Reply #27: Robert Fisk article... [View All]

[Violet_Crumble]

By Robert Fisk


The Independent
27 September, 2003

<snip>


After Arafat went along with the Oslo accords, Said was the first - rightly - to attack him. Arafat had never seen a Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, he said. There wasn't a single Palestinian lawyer present during the Oslo negotiations. Said was immediately condemned - all of us who said that Oslo would be a catastrophic failure were - as "anti-peace" and, by vicious extension, "pro-terrorist".

Said would weary of the need to repeat the Palestinian story, the importance of denouncing the old lies - one of them, which especially enraged him, was the myth that Arab radio stations had called upon the Palestinian Arabs of 1948 to abandon their homes in the new Israeli state - but he would repeat, over and over again, the importance of re-telling the tale of Palestinian tragedy.

He was abused by anonymous callers, his office was visited by a fire-bomber, and he was libelled many times by Jewish Americans who hated that he, a professor of literature at Columbia University, could so eloquently and vigorously defend his occupied people.

An attempt was made, in his dying days, to deprive him of his academic job by some cruel supporters of Israel who claimed - the same old, mendacious slur - that he was an anti-Semite. Columbia, in a long but slightly ambivalent statement, defended him. When the Jewish head of Harvard expressed his concern about the rise of "anti-Semitism" in the United States - by those who dared to criticise Israel - Said wrote scathingly that a Jewish academic who was head of Harvard "complains about anti-Semitism!"

http://www.countercurrents.org/fisk-270903.htm