Customer Reviews

Edward Said and The Modern Language Association.: An article from: Midstream

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As Edward Alexander explains in this article, Ed Said, by 1989, "already had a well-established reputation for confidently reciting the most preposterous falsehoods, especially when he wrote about matters touching Jews and Israel." Some of the examples Alexander gives are truly amazing. One is Said's claim that the historical duration of a Jewish state in the Levant was "a sixty-year period, two millenia ago." Another is that the Holocaust served to "protect" Levantine Jews "with the world's compassion." Yet another was that the Jews are not really a people because their Diaspora identity was wholly a function of persecution! And one of the best was that it was just fine to murder those Arabs who support Israel (according to Said, "the UN Charter and every other known document or protocol entitles a people under foreign occupation not only to resist but also by extension to deal severely with collaborators").

Alexander informs us that this last bit of nonsense was published in, of all places, Critical Inquiry, a journal of literary theory!

The author's main point is that Said was elected President of the Modern Language Association in 1999. And that most of the members of that organization failed to so much as protest the election of Said, who was, after all, a member of the National Council of an infamous terrorist organization.

Alexander has done us all a service by showing the extent to which parts of academia have been perverted in such a manner. As far as I am concerned, the politicization of the Modern Language Association is inexcusable. So is the rude manner in which it treats its political opponents. But worst of all is its repudiation of truth and scholarship. The product of academic associations is supposed to be truth. If that is abandoned, they are of no use. And they'll threaten the reputation of other aspects of academia as well.