CONOR McCARTHY,
Madam, - In his response to my review of Abdirahman Hussein's book Edward Said: Criticism and Society, Tom Cooney (December 30th) makes a hysterical attack on one of the great intellectuals of our time, not for the content of Said's views, but by stamping, in the manner of Rumplestiltskin, on Said's nationality and patrimony.
Mr Cooney nowhere actually engages with the book under review, which, as I made clear, has to do primarily with Said's intellectual trajectory and philosophical/critical methods. Hussein is not concerned with whether Said's politics are "coherent and consistent", as Cooney implies, but with Said's literary-critical writings and positions.
Mr Cooney is economical with the truth when he says that there is no state called Palestine and suggests that therefore there is no legitimate cause of which Said might also be an advocate. Of course there is no state called Palestine, but that is due principally to Israel's successful conquest of 77 per cent of Mandate Palestine in 1948, and its conquest of the remainder in 1967, having been allotted only 55 per cent under the UN Partition Plan of 1947. The absence of an Irish state, for example, was no inhibition to the advocacy of the Irish cause by legions of Irish patriots before 1922.
Mr Cooney is economical with the truth when he quotes "Suheir Muhsin" (Zuhayr Muhsin, actually) "of the PLO" as saying that the raison d'être of any Palestinian state would be to further the battle with Israel. Quoting Muhsin is an easy ploy, since the Palestine Liberation Organisation is an umbrella for many political and civil organisations and institutions, and the al-Saiqa faction of which Muhsin was a member is a small rejectionist Palestinian grouping controlled by Syria. Quoting Muhsin is about as accurate and representative as imaging Israeli political opinion only through the lens offered by Meir Kahane and the Kach Party.
On the matter of Said's origins in Jerusalem, Mr Cooney is inaccurate, dated and derivative. His case against Said's status as a Palestinian exile is lifted straight out of the work of Justus Reid Weiner, a right-wing Jewish academic whose now-infamous article entitled "My Beautiful House and other Fabrications by Edward Said" appeared in the American Zionist magazine Commentary in 1999, just as Said's memoir, Out of Place, was published.
There are two things to say about this. First, Weiner's attempt to demonstrate that Said had no origins in Jerusalem was decisively routed in the American and British press at the time, riddled as it is with factual errors. Notably, Weiner claimed that since Said's name does not appear on the records of St George's School in Jerusalem, which he claims to have attended, he can never have resided in that city. But Weiner has been shown to have consciously ignored testimony by a former pupil of St George's that Said was a student there, and a former teacher of Said's has also testified to Said's attendance at the school. In addition, Said has never claimed that he was driven from Jerusalem by Jews. Second, the attempt to detach one famous Palestinian from his historical roots is a metonym for the wider tendency to say, with Golda Meir, that "there were no Palestinians", or to show that their link to the geographical entity of Palestine was and is tenuous. All of this is the prelude to, and justification for, conquest and, potentially, ethnic cleansing.
Mr Cooney ascribes to me the statement that Said is "the last Jewish intellectual". If Mr Cooney read my review carefully, he would see that the statement is one Said made himself, and that I do not simply "endorse" it. Mr Cooney further says that I manifest "the iron fist of anti-Semitism in a velvet academic glove". This is a serious charge, but he nowhere shows how I display this prejudice.
This, and the fact that he must be aware of the refutation of the calumny on the reputation of Edward Said, is a sorry example of intellectual bad faith, and betrays an oddly cavalier attitude to the evidence, and to the truth, for one who purports to be a legal expert and an advocate of civil liberties. - Yours, etc.,
CONOR McCARTHY,
De Vesci Court,
Dun Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.