John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
"An Attack on Edward Said’s Legacy"
"Caroline Glick’s tirade, picked up by Newsweek, against the late American-Palestinian scholar"
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/24/an-attack-on-edward-saids-legacy/
Caroline Glick provides the world with yet another example of the absurdities committed by intense ideologues defending Israel’s bloody excesses.
Referring to Edward Said – a fine, gentle, humane man of exceptional intellectual ability – in terms of terrorism is just stone-stupid.
It is comparable in its angry blindness to the line, “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian,” first uttered by Golda Meir and repeated occasionally by some American politicians looking for a large campaign-finance handout.
Or, even worse, some American views of 2018-19 events in Gaza with heavily-armed Israeli troops ambushing unarmed people demonstrating for some basic rights. Israel’s brave army killed more than two hundred, wounded thousands, and the tally included women and children. In America, the slaughter was characterized by several prominent figures as “restrained.”
Ideologues of any description are prone to dangerous fantasies and are therefore dangerous people.
This is true of all such extremists, of which there are many in American society itself.
Israel is built on the same brutal sense of “exceptionalism” as the American empire is. Indeed, it is really just part of it.
Thanks for including the photo of Edward Said with Daniel Barenboim, a man of principle and one of my favorite pianists.
