>In essence, the obituary summarizes Mr. Said's work and political
>positions, including the fact that he was considered controversial by
>Israeli nationalists. Maybe I am missing something, but I do not see
>what is so vile about that piece.
Three paragraphs on the stone-throwing, another three on the "concocted" autobiography. the idiotic "even-handedness" of these two grafs:
>Among the criticisms leveled against Dr. Said by Jews and others was
>his failure to condemn specific terrorist acts by Palestinian
>groups, including some groups that served alongside him on the
>Palestine National Council. One such person, for example, was Abu
>Abbas, a member of the P.L.O. executive committee who is believed
>responsible for the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille
>Lauro and the murder of an American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, who
>was in a wheelchair. In his interview with New York, Dr. Said called
>Mr. Abbas "a degenerate," but he then argued that important Israeli
>leaders, like former prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak
>Shamir, had been terrorists responsible for killing women and
>children.
>
>Among Dr. Said's political views cited by his defenders was his
>condemnation of the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for
>urging his followers to assassinate the writer Salman Rushdie. Dr.
>Said, while opposing the American-led Persian Gulf war in 1991,
>called the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "an appalling and dreadful
>despot," and he made similar statements about the Syrian President
>Hafez al-Assad. But Dr. Said was far more critical of the West and
>of Israel and their approach to the Arab world than he was of the
>Arabs or their leaders.
...and this stupid paragraph too:
>This view did not go unchallenged, even among specialists on the
>Middle East who found many of his points valid but who rejected
>numerous assertions as overdrawn, hyperbolic and oversimplistic.
It's clear that despite the pretense of Timesian "balance" you know that Bernstein sides with the critics.
Doug