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A pity Alison isnt here to read this...
Article 6912 of uk.current-events.terrorism:
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Subject: Palestinian-American Edward W. Said Wins Spain's Coveted "Premio Principe de Asturias"
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 21:36:05 -0000
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http://www.aztlan.net/ewsaid.htm
Palestinian-American Edward W. Said Wins
Spain's Coveted "Premio Principe de Asturias"
by Hector Carreon
La Voz de Aztlan
Los Angeles, Alta California - October 26, 2002 - (ACN)
Dr. Edward W. Said, Professor at Columbia University
in New York, has been awarded the prestigious "Premio
Principe de Asturias" in Oviedo, Spain for his
lifetime literary work on Palestine and the Middle
East. The coveted award was given on September 4, 2002
but little mention of this has appeared in the U.S.
media. The "Premio Principe de Asturias" is much
respected in the Spanish speaking world and in a few
intellectual circles of the U.S.A,
The "Premio Principe de Asturias" includes an award of
500,000 Euros and a special sculpture by the renown
artist Joan Miró. The annual award is given to,
(English translation follows) " . . . a la persona,
grupo o institución de cualquier país del mundo cuyo
trabajo haya contribuido, de una manera ejemplar y
significativa, a la superación de fronteras nacionales,
a la hermandad entre los hombres, a la lucha contra la
injusticia, la pobreza, la enfermedad o la ignorancia,
a la defensa del patrimonio de la humanidad o al
descubrimiento de nuevos campos de conocimiento."
(" . . . to a person, group or institution from any
part of the world, whose work has contributed, in an
exemplary and significant manner, to the unity of
human beings beyond national boundaries, to
brotherhood and sisterhood among people, to the
struggle for justice, elimination of economic poverty
and of diseases and of ignorance, and to the defense
of human rights or to the promotion of new modes of
positive thought.")
Dr. Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem where he
received his early academic education. He immigrated
to the U.S. in the early 1950's and attended Princeton
and Harvard Universities. Dr. Said has lived in New
York City since 1963, the year when he accepted a
position at Columbia University. He now holds the
position of University Professor. Professor Said is an
expert in Middle East politics and has become one of
the most prominent spokesperson for the Palestinian
cause in the United States. Dr. Said, though
struggling against leukemia, is a prolific author. His
most recently published works are "Reflections on
Exile" and "Power, Politics, and Culture."
------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is an interview of Dr. Said conducted by
Alternative Radio soon after September 11, 2001:
Q: The events of September 11 have bewildered and
confused many Americans. What was your reaction?
Edward W. Said: Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it a
shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale
of it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do
harm to innocent people. It was aimed at symbols: the
World Trade Center, the heart of American capitalism,
and the Pentagon, the headquarters of the American
military establishment. But it was not meant to be
argued with. It wasn't part of any negotiation. No
message was intended with it. It spoke for itself,
which is unusual. It transcended the political and
moved into the metaphysical. There was a kind of
cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here, which
refused to have any interest in dialogue and political
organization and persuasion. This was bloody-minded
destruction for no other reason than to do it. Note
that there was no claim for these attacks. There were
no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent
piece of terror. This was part of nothing. It was a
leap into another realm--the realm of crazy
abstractions and mythological generalities, involving
people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes.
It's important not to fall into that trap and to try
to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some
sort.
Q: What should the U.S. do?
Said: The just response to this terrible event should
be to go immediately to the world community, the
United Nations. The rule of international law should
be marshaled, but it's probably too late because the
United States has never done that; it's always gone it
alone. To say that we're going to end countries or
eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long war over
many years, with many different instruments, suggests
a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which,
I think, most Americans aren't prepared.There isn't a
clear goal in sight. Osama bin Laden's organization
has spun out from him and is now probably independent
of him. There will be others who will appear and
reappear. This is why we need a much more precise, a
much more defined, a much more patiently constructed
campaign, as well as one that surveys not just the
terrorists' presence but the root causes of terrorism,
which are ascertainable.
Q: What are those root causes?
Said: They come out of a long dialectic of U.S.
involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the
oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle
East--those areas that are considered to be essential
to U.S. interests and security. And in this
relentlessly unfolding series of interactions, the U.S.
has played a very distinctive role, which most
Americans have been either shielded from or simply
unaware of.
In the Islamic world, the U.S. is seen in two quite
different ways. One view recognizes what an
extraordinary country the U.S. is. Every Arab or
Muslim that I know is tremendously interested in the
United States. Many of them send their children here
for education. Many of them come here for vacations.
They do business here or get their training here.The
other view is of the official United States, the
United States of armies and interventions. The United
States that in 1953 overthrew the nationalist
government of Mossadegh in Iran and brought back the
shah. The United States that has been involved first
in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging
sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States
that is the supporter of Israel against the
Palestinians.
If you live in the area, you see these things as part
of a continuing drive for dominance, and with it a
kind of obduracy, a stubborn opposition to the wishes
and desires and aspirations of the people there. Most
Arabs and Muslims feel that the United States hasn't
really been paying much attention to their desires.
They think it has been pursuing its policies for its
own sake and not according to many of the principles
that it claims are its own--democracy,
self-determination, freedom of speech, freedom of
assembly, international law. It's very hard, for
example, to justify the thirty-four-year occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza. It's very hard to justify 140
Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers.
These actions were taken with the support and
financing of the United States. How can you say this
is part of U.S. adherence to international law and U.N.
resolutions? The result is a kind of schizophrenic
picture of the United States.
Now we come to the really sad part. The Arab rulers
are basically unpopular. They are supported by the
United States against the wishes of their people. In
all of this rather heady mixture of violence and
policies that are remarkably unpopular right down to
the last iota, it's not hard for demagogues,
especially people who claim to speak in the name of
religion, in this case Islam, to raise a crusade
against the United States and say that we must somehow
bring America down.
Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin
Laden and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by
the United States in the early eighties in its efforts
to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. It was
thought that to rally Islam against godless communism
would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad turn indeed,
and that, in fact, transpired. In 1985, a group of
mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by
President Reagan, who called them "freedom
fighters."These people, by the way, don't represent
Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks.
They are self-appointed warriors for Islam. Osama bin
Laden, who is a Saudi, feels himself to be a patriot
because the U.S. has forces in Saudi Arabia, which is
sacred because it is the land of the prophet Mohammed.
There is also this great sense of triumphalism, that
just as we defeated the Soviet Union, we can do this.
And out of this sense of desperation and pathological
religion, there develops an all-encompassing drive to
harm and hurt, without regard for the innocent and the
uninvolved, which was the case in New York. Now to
understand this is, of course, not at all to condone
it. And what terrifies me is that we're entering a
phase where if you start to speak about this as
something that can be understood historically--without
any sympathy--you are going to be thought of as
unpatriotic, and you are going to be forbidden. It's
very dangerous. It is precisely incumbent on every
citizen to quite understand the world we're living in
and the history we are a part of and we are forming as
a superpower.
Q: Some pundits and politicians seem to be echoing
Kurtz in Heart of Darkness when he said, "Exterminate
all the brutes."
Said: In the first few days, I found it depressingly
monochromatic. There's been essentially the same
analysis over and over again and very little allowance
made for different views and interpretations and
reflections. What is quite worrisome is the absence of
analysis and reflection. Take the word "terrorism." It
has become synonymous now with anti-Americanism, which,
in turn, has become synonymous with being critical of
the United States, which, in turn, has become
synonymous with being unpatriotic. That's an
unacceptable series of equations. The definition of
terrorism has to be more precise, so that we are able
to discriminate between, for example, what it is that
the Palestinians are doing to fight the Israeli
military occupation and terrorism of the sort that
resulted in the World Trade Center bombing.
Q: What's the distinction you're drawing?
Said: Take a young man from Gaza living in the most
horrendous conditions--most of it imposed by
Israel--who straps dynamite around himself and then
throws himself into a crowd of Israelis. I've never
condoned or agreed with it, but at least it is
understandable as the desperate wish of a human being
who feels himself being crowded out of life and all of
his surroundings, who sees his fellow citizens, other
Palestinians, his parents, sisters, and brothers,
suffering, being injured, or being killed. He wants to
do something, to strike back. That can be understood
as the act of a truly desperate person trying to free
himself from unjustly imposed conditions. It's not
something I agree with, but at least you could
understand it. The people who perpetrated the terror
of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings are
something different because these people were
obviously not desperate and poor refugee dwellers.
They were middle class, educated enough to speak
English, to be able to go to flight school, to come to
America, to live in Florida.
Q: In your introduction to the updated version of
Covering Islam: How The Media and The Experts
Determine How We See The Rest of The World, you say:
"Malicious generalizations about Islam have become the
last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture
in the West." Why is that?
Said: The sense of Islam as a threatening Other--with
Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful,
irrational--develops during the colonial period in
what I called Orientalism. The study of the Other has
a lot to do with the control and dominance of Europe
and the West generally in the Islamic world. And it
has persisted because it's based very, very deeply in
religious roots, where Islam is seen as a kind of
competitor of Christianity.If you look at the
curricula of most universities and schools in this
country, considering our long encounter with the
Islamic world, there is very little there that you can
get hold of that is really informative about Islam. If
you look at the popular media, you'll see that the
stereotype that begins with Rudolph Valentino in The
Sheik has really remained and developed into the
transnational villain of television and film and
culture in general. It is very easy to make wild
generalizations about Islam. All you have to do is
read almost any issue of The New Republic and you'll
see there the radical evil that's associated with
Islam, the Arabs as having a depraved culture, and so
forth. These are impossible generalizations to make in
the United States about any other religious or ethnic
group.
Q: In a recent article in the London Observer, you say
the U.S. drive for war uncannily resembles Captain
Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick. Tell me what you have in
mind there.
Said: Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an
obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had
harmed him--which had torn his leg out--to the ends of
the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene
of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea,
wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his
own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a
scene of almost suicidal finality. Now, all the words
that George Bush used in public during the early
stages of the crisis--"wanted, dead or alive," "a
crusade," etc.--suggest not so much an orderly and
considered progress towards bringing the man to
justice according to international norms, but rather
something apocalyptic, something of the order of the
criminal atrocity itself. That will make matters a lot,
lot worse, because there are always consequences. And
it would seem to me that to give Osama bin Laden--who
has been turned into Moby Dick, he's been made a
symbol of all that's evil in the world--a kind of
mythological proportion is really playing his game. I
think we need to secularize the man. We need to bring
him down to the realm of reality. Treat him as a
criminal, as a man who is a demagogue, who has
unlawfully unleashed violence against innocent people.
Punish him accordingly, and don't bring down the world
around him and ourselves.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
La Voz de Aztlan
http://www.aztlan.net/ewsaid.htm
Douglas Clark, Bath, England mailto: [log in to unmask]
Lynx: Poetry from Bath .......... http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html
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