Imperial Continuity - Palestine, Iraq, and U.S. Policy.

[nhboy]

 

[GURPS]

lets see who Edward Said was ....

One of Obama’s founding fathers who remains relatively unknown is the Palestinian radical Edward Said. Prior to his death in 2003, Said was the leading anti-colonial thinker in the United States. Obama studied with Said at Columbia University and the two maintained a relationship over the next two decades. Obama attended a Palestinian fundraiser in Chicago in 1998 in which Said was the featured speaker, and Obama also befriended Said’s protege Rashid Khalidi, who currently occupies the Edward Said chair of Arab Studies at Columbia.

Said wasn’t a mere academic; for a time, he served as a member of the Palestine National Council. In this capacity he worked closely with Yasser Arafat. Said has been photographed throwing rocks at Israel to symbolize his support for armed resistance against the Jewish state; one Jewish magazine dubbed him a “Professor of Terror.”

While Said was hired by Columbia to teach literature, his main interests were always political. We see this in the titles of his books: Culture and Imperialism, The Question of Palestine, and The Politics of Dispossession. He was a vehement critic of the United State and an even-more-vehement critic of Israel. America, Said argued, is a genocidal power with a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries, and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.”


http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/edward-said-obamas-founding-father/

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=634

Said is best known for his extremely influential 1979 book Orientalism, which holds that it is impossible for Westerners to write valid accounts of Middle Eastern affairs because their ideas are tainted by cultural biases and arrogance. In The Weekly Standard, Stanley Kurtz explains:

“The founding text of postcolonial studies, Orientalism effectively de-legitimated all previous scholarship on the Middle East by branding it as racist. Said drew no distinction between the most ignorant and bigoted remarks of nineteenth-century colonialists and the most accomplished pronouncements of contemporary Western scholars: All Western knowledge of the East was intrinsically tainted with imperialism.”​

Said considered Israel to be an illegitimate, colonialist state that preyed aggressively upon blameless Palestinians. He was a member of the PLO’s Palestinian National Council throughout the 1970s and 80s, though he stepped away from that post in 1991 -- in protest to the Oslo peace accords and to what he deemed Yasser Arafat’s unduly moderate stance toward Israel.

Said occasionally joined with Islamic activists in publicly protesting against alleged Israeli transgressions. In a famous photo from July 2000, he can be seen hurling a rock at Israeli Defense Force soldiers. When he subsequently was asked about his action, Said explained that it was “a symbolic gesture of joy.”

In the 1990s, Said spoke out against the sanctions that the United Nations had imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The professor was joined in this criticism by such academic luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Robert Jensen, and and Howard Zinn. The four collaborated to issue a January 1999 statement condemning the situation in Iraq as “sanctioned mass-murder that is nearing holocaust proportions.”

It's a Middle Eastern Thing, You Would Not Understand ........