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After a contentious two-year campaign waged by the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) and other supporters, a mural dedicated to the late Columbia University English and comparative literature professor Edward Said was unveiled at San Francisco State University (SFSU) last week. Former SFSU Arabic professor Fayeq Oweis – now teaching the same subject at Santa Clara University – was the lead artist for what's been labeled the "Palestinian Cultural Mural." The mural does include various symbols said to be associated with Palestinian culture, but it is Said's likeness that looms largest. This is perhaps appropriate for it was Said's...

Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books, 500 pp., $29.95) The West hasn’t been doing well in the war of ideas against Islamic jihadists. We fail to understand the true nature of Muslim doctrine, and a self-loathing long entrenched in our public discourse often cripples us. The eagerness of our intellectuals, scholars, and artists to don the hair shirt of colonial, imperial, racist, and xenophobic guilt has heartened our enemies and convinced them that for all of our economic and military power, we are rotten to the core and ripe for destruction....

I first met Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama almost ten years ago when, as my representative in the Illinois state senate, he came to speak at the University of Chicago. He impressed me as progressive, intelligent and charismatic. I distinctly remember thinking 'if only a man of this calibre could become president one day.' On Friday Obama gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Chicago. It had been much anticipated in American Jewish political circles which buzzed about his intensive efforts to woo wealthy pro-Israel campaign donors who up to now have generally leaned...

On the evening of September 11th, Rosemary Righter, the senior leader writer (“leader” is British for “editorial”) at The Times of London, was due at a dinner party. She arrived late, and found the tone, after a hard day at the office, oddly smug and triumphalist. Leaving early, she gave a lift to another guest. “Rosemary,” he said, “isn’t it marvelous to think that the arrogant bloody Americans have finally got it in the neck?” Involuntarily, she braked. Hard. Though not hard enough to precipitate him through the windshield, sadly. Miss Righter was one of the first to experience an admittedly...

A widely-publicized attack on supporters of Israel by two leading academics commits a fair number of inaccuracies not the least of which is their characterization of controversies surrounding the Israel Lobby as they manifest themselves on American campuses. “In September 2002, for example, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in a recent report which also appeared in abbreviated form in the London Review of Books....

Did the Edward Said Chair at Columbia University break a rule that would get one of his students expelled? Rashid Khalidi: Plagiarist? By Lee KaplanFrontPageMagazine.com | June 9, 2005I once covered a speech by the late Edward Said at UC-Berkeley in which he claimed the ancient people of the Bible who predated the Jews were in fact today’s “Palestinians.” In other words, the Jewish claims to any part of the land of Israel based on the Bible or nationalism should be rejected: the Palestinians were there first. A friend of mine in academia called me with a tip. “So there I...

ABIGAIL THERNSTROM once described the American college campus as an island of repression in a sea of freedom. The report of Columbia University's ad hoc grievance committee suggests that Columbia is such an island. On its face, the report presents findings and recommendations concerning allegations by Columbia students that they were subjected to intimidation and abuse by members of the university's department of Middle East and Asian Language and Cultures (MEALAC). However, the report is better understood as a directive to Columbia students to take without protest the poisonous medicine being administered by the anti-Israel, anti-American radicals who dominate MEALAC....

Secrets, Donors and the Edward Said Chair Columbia University’s newly established Edward Said Chair in Middle East Studies is noteworthy for several reasons. The position is named for the recently deceased professor best known for his defense of Palestinian “resistence.” And Rashid Khalidi, an overt supporter of Palestinian violence and – according to a just-published biography of Yasir Arafat from Oxford University Press – a former PLO press spokesman[i], has joined Columbia to fill the post. But there is something even more objectionable about this chair: It is anonymously endowed and Columbia University – perhaps against the law – refuses...

FEBRUARY 2004 MARKED THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the Iranian Revolution. From September 1978 to February 1979, in the course of a massive urban revolution with millions of participants, the Iranian people toppled the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941-1979), which had pursued a highly authoritarian program of economic and cultural modernization. By late 1978, the Islamist faction led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had come to dominate the antiregime uprising, in which secular nationalists, democrats, and leftists also participated. The Islamists controlled the slogans and the organization of the protests, which meant that many secular women protesters were pressured into...

Saturday, June 12, 2004 Kim by Edward Said Anyone who doubts the power of the Leftist pen must account for the peculiar circumstances in which Edward Said was asked to write the introduction to Penguin's 1989 edition of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Peter Hopkirk, the inveterate chronicler of the "Great Game" -- the 19th century geopolitical rivalry between Russia and Britain for Central Asia -- observed in his 1996 book The Quest for Kim how far the historical revisionism had advanced. "More recently both Kipling and Kim have become the targets of sanctimonious critics, especially in the United States. Declaring that...

The recently established Edward Said Chair at Columbia has caused much controversy, in part because it is held by former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi and in part because the donors of the chair’s estimated $4 million endowment have until now been kept secret. As Campus Watch has reported, it is highly irregular for the identity of academic chair donors to be concealed. It is all the more alarming that a university, naming a chair for one political activist and then awarding it to another political activist, would then prevent the public from knowing who had funded the chair. Columbia University...

The recently established Edward Said Chair at Columbia has caused much controversy, in part because it is held by former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi and in part because the donors of the chair's estimated $4 million endowment have until now been kept secret. As Campus Watch has reported, it is highly irregular for the identity of academic chair donors to be concealed. It is all the more alarming that a university, naming a chair for one political activist and then awarding it to another political activist, would then prevent the public from knowing who had funded the chair. Columbia University...

The recently established Edward Said Chair at Columbia has caused much controversy, in part because it is held by former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi and in part because the donors of the chair's estimated $4 million endowment have until now been kept secret. As Campus Watch has reported, it is highly irregular for the identity of academic chair donors to be concealed. It is all the more alarming that a university, naming a chair for one political activist and then awarding it to another political activist, would then prevent the public from knowing who had funded the chair. Columbia University...

American professors have long lectured to our students about purported Western biases and cruel misconceptions toward the "Other." According to Edward Said and other postcolonial critics, much of our dim view of Arabs is a product of an "Orientalism" that was constructed by European intellectuals of the 19th century West — blinkered folk actively engaged as colonialists overseas, and conditioned by an earlier pedigree of prejudice toward the East dating from Herodotus and Aeschylus. According to such supposedly biased and unsophisticated views, Asians and Arabs were considered tribal, emotional, less-sophisticated peoples, prone to violence, fundamentalism, and irrational thinking, simply because...

Columbia’s MEALC Praises a Legacy of Hateby Jerry Gordon, Alyssa A. Lappen and Maria SliwaDec 14, '03 / 19 Kislev 5764  E-mail This  Print  Homepage A veritable geyser of hate, in the tradition of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Der Deutscher Beobachter editor Julius Streicher, erupted Friday evening, December 5th at a festschrift to honor the memory of the late cultural polemicist and Comparative Literature professor Edward Said. The “US Imperialism in the 21st Century” intellectual atrocity gathered in the Teatro at Columbia University’s Casa Italiana, sponsored by the controversial Middle East Arts Language and Culture (MEALC) program, an...

Columbia University’s newly established Edward Said Chair in Middle East Studies is noteworthy for several reasons. The position is named for the recently deceased professor best known for his defense of Palestinian “resistence.” And Rashid Khalidi, an overt supporter of Palestinian violence and – according to a just-published biography of Yasir Arafat from Oxford University Press – a former PLO press spokesman[i], has joined Columbia to fill the post. But there is something even more objectionable about this chair: It is anonymously endowed and Columbia University – perhaps against the law – refuses to disclose the donors. According to Columbia,...

The way Muslim apologists speak of Bernard Lewis one might believe they think him the Devil incarnate. Famed anti-Orientalist Edward Said, for one, never missed an opportunity to execrate Lewis. Intrigued by all this calumny I picked up a copy of Lewis’ latest book, What Went Wrong, in which Lewis cursorily examines Islamic civilization, trying to tell us, well, what went wrong. I’d like to say I found out what it was, but I didn’t. Lewis never answered the question. While he thoroughly details the historical problems Muslim societies have faced when confronting with the modern West, he doesn't dig...

Penman for the terrorists Edward Said was the Harriet Beecher Stowe of radical Islam's war on the WestBy Gene Edward Veith WHY IS IT THAT THE WORLD'S UNIVERSITIES ARE hotbeds of support for the cause of radical Islam? This, despite the fact that they are also hotbeds of support for feminism, gay rights, and free sex, causes the radical Muslims would put to the sword? Why do even Jewish professors and students at major universities feel constrained to denounce "Zionism" and support the Palestinian cause? Outside of the ivory towers, why did Islamic radicalism break out just now in...

far as we know, Saddam Hussein is on the loose in Iraq, Osama Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the tribal lands of Pakistan and Sheik Ahmed Yassin is still dodging Israeli bombs in Gaza. But the jihad just lost a hero right here in New York City. Edward Said, Columbia University's famous warrior-scholar, is dead, felled at age 67 by leukemia. Columbia mourns. "This death is an irreplaceable loss to the realm of ideas," said President Lee Bollinger. Bollinger's grief is shared by many. CounterPunch, a journal of the radical left, has run a series of fervid tributes to...

King Features Syndicate Inc.Charley Reese 10/06/2003 A Giant Among MidgetsLast week, television news shows took note of the deaths of Donald O'Connor, an actor-dancer; of George Plimpton, a high-toned journalist; and of some rock 'n' roll singer I'd never heard of. Completely missing from the shows I scanned was any mention at all of the death of a giant in this era of mental and moral midgets. I refer to Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University; a Palestinian and a fearless champion of human rights; a musician and a music critic; and a writer of great note....