Edward Said — a lonely prophet of doom

It had been billed as a clash of the Titans. Boston, 22 November 1986: two giants of their field slugging it out in the circus, a shootout at the scholars’ corral. The atmosphere was electric. Here was the long-awaited confrontation between Edward Said, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and Bernard Lewis, emeritus professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. It didn’t disappoint.

Ten minutes into the debate on ‘The Scholars, the Media and the Middle East’, Said took the microphone and let rip, unleashing his blistering attack on American scholars, journalists and ‘the Zionist lobby’. Together, he said, they had collaborated in a ‘shameful’ misrepresentation of the Middle East in order ‘to maintain American hostility towards the vast majority’ of its peoples.

Said put the entire American media and their academic accomplices on trial and pronounced them guilty. From the New York Times, Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books to CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS, all were complicit in a tendentious distortion of the Middle East:

Ask yourselves whether any of you can think of a media outlet whose guiding principles vis-à-vis Middle East coverage include the notions that Islam is never to be criticised; that the PLO, while prone to a few excesses, is basically democratic and lovable; that one or another Middle East state beside Israel is worthy of unrestricted US aid; and that Christianity and Judaism are basically violent, hypocritical and depraved religions.