Professor Said's untrue stories
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist, 08/30/99
If he were a columnist for The Boston Globe, he would be fired.
But Edward Said is not a journalist, he is an academic, and the standards of truth and accuracy in academia are lower than those in journalism. So it is a safe bet that Said has little to fear from the fact that he has just been exposed as a liar. He will not be fired from Columbia University, where he is a tenured professor, nor will he be ousted from the renowned Modern Language Association, whose presidency he assumed in January.
For 20 years, Said has been the Palestinians' most illustrious spokesman. Articulate, zealous, brilliant, he has savaged Israel and championed the PLO in every imaginable medium: books, newspapers, speeches, interviews, radio broadcasts, even a BBC documentary. He was a close adviser to Yasser Arafat and the author of Arafat's infamous 1974 United Nations speech. For many years Said was a member of the Palestine National Council, the parent body of the PLO.
He resigned in 1991 and today calls Arafat a traitor for signing peace agreements with Israel.
What has always made Said's pleas on the Palestinians' behalf so poignant is that he spoke from personal experience. He told of growing up in Palestine before the Israeli War of Independence, and of how his family was uprooted by Zionist violence and forced into exile. ''I was born in Jerusalem,'' he wrote last year, ''and spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt.'' In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor he recalled how his family had fled ''in panic'' in December 1947, when ''a Jewish-forces sound truck warned Arabs to leave the neighborhood'' in which they lived.
Said's life story has infused his advocacy with moral authority. As Salman Rushdie puts it, bywriting about ''the anguish of living with displacement, with exile,'' Said ''enables us to feel the pain of his people.''
Said has described with sad nostalgia his childhood home at 10 Brenner St. ''I feel even more depressed,'' he told an English-language Palestinian newspaper in March, ''when I remember my beautiful old house surrounded by pine and orange trees in Al Talbiyeh in East Jerusalem.''
Some time after his family was pushed out by the Jews, Said has noted, the famed Jewish philosopher Martin Buber moved in. ''Buber of course was a great apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews,'' Said told a West Bank audience last year, ''but he didn't mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced.'' The home of his youth thus serves as a parable for the Palestinian condition itself.
Only one thing is wrong with Said's deeply affecting autobiography. He made most of it up.
The story of Said's childhood, and with it his credibility, has been exploded by Justus Reid Weiner, an Israeli scholar who spent three years checking out Said's tales. ''Virtually everything I learned,'' Weiner writes in the September issue of Commentary, ''contradicts the story of Said's early life as Said has told it.''
He grew up, it turns out, not in Jerusalem, but in Cairo's richest quarter. The ''beautiful old house'' in Jerusalem was his aunt's, not his father's. Said's parents sometimes visited this aunt; during one such visit in 1935, Edward was born. On his birth certificate, the family's place of residence is given as Cairo.
The expulsion from Talbieh in December 1947 never happened. A sound truck urging Arabs to evacuate did go through the neighborhood in February 1948, Weiner learned. But only a few Arab residents left, and they soon returned. Meanwhile, the Jewish men in the sound truck were arrested by the British.
Martin Buber and his family, who came to Palestine as refugees in the 1930s, did live at 10 Brenner St. - as tenants of Said's aunt, who rented them a basement apartment in 1938. Said's acid description of Buber living in the home of a displaced Arab is an exact inversion of the truth. For in 1942, six years before the war, Said's aunt broke the lease and expelled her Jewish tenants.
Weiner's devastating article - ''`My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said'' - drives a stake through Said's integrity. If the man lies about his own past, what won't he lie about?
In fact, Said lies routinely, especially when Israelis or Arabs are on the agenda. It would take a far longer column to catalog all his falsehoods, but two are enough to give a taste of his inventiveness:
During the intifada, when scores of innocent Palestinians were being killed by fellow Arabs as ''collaborators,'' Said defended the murderers. ''The UN Charter and every other known document or protocol,'' he wrote, ''entitles a people under foreign occupation ... to deal severely with collaborators.'' The UN Charter says nothing of the kind.
Said has accused Israel's founders of literally taking lessons from Hitler. During World War II, he has written, the Zionists ''were in touch with the Nazis in the hope of emulating their Reich in Palestine.'' A more evil libel is hard to imagine. Said's foremost scholarly work, ''Orientalism,'' is littered with factual errors, as the historian Keith Windschuttle recently showed. ''In Search of Palestine,'' Said's 1998 BBC documentary, brims with false accusations and gross distortions. But the most shameful lie of all is Said's formulation of the creed he lives by: ''to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible.''
Nothing could be more untrue.
Jeff Jacoby is a Globe columnist.