Caroline Glick: Edward Said, Prophet of Political Violence in America
Twenty years ago, on July 3, 2000, an incident occurred along the Lebanese border with Israel that, at the time, seemed both bizarre and, in the broad span of things, unimportant. But with the hindsight of 20 years, it was a seminal moment and a harbinger for the mob violence now taking place in many parts of America.Melanie Phillips: The war against the west, and its defender
That day, Columbia University professor Edward Said was photographed on the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese side of border with Israel throwing a rock at an Israel Defense Forces watchtower 30 feet away.
Said, who passed away in 2003, was no mere professor. He was the superstar of far-Left intellectuals. Even better, he was at once both a professor and a member of a terrorist organization. Said served not only as an academic, but as a member of the Palestine National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terror group's formal governing apparatus.
Still, his action was strange. The PLO had ostensibly forsworn terrorism seven years earlier, when it embarked on a peace process with Israel. True, since then, Palestinian terrorism had risen to unprecedented heights, with more Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists between 1993 and 2000 than had been killed over the previous 15 years. But Said himself insisted that he was a man of peace. So why did he choose to get photographed throwing a rock at Israeli soldiers protecting their border?
To understand his action, it is necessary to understand Said's intellectual record.
Although his field of expertise was comparative literature, Said became a celebrity intellectual for a work that had nothing to do with comparative literature.
In 1978, Said published Orientalism, a polemical analysis of Western study of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Said's work, which became the canonical text of postcolonial studies in the American academy, was a repudiation of all Western scholarship on the Islamic world—and, more broadly, a repudiation of the capacity of Western academics to study other regions and peoples of the world.
In Orientalism, Said characterized all Western—and particularly American—scholarship on the Arab and Islamic worlds as one big conspiracy theory. As Middle East scholar Martin Kramer explained in his 2001 work, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Said said that Western scholarship on the Arab and Islamic worlds amounted to an expression of white supremacy, "articulated in the West to justify its dominion over the East."
Trump wasn’t stoking a culture war or exploiting social divisions. He was instead responding to the culture war now being waged upon core American and western values of freedom of expression and the rule of law, and declaring that he would not allow it to succeed.Melanie Phillips: Video interview with Gadi Taub
“One of their political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.
“This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty must be stopped and it will be stopped very quickly. We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children from this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life. In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.”
Right from the start of Trump’s presidency I have expressed concerns about aspects of his character: his narcissism and thin skin, his volatility, his short attention span, his transactionalism, his occasional lapses into believing in fantasies, his Twitterhoea. And his leadership during the coronavirus crisis – or rather, the lack of it – has been lamentable.
Yet despite all that, I still believe as I did in November 2016 that if he were to lose the presidential election to the Democratic party, America and the west would be lost. The slim chance of their surviving this great crisis for civilisation would be snuffed out altogether if the morally bankrupt and venomously west-bashing left were to come to power in America. I also thought the west was now in such disarray, and the political and cultural establishment was so uniformly bankrupt, that it was only an individual defying conventional rules of behaviour who – paradoxically – would stand any chance of restoring America’s centre of moral and political gravity. And I believe all that even more strongly now.
I did a video interview with Gadi Taub, a historian at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.
We talked about my novel, The Legacy, and its themes of antisemitism, fractured Jewish diaspora identity and the pull of history, as well as my political and personal memoir, Guardian Angel. Then we talked about the journey I describe in that memoir, “from leftism to sanity” as it’s put on the cover or, as I prefer to style it, from fantasy to realism. We also talked about the reality-denying transformation of Israel in the western mind from victim to victimiser, and the malign processes which had brought this about.
You can watch the interview here.
Melanie Phillips: The long march, and how to reverse it
I took part remotely in a discussion held in London by the New Culture Forum to discuss their new book, “The Long March: How the Left Won the Culture War and What To Do About It.” The first part of the title refers to the “long march through the institutions”, the strategy of achieving revolutionary change by infiltrating subversive ideas into all the cultural institutions of society and thus transforming it from within.
As chairman Peter Whittle observed, however, it’s the latter part of the title that’s the most important and difficult bit. The long march has succeeded in Britain to the letter. The great question is whether it can be reversed and if so, how.
Other participants in the discussion were the book’s author, Marc Sidwell, and historian Ralph Heydell-Mankoo. You can buy the book or download a pdf at the NCF website here.