Thread by @asadabukhalil

A thread: There is something happening to Edward Said at the hand of Western liberals (academics and journalists). There is an earnest campaign to make Said less radical than he was and to turn him into another Arab/Western liberal.
Adam Shatz · lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/…

The worst part is that some wish to employ Said into their political campaigns today regarding Syria or against Iran or against armed resistance. Take this for example: of all the things Said said about Israel and Arab governments, Shatz ignored all that and dug a sentence Said

Said about the Iranian regime. Of course, Said was not a fan of the Iranian regime, nor am I but you see the kind of political effort under way. Shatz brazenly reminds readers that a leftist died in Egyptian prison under Nasser (executions in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran in one

Month exceed executions in Nasser’s regime in its entirety. Why not mention the campaign against the left by Gulf regimes of by Western governments (against Arab leftists) or by Baathist regimes too. Said was far more complicated than is portrayed in the article by Shatz and

Brennan (although I am not finished with Brennan). What Shatz fails to recognize is that both Said and Hisham Sharabi really radically changed over the years: toward a more radical stance on Palestine. Shatz invokes a categorical stance by Said against “political Islam”

(Whatever it means) without saying that Said did not object to resistance against Israeli occupation by politically Islamist groups. Said was not categorically against armed struggle—at least later in his life. When I first came to the US, I had my first encounter with Said in

A public clash at the Institute of Policy Studies in DC, where Said denounced PLO’s armed struggle. I was furious at him. But that is not at all how Said evolved (or Sharabi for that matter). In the 1990s, I made some remarks at a conference that were critical of Hizbullah and

Their ideology, and I remember that both Edward Said and Clovis Maksoud took me aside later and spoke to me about the historical significance of the military campaign against Israeli occupation in South Lebanon by Hizbullah. You would not know that from Shatz or Brennan. When I

Came to US in 1983, Said stood for a 2-state solution. In 1993, after Said attended a debate I had with Judith Miller in New York City, Said told me as we were walking outside afterwards: increasingly over the years, I am leaning more toward “your people” (in reference to George

Habash and their maximalist just proposals for the liberation of all of Palestine). And the admiration for Sadiq Al-Azm comes through in Shatz and Brennan. Shatz here talked about how Azm wrote a “blistering anatomy of the Arab military failure” in the aftermath of 1967. No,

Adam. What Al-Azm wrote in “Self-criticism After the Defeat” was a blistering attack on the Arab “mindset” and of the Arab character—his book was a racist denunciation of the Arab mind in a genre not that different from Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind. Ghassan Kanafani saw that in

The project of Al-Azm very early on and wrote that in Al-Anwar (See the articles that Kanafani wrote under the pen name Faris Faris). Said was increasingly aware of those tendencies in Al-Azm and also his usefulness to American Zionists. When Said knew in 1993, that Al-Azm and I

Were meeting when Al-Azm was a scholar at the Wilson Center, Said told me about the Princeton’s Zionists and their admiration for Al-Azm. Incidentally, Al-Azm urged me to intervene for a reconciliation with Said and Said was fiercely opposed to any reconciliation and on

Political grounds. I now feel that present-day American liberals (and some American progressive leftists) want to use dead Said as an ally in their present-day political stances. Also, what Shatz said about the Lebanese civil war is so inaccurate: Hizbullah did not come to the

Scene until 1984–that was NINE years after the outbreak of the war. And the War of the Camps was not a war between Shiiites and Palestinians, as Shatz said. It was a war between the Amal Movement and other clients of the Syrian regime against the camps. Hizbullah in fact was

Opposed to that war and even surreptitiously aided Palestinians. All that is missing from his account. And Said was clearly sided in that war: he was categorically opposed to the Phalanges and to any cooperation with them. That is missing here too.