Ed Said Miscellany

Towards the end of The Politics of Dispossession, there are some essays on books and people - on Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, Noam Chomsky, Nelson Mandela to mention a few.

Rarely have I read such a scathing review of any book, no matter what the content! Ed Said simply tears apart Friedman's book in this essay called The Orientalist Express: Thomas Friedman Wraps up the Middle East. I had been recommend Freidmans book as a classic on the Israel-Palestine conflict, I am not so sure anymore. To give a bit of a background, Friedman is a Jew who pretty much grew up in the US, studied Arabic and Jewish history at Brandeis and Oxford and went on to become a journalist, covering the Middle East for a good part of two decades. Said does say that the book is good reading despite its gargantuan length, except for the parts where "Friedman gets overly sentimental with his testimonials about his feelings, or when he offers advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him". He goes on - "What Friedman and the Orientalists espouse is a threadbare repertoire of often racist cliches, all of them bearing the marks of colonial knowledge now allied with Naipaulesque disenchantment". I read it to mean that Friedman is often quoting and preaching ideas or idealised situations that are just drawn from a theoretical knowledge of the situation and the incredibly disgusting condescending attitute that is so typical of Naipaul. If any of my readers think I am interpreting this wrong, please let me know...

In an intensely personal situation in one of the essays, Said describes how he & his family get back to the part of Palestine where he was born & grew up during his early years. After a while, they manage to find the house...now occupied by a right-wing Christian fundamentalist and militantly pro-Zionist family...."More than anything else, it was the house I did not, could not, enter that symbolised the eerie finality of a history that looked at me from behind the shaded windows, across an immense gulf I found myself unable to cross". Must have been an incredibly powerful feeling...