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Last month, we offered a series of quotes from Professor Said speaking at a symposium in Gaza that gave insight into the level of his intellectual discourse. Suffice it here to remind the reader of one: "The American policy tries to annihilate nations that do not follow America's ideology . . . American history [and] society is based on the annihilation of nations." In December 1998, he reacted indignantly to the charade where the PLO in Gaza, Clinton in attendance, supposedly changed its charter. (Eliminating the charter is the rug the PLO has repeatedly sold since the signing of the Oslo agreements). Said was indignant at any semblance of changing the Charter's formal commitment to destroy Israel. Said Said: "What the Israelis are trying to do is to force Palestinians to change their own history and I don't see why we should do that."
In an unfortunately all too rare display of protest, Jon Whitman of Hebrew University sent a letter resigning from the Association that was published in the PMLA Forum (the Publication of the Modern Language Association's letter section). His emphasis was on a humanistic value wholly foreign to Said: civic discourse. The following are excerpts from Whitman's letter.
"The President of the MLA publicly and officially represents the organization. I believe that such a representative should have displayed regularly not only distinction in critical scholarship but also dignity in the public treatment of others. Edward Said's professional work has extensively influenced several fields of literary study. But his public assaults against individuals whose views reasonably differ from his own deeply violate fundamental values repeatedly professed by the MLA. At times, such assaults have passed beyond the forms of disparagement that often compromise contemporary academic disputes. They have passed into acts of aggressive contempt and blatant dehumanization.
"The variety of disturbing cases includes an exchange many years ago with several members of the MLA ("An Exchange on Edward Said and Difference," Critical Inquiry 15 [1989]:611-46). In a detailed article, one scholar argued that greater accuracy and breadth of information would noticeably revise Said's claims about the Middle East (Robert J. Griffin, "Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward Said"). In his reply ("Response"), Said tried to discredit alternately the author's sanity, his scholarship, and his humanity. His "solemn idiocies," cried Said, "inhabit a semi-deranged world entirely his own." This scholar—"if that is what he is," scoffed Said—is, "only, to the best of my knowledge, the author or two (or is it three?) below average articles on Dr. Johnson." "I surmise," Said postured, that "Griffin is actually 'Griffin,' an ideological simulacrum": it could be asked "if he is a human being."
"Perhaps even more than the original critique, Said's reaction exposed some of the stark deficiencies of his own claims, including his profession to speak for the cause of humane behavior."
Whitman goes on to cite a series of assaults by Said, many on Jews (ironically chiefly left wing critics of Israel like Michael Walzer whom he calls a figure of "characteristic idiocy") but some, relatively mild by Said's standards, on Arabs (presumably guilty of not being sufficiently inflamed against Israel for the burning Said). Whitman points out that "the more reflective the critique of his views, the more enraged his reaction. When confronted with his insults (like those quoted in this letter), he cries that his own integrity is being impugned."
Said's reply, published in the same issue (January 1999), is as churlish and unapologetic as ever. Complains Said: "All the comments he ascribes to me occurred in specific, extremely combative contexts in which I was attacked first at least as unreasonably as anything I either thought or said afterward.. . . He says nothing about the relentless verbal attacks on me (e.g. Edward Alexander—also a literary scholar—"The Professor of Terror," Commentary, August 1989) . . ." And Said then launches into an ad hominem attack on Whitman "one of the real sources of his animus (and of the inordinate amount of time he must have spent trawling in a lot of marginal writing) resembles that of a partisan, recently nationalized Israeli once again fighting a Palestinian.
"Whitman's letter is, I believe, an extension of the Zionist–Palestinian conflict masked as an argument against public misbehaving: it is drenched in the usual hypocrisy about norms of conduct, a tactic employed by publicists who try to hide their real agenda."
Said also asks why Whitman waited so long to protest (that Said would be president in 1999 was established in a 1996 MLA election), and concludes by dismissing Whitman's criticism as "oedipal rebellion" because Whitman had been an undergraduate student at Columbia and apparently taken at least one course with Said.
Since Said had attacked Edward Alexander (not mentioned in Whitman's chronicle of Said's targets), Alexander wrote a response to the PMLA journal which it declined to publish on the grounds, in the words of the letter to him, that "your name does not appear in the MLA membership records." Alexander is professor of English at the University of Washington, the author of numerous works on Victorian literature, and familiar to advocates for Israel as the author of such books as The Jewish Wars and The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies. Here, for the record, is Alexander's response:
PMLA Forum
Modern Language Association
10 Astor Place
New York NY 10003-6981
21 December 1998
To the editor:
Edward Said (Forum, January 1999) admits to the incivility of discourse that Jon Whitman accuses him of, but claims that all instances of it occurred in his responses to still more uncivil attacks on him. In fact, nearly all Said's vituperation cited by Whitman was in response to compositions overly respectful of Said, even though falling short of the sycophancy that he is accustomed to from New York Times interviewers. Does this heavily petted intellectual believe that any criticism of his views constitutes an act of lese majeste meriting execution?
I am flattered that Said singles out a little essay of mine, published nearly ten years ago, as the epitome of "relentless verbal attacks" on him. That essay was not about his bad manners. Rather, it treated his famously preposterous statements about Jews: they are not truly a people because their identity in the Diaspora has been wholly a function of persecution; the Holocaust served to "protect" Palestinian Jews "with the world's compassion"; before 1948 "the historical duration of a Jewish state [in Palestine] was a sixty-year period two millennia ago." I also commented on his advocacy of murdering Arab political opponents ("collaborators") and his claim that such murders were sanctioned by the UN Charter—a claim that would strike a normally attentive sixth-grader as ludicrous, but was perfectly acceptable to the editors of Critical Inquiry who published it. Finally, I raised the question of how Said's membership on the Palestine National Council, an international terrorist organization, might bear upon our old-fashioned view of literature as an art meant to encourage moral awareness and humane understanding.
I do agree with Said that Whitman's letter of resignation from the MLA is belated—but by far more than three years. I recall another letter of resignation from the MLA, shown to me in about 1971 after Louis Kampf had been elected president of the organization. It was written by my then colleague, the late Elizabeth Dipple. She said that, as a Canadian citizen, she was forbidden to belong to foreign political organizations. Perhaps that should have been the last word on this subject.
Sincerely yours,
Edward Alexander
University of Washington
(For those who have not followed the progressive politicization of the Modern Language Association, the election of Louis Kampf in 1971 was a landmark.)
Since the MLA did not see fit to publish this letter, Said could not rave further against Alexander in its pages. But as a pleasant postscript, it is worth noting that May 1999 brought a hissing fit from Said against Milton Viorst, whose pro-PLO writings date back to the 1970s when Golda Meir was Prime Minister and the PLO was still rightfully and universally recognized as a terror organization devoted to Israel's destruction. Said had tossed off some barbs against Viorst in the pages of the Egyptian daily Al Ahram: from Said's perspective Viorst's crime seems to have been his enthusiasm for the late King Hussein of Jordan. Hurt, Viorst sent a letter to Al Ahram plaintively complaining that despite "having spent much of my adult life reporting on the region and being recognized as a fair observer" [in other words, having long faithfully promoted the pro-Arab line] he had been insulted as "racist" by Said and part "of a Western media conspiracy that degrades the Arab image." Said's response was that Viorst was "as inaccurate and ill-informed a reader as he is a writer. Most of what he ascribes to me is a confection made up to mask his animus against the Arabs and his adoration of King Hussein, one of whose major achievements was to have granted Viorst an interview." One cannot help a frisson of pleasure as one reads this exchange in the Egyptian daily. These two deserve each other.
Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost.
Thanks to the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] for the translation from the Egyptian press.
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