Said was a moral inspiration, not least because of his refusal to be bowed or intimidated by systems of power. These systems included Arab regimes, as well as imperial America and colonial Israel.
Time and again as one reads through Said’s collected newspaper columns (which you can do in books such as “Peace and its Discontents”, “The End of the Peace Process” and his final collection “From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap”) a constant theme is denunciation of the brutal and corrupt dictatorships that rule in the Arab world. He ridiculed and denounced subservient Arab intellectuals and journalists, the court stenographers of oil sheikhs and dictators.
In that respect, Said pre-empted 2011’s popular Arab uprisings by decades (although I am personally convinced that he would, like me, have disliked the Western imposed label “Arab spring”).
Tag: MEMO
Israel and Saudi Arabia: the permanent counter-revolution
The “moderate” Saudi regime’s alliance with Israel is now in the open:
The two regimes are both military dictatorships in very different ways. The two regimes are also theocracies, each in their own way. The extreme Wahhabist religious vision of the sprawling Saudi royal family which dominates the country may lead you to think it would hate the so-called “Jewish state”. Not so.
Are Israeli spooks reading your emails?
On the latest Greenwald-Snowden revelations:
This means Israel is spying on America – its biggest ally — more than most other states in the world. If this was a Facebook friendship, it would be listed as “It’s complicated”.
Read the whole article here.
Inventing a genocide as pretext to bomb Syria
This week’s column over at MEMO. An extract:
Claiming that all the killing in this war is being done by Assad alone, is a way to increase the propaganda beat of the war-drums against Syria. If in fact the vast majority of the 100,000 had been killed by the regime, it would imply a one-way massacre, not the reality of this dirty civil war. Mousab Azzawi, the pro-NATO leader of the SOHR splinter group even claimed to Western media that there is a “genocide” going on in Syria. Freedland seems to be implying the same.
Western powers “doing nothing” in Syria? If only
Here we are again. A decade on from the American-British war of aggression against Iraq, the cruise-missile liberals are demanding that “something must be done” about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “Something” inevitably amounts to bombing.
Read the whole thing over at MEMO.
Israel’s military dictatorship jails peaceful Palestinian activists
Israel’s system of racist political imprisonment does not care about the methods Palestinians use to resist Israel, so much as the fact of resistance to Israel. Anyone who lifts a fist of protest or a pen of dissent are as guilty in the eyes of Israel’s kangaroo military courts system as one who lifts the freedom fighter’s rifle.
Don’t be fooled by Israel’s “negotiations”
The farce that is the “peace process”:
Israel’s own housing minister, Uri Ariel is himself a settler who lives the West Bank colony of Kfar Adumim, between Jerusalem and Jericho.Indeed, the main Israeli negotiator is “justice” minister Tzipi Livni. She has in the past has had to skip the UK to avoid arrest on suspicion on war crimes. In 2011 the Palestine Papers revealed that she once said: “I am a lawyer … But I am against law — international law in particular. Law in general.” In her own words: Israel’s justice minister is “against law.”
Read the whole thing over at MEMO.
Israel’s new plan of ethnic cleansing in the desert
I write on Prawer:
The latest incarnation of this on-going Nakba is Israel’s Prawer plan. Passed by its parliament in June as the Prawer-Begin law, this new wave of ethnic cleansing aims to empty the southern Naqab desert (known as the Negev in Hebrew) of tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins.
These Palestinians are nominally citizens of Israel, but are not treated as equals to Jewish Israelis. Varying estimates state that between 30,000 and 70,000 Bedouin citizens will be removed if Prawer is fully implemented. In their places will come new Jewish developments.
Read the whole column over at MEMO.
The peace process merry-go-round
Yes, they are still playing this stupid “peace process” game:
The 13th of September will mark 20 years since the White House lawn signing ceremony between Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin, flanked by former US President Bill Clinton. The signing of Declaration of Principles initiated the related series of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization known as the Oslo accords – named after the city where it was secretly negotiated.
Right away, late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said denounced the agreement, although he had long been a supporter of a two-state solution. “So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles,” he wrote in Al-Hayat a month later.
Read my whole column over at MEMO.
Palestinians of all faiths face persecution by Israel
MEMO column on Zionism’s sectarian conspiracies:
Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre dates back to the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine. It a cruel irony that tourists often have far more access to the church than the indigenous Christians of the land.Meanwhile, Jews from all around the world have more rights and more access to all of occupied Palestine than any Palestinian. Under Israel’s racist “Law of Return,” any Jew from London or New York can “return” to live in the land, regardless of whether or not he or she has any historical connection there.
Read the whole thing here.
Egypt’s military regime demonizes the Palestinian people
Updating the site with my recent MEMO columns.
In these turbulent times, many things remain uncertain. But there seems to be one reliable constant: the oppression of the Palestinian people throughout the region.Despite widespread popular support for the Palestinian cause among the Arab peoples, regimes all over the region have used vulnerable Palestinians as easy scape-goats, abusing their human rights in various ways.
Read the whole thing here.
MEMO column: Arab Idol will not liberate Palestine
In which I poop the party:
But a victory in a singing competition will not remove a single Israeli occupation checkpoint. Arab Idol will not release one prisoner, suffering in Israel’s torture dungeons. Neither will it bring equality for millions of Palestinians living under Israel’s system of apartheid.
The liberation of Palestine will only be won after a long struggle for rights: the end of the occupation, equality and the return of the refugees.
A week old now, but still worth a read: check it out over at MEMO.