When Did "Arab"
Become
A Dirty Word?
By Robert Fisk
The
Independent
05 November, 2003
Is
"Palestinian" now just a dirty word? Or is "Arab"
the dirty word? Let's start with the late Edward Said, the brilliant
and passionate Palestinian-American academic who wrote--among many other
books--Orientalism, the ground-breaking work which first explored our
imperial Western fantasies about the Middle East. After he died of leukaemia
last month, Zev Chafets sneered at him in the New York Daily News in
the following words: "As an Episcopalian, he's ineligible for the
customary 72 virgins, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's honoured with
a couple of female doctoral graduates."
According to Chafets,
who (says the Post) spent 33 years "in politics, government and
journalism" in Jerusalem, Orientalism "rests on a simple thesis:
Westerners are inherently unable to fairly judge, or even grasp, the
Arab world." Said "didn't blow up the Marines in Lebanon in
1983 ... he certainly didn't fly a plane into the World Trade Centre.
What he did was to jam America's intellectual radar."
When I read this
vicious obituary, I recalled hearing Chafets' name before. So I turned
to my files and up he popped in 1982, as former director of the Israeli
government press office in Jerusalem. He had just published a book falsely
claiming that Western journalists in Beirut--myself among them--had
been "terrorised" by bands of Palestinians. He even claimed
my old friend Sean Toolan, who was murdered by a jealous husband with
whose wife he was having an affair, was killed by Palestinians because
they disapproved of a US television programme about the PLO.
So I got the point.
You can kick a scholar when he's dead if he's a Palestinian, and kick
a journalist when he's dead if you want to claim he was murdered by
Palestinians. But now the same sick fantasies are taking hold in Australia,
where a determined effort is being made by Israel's supposed friends
there to prevent the Palestinian scholar Hanan Ashrawi--of all people--from
receiving the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize this week. A Jewish writer in
Sydney has bravely defended her--not least because the local Israeli
lobby appears to have deliberately misquoted an interview she gave me
two years ago, distorting her words to imply that she is in favour of
suicide bombings.
Ashrawi is not in
favour of these wicked attacks. She has fearlessly spoken out against
them. But Sydney University has already withdrawn the use of its Great
Hall for the presentation of the peace prize and the Lord Mayor of Sydney,
Lucy Turnbull, has dissociated the City of Sydney, sponsor of the prize,
from the presentation. And just to show you what lies behind this--apart
from the fact that Turnbull's husband Malcolm is trying to get a nomination
for a parliamentary seat--take a look through the following exchange
between Kathryn Greiner, former chairwoman of the Sydney peace foundation,
and Professor Stuart Rees, the foundation's director:
KG: "I have
to speak logically. It is either Hanan Ashrawi or the Peace Foundation.
That's our choice, Stuart. My distinct impression is that if you persist
in having her here, they'll (sic) destroy you. Rob Thomas of City Group
is in trouble for supporting us. And you know Danny Gilbert [an Australian
lawyer] has already been warned off."
SR: "You must
be joking. We've been over this a hundred times. We consulted widely.
We agreed the jury's decision, made over a year ago, was not only unanimous
but that we would support it, together."
KG: "But you're
not listening to the logic. The Commonwealth Bank ... is highly critical.
We could not approach them for financial help for the Schools Peace
Prize. We'll get no support from them. The business world will close
ranks. They are saying we are one-sided, that we've only supported Palestine."
There is more of
the same, but Professor Rees is standing firm--for now. So is Australian
journalist Antony Loewenstein in Zmag magazine. Ashrawi, he says, "has
endured campaigns of hate based on slander and lies for most of her
life, from those who are intent on silencing the Palestinian narrative
..." But how much longer must this go on? Ashrawi, I notice, is
now being called an "aging (sic) bespoke terror apologist"
by Mark Steyn in, of all places, The Irish Times.
And it's getting
worse. Said's work is now being denounced in testimony to the US Congress
by Dr Stanley Kurz, who claims that the presence of "post-colonial
theory" in academic circles has produced professors who refuse
to support or instruct students interested in joining the State Department
or American intelligence agencies. So now Congress is proposing to set
up an "oversight board"--with appointed members from Homeland
Security, the Department of Defence and the US National Security Agency--that
will link university department funding on Middle East studies to "students
training for careers in national security, defence and intelligence
agencies ..."
As Professor Michael
Bednar of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin
says, "the possibility that someone in Homeland Security will instruct
college professors ... on the proper, patriotic, 'American-friendly'
textbooks that may be used in class scares and outrages me."
So it's to be goodbye
to the life-work of Edward Said? And goodbye to peace prizes for Hanan
Ashrawi? Goodbye to Palestinians, in fact? Then the radar really will
be jammed.
Copyright: The Independent: