimate criticism of American foreign policy. It’s about finding some glue for a series of resentments, now that socialism has collapsed as an ideology.
The Dish 