WALTER LAQUEUR
47
outsider, a marginal existence, a lonely, persecuted, courageous voice in
the wilderness. Said's polemical style is shrill,
ad hominem,
and deliber–
ately injurious. But when he is paid back in his own coin he tends to
become weepy, like one of the boxers good in the attack but incapable
of taking punishment. He talks about vicious attacks against him, poi–
sonous lies, attempts to destroy his good name and reputation. He
upbraided Arafat and the Palestinian authority for selling out to the
Zionists and, above all, for not building a democratic and incorruptible
state. But how can he not know that this is a wholly unrealistic demand;
why should the Palestinian state be different in character from the other
Arab countries? He grimly attacks Arafat for having broken bread with
Barak in the latter's home; but if the Israeli prime minister had refused
to socialize with the Palestinian leader he would have been called a
racialist (if not worse). Said attacked the late King Hussein of Jordan as
the most repressive and reactionary ruler in the Middle East, and his
attitude to other moderates in the Arab world is similar. One would
have a hard time to find in the writings of this critical and humanist
intellectual a single word of criticism, let alone condemnation, for the
truly repressive regimes from Iraq to Libya.
Said has adopted the cause and the arguments of Arab nationalism and
he is, of course, perfectly entitled to do so. But at the same time he claims
to
be a man of the left, an internationalist in excellent standing with pro–
gressives everywhere. One of Mr. Said's friends, whom he says he admires
greatly, has proclaimed that the Israeli left is much worse than the right,
and another (the Christian Arab Clovis Maksoud) has written that Arab
intellectuals should have nothing
to
do with the new Israeli historians of
the post-Zionist school because all they want is to refurbish Zionism.
Said appears in the role of a secular intellectual but writes books
defending Islam against its detractors and cordially approves of a relent–
less attack, not against Zionism but against the poisonous Jewish reli–
gion and its horrible impact over three thousand years. He bitterly
denounces the Western intellectuals who fought against Stalinism and its
sympathizers in the
19 50S
in the framework of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, because the Congress was financed in large part by the CIA.
To be sure, he would have attacked them anyway; the CIA's involvement
only provided a wonderful opportunity to do so from high moral
ground. But at the same time some of his writing is brought out by the
main publisher of neo-Nazi literature in Europe, the man whom the
Swedish authorities sent to prison for six months for racial incitement.
Thus, in Said's book, collaboration with neo-Nazis is permissible, but
resistance to Stalinism was reprehensible.
