Abbas Tells US PA Will Recognize Israel, Says Opposite on PA TV

Abbas and Musharraf must have been the offspring of the same chameleon-they like to present different things to different people. I guess Abbas figures only Arabs understand Arabic. But those sneaky Zionists are on to him (I hope).

I can't decide if Condoleezza Rice is very smart or very ignorant. Maybe she was absent the day they taught taqiyya in diplomacy school.

So Abbas sets up the same three-card-monte-game-on-a-cardboard-box he inherited from Arafart the Pederast and invites Condi to play.

"Come on Condi! Guess which is the Peace Card!"

And the US continues to give the PA weapons, which of course will only be used against Jews. Is Condi and this adminstration stupid,decieved or corrupt ?
++++++++++++

Zyklon B or M16's What's the Difference
Abbas to request more weapons from US
Militants admit last American arms transfer shared with Palestinian terrorists

Following deadly clashes the past few days between his Fatah organization and Hamas members, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is planning to request a large shipment of weapons from the United States purportedly to arm his group against rival factions, a senior Palestinian official told WND today.

The US government previously sent weapons to Abbas in May after the Palestinian leader requested the arms to bolster Fatah's Force 17
security forces against possible clashes with Hamas.

In June, WND broke the story about how assault rifles that were part of a cache of weapons transferred by the US made its way to members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, some of whom are also officers of Force 17. The weapons may have been used in a string of shootings, including an ambush against a busload of Israeli school girls here, Al Aqsa members told WND.

In some of the worst infighting since Hamas won the majority of parliamentary seats earlier this year, 11 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 were injured in Gaza Strip clashes that broke out two days ago when a 3,500-strong Hamas militia confronted members of Fatah's security forces protesting the government's inability to pay their wages.

Last night Hamas attacked several Fatah officers in Gaza. In retaliation, Fatah supporters reportedly attacked and torched Hamas offices throughout the West Bank, including the prime minister's offices in Ramallah.

Fatah clans are known to be more dominant in the West Bank than in Gaza.

Palestinian schools today were closed in Gaza for fear of further clashes.

In a marked escalation of rhetoric, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the declared "military wing" of Fatah, threatened this morning to kill Hamas leaders, including Damascus-based Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshal.

The Brigades, along with the Islamic Jihad terror group, are responsible for every suicide bombing in Israel the past two years. The group has also carried out scores of shooting and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians.

A senior Palestinian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told WND today Fatah security officials noted that in Sunday's firefights Hamas members used weaponry more advanced than what was known to have been in the Hamas arsonal, including newer styles of assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades.

The official said Abbas has enlisted senior Egyptian and Jordanian officials to help him petition the US for more weapons to arm his group, particularly Fatah security forces in Gaza, against Hamas.

The official said the request will be brought up in meetings with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is in the region this week.

The US considers Abbas to be a "moderate," and regularly supports his Fatah organization with money and weapons.

In May, Egypt, Jordan and Israel were reportedly involved in talks requesting weapons from the US, stating rifles and ammunition were needed to arm Fatah for possible clashes with Hamas. America reportedly agreed.

The weapons were transported in late-May into Israel from the Jordanian border and were delivered to Force 17 by a convoy protected by the Israeli Defense Forces. The cache was driven to Ramallah and to the Gaza Strip border.

In Ramallah, the US weapons were trucked to the main Fatah government building, which is used by both Force 17 and members of the Al Aqsa Brigades, Palestinian officials involved in the transfer told WND.

The US weapons transfer reportedly included 3,000 American-made M-16 assault rifles and over 1 million rounds of ammunition.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced he had approved the shipment of weapons and ammunition, explaining the transfer was meant for Abbas' personal protection.

"I did this because we are running out of time and we need to help Abu Mazen," Olmert told reporters.

But following the transfer, Force 17 senior officer Abu Yousuf told WND in an exclusive interview the American weapons will be shared with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and utilized for attacks against Jews.

Abu Yousuf is also a member of the Al Aqsa Brigades. He hinted the weapons were used in shooting attacks in June that killed one Israeli civilian and wounded another.

Many Force 17 officers are also members of the Brigades. In June Abbas appointed senior Brigades leader Mahmoud Damra to head Force 17. Damra is on Israel's most wanted list of terrorists. He is accused of masterminding a string of attacks. Damra was arrested by Israel last month.

Abu Yousuf told WND the US and Israel facilitated the May transfer of weapons to his Force 17 unit "for its own political purposes. We are not concerned with the reasons. The weapons will not be used against our brothers, only (against) Israelis."

Sources close to the Al Aqsa Brigades told WND the American assault rifles were used in three separate anti-Israel shooting attacks in June. One attack killed a 35-year-old Israeli Arab on a major West Bank highway on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Israeli security officials say the shooters likely mistook the victim for a Jew. The second attack, which occurred June 13 on the same highway, lightly wounded an Israeli.

In the third attack, the Al Aqsa Brigades on June 19 on a West Bank highway ambushed a bus carrying Israeli school girls. The bus was armored. The school girls escaped unharmed.

Abu Yousuf refused to confirm whether the American weapons were used in the spate of highway shootings, but he hinted the information was accurate.

"It is no coincidence that as soon as these American weapons arrived, we were able to carry out these accurate shootings," Abu Yousuf said.

Unfortunately, the notion that Condi Rice might be "very smart" and cunning is wishful thinking. She strikes me as foolish and inept, and she plays right into the hands of her handlers at the State Department and the career Jihadists (such as Abbas) who find it so easy to hoodwink her. She is merely a career academic, and not a very qualified one at that.

Will a true leader ever emerge in this war against Jihad, this war for Western Civilization and freedom? We wait for the next Ronald Reagan, the next John Paul II, the next Churchill. Does anyone have the moxie or spine to truly confront Jihad? Among current world leaders, John Howard of Australia seems the best candidate, but will anyone else stand up and rise to the challenge?

Everything's on hold till the American/Indian/Israeli nuclear strike on Iran/Pakistan/Waziristan.

The real payback for 911 will come sometime before George Bush leaves office.

Till then we're in a holding pattern. Worrying about Haniyeh or Musharraf is just a waste of time.

Wow, a replay of Yasser Arafat, eh?

I laughed when UN envoy John Dugard said that Israel had turned Gaza into a big prison. Is it no wonder? It's full of criminals.

Rice should have known better and now she looks like a joke. The only thing the Palestinians should get from the US and Europe is a bombing. Let them wallow the craphole they created and let the Israelis treat the occupied "terrortories" like prisons. The Palestinians time is limited anyways on the Israeli territory they occupy.

How dare people slander the great name of Arafat!
Don't you know he won a Nobel Peace Prize? Thanks to his efforts there is peace throughout the region. What more do you want? I swear by Mo himself some people are just too hard to please.

RE: Taqiyya and Sura 9:111

Can someone explain how 9:111 supports Taqiyya? This sura for sure says that muslims must not take infidels as friends over msulims. That much is clear. But where does the lying and deception requirements fit in with this passage? I dont see the connection. Are there other Suras in support of deception to infidels.

I am not an appologist so cool your temper. Thanks.

Avatar, hello ! did ya happen to click on the link Kreuzueber Halbmond left ?

Playing "the fool" comes all too easily for C. Rice. I have never thought a woman should be Secretary of State, U.S. It's too tough for most men,even.

I keep hoping that American government officials (Mr. Bush, Ms. Rice, etc.) are doing the same thing that the Muslims do before they attack. You know, extend the hand of friendship, invite them to come over to our side and cooperate, warn them of the dangers if they don't.

Once they've done that, if the enemy crosses the line, that's it, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

That's what I keep hoping.

Oops I meant to says Sura 3:28 not 9:111

CaptainsGrevous
Yes I did. I understand what Taqiyya is. It also referances 3:28. After reading 3:28, it was not clear to me that muslims must lie and deceive to unbelievers. It was very clear that they must not take them as friends though. I suppose one does not have to tell the truth to one that is not a friend, but one doesnt need to lie either. I'm just missing the deception part in the sura. That's why I asked if there were more sura that support deception or anything in Hadith, sunna?

I'm really looking for an argument to support 3:28 has a requirement to deceive unbelievers and I cant see or understand it.

Jihad Watch and all posters,

After watching Arafat’s double talk and deceit since about 1968 - Madman Insane’s double talk and deceit violating about 17 resolutions- the Thug of Iran’s wrath of threats and deceit against the West - the sly, deceitful and backstabbing Saudi’s, it would seem that anyone should realize who the enemy was years ago. It just amazes me that everyone here at Jihad Watch knows for a fact know who the enemy is and all the supposedly “experts” in foreign policy of governments don’t seem to have a clue. They should be reading Robert Spence and Jihad Watch.

“Blessed are those who run around in circles, for they shall be called the big wheels.”

Avatar, ask a Muslim, I sure he'll tell you the truth !

It really is time to quit patting Abbas and the rest of his ilk on the head and believing that such worthless rabble is really interested in peace. They are not-in 2000 the Palestinians were offered nearly everything they sought and Arafat said no. What's happened since is obvious. We stupidly arm these crazies (as CaptainGrievous posted above) against the one true friend we have there. If I'm an Israeli I'd have to really wonder how much we differ from the way Pakistan acts toward us. Let's save some money and some dignity and tell Abbas and his goons (PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah-they're all basically the same) to move elsewhere and get a life-there are plenty of Arab countries out there in which to start a new life.

I can't decide if Condoleezza Rice is very smart or very ignorant. Maybe she was absent the day they taught taqiyya in diplomacy school.

Posted by: Kreuzueber Halbmond

Well Mr. Halbmond, may I suggest assuming the worst? Assume she's ignorant and if things play out differently you can be pleasantly surprised.

Personally I like to think of her as a 'Stepford Wife'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives

I disagree with the posters who say that Rice isn't as smart as she's said to be. She is indeed highly intelligent and accomplished. Rather, very smart people are often more prone to self-deception than are people of lesser intellect. The reason is that the fooler is as smart as the foolee. If that weren't the case, then there would be no high-IQ people on the left (e.g., in the faculties of all our elite universities).

In Rice's case, recall that her mentor is James ["f**k the Jews"] Baker. She herself has never shown genuine sympathy for Israel; she's merely spoken the necessary words. As to her boss, even the Hamas victory in a democratic election has not persuaded Bush to abandon his fantasy about the wonderful transformation that democracy will effect in the Middle East.

Frieda - what I imply is that she's indeed ignorant in the true sense of the word - not unintelligent. She's well spoken but the words ring hollow and over-scripted. She strikes me as a beautiful, well kept robot.

Avatar - you're looking for justification for dishonesty, deception and lying for True Believers? Here are some examples to choose from:

ECEPTION IN ISLAM - THE EVIDENCE

Bukhari:V7B67N427 “The Prophet said, ‘If I take an oath and later find something else better than that, then I do what is better and expiate my oath.’”

Koran 9:3 “Allah and His Messenger dissolve obligations.”

Koran 66:1 “Allah has already sanctioned for you the dissolution of your vows.”

Bukhari:V4B52N268 “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘War is deceit.’”

Koran 4:142 “Surely the hypocrites strive to deceive Allah. He shall retaliate by deceiving them.”

Bukhari:V7B71N661 “Magic was worked on Allah’s Apostle and he was bewitched so that he began to imagine doing things which in fact, he had not done.”

Bukhari:V6B60N8 “Umar said, ‘Our best Koran reciter is Ubai. And in spite of this, we leave out some of his statements because Allah’s Apostle himself said, “Whatever verse or revelation We abrogate or cause to be forgotten We bring a better one.”

Koran 33:11 “In that situation the Believers were sorely tried and shaken as by a tremendous shaking. And behold! The Hypocrites and those in whose hearts is a disease said: ‘Allah and His Messenger promised us nothing but delusion; they have promised only to deceive us.”

Koran 33:14 “Say: Flight will not avail you if you flee from death, killing, or slaughter. In that case you will not be allowed to enjoy yourselves but a little while. Say, ‘Who will screen you, saving you from Allah if he intends to harm and injure you?’”

Koran 33:21 “You have in (Muhammad) the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern of conduct for any one to follow.”

Koran 74:31 “We have appointed nineteen angels to be the wardens of the Hell Fire. We made a stumbling-block for those who disbelieve and We have fixed their number as a trial for unbelievers in order that the people of the Book may arrive with certainty, and that no doubts may be left for the people of the Book, those in whose hearts is a disease. And for those to whom the Scripture Book has been given, and the believers, there should be no doubt. The unbelievers may say, ‘What does the Lord intend by this?’ The Lord will lead astray whomever He pleases, and He will guide whomever He pleases: and none can know the armies of your Lord except He, and this is no other than a warning to mankind.”

Koran 74:52 “Each one of them wants to be given scrolls of revelation spread out! No! By no means! Nay, this is an admonishment. Let them keep it in remembrance! But they will not heed unless the Lord wants them to. He is the fountain of fear.”

Bukhari:V2B24N555 “I heard the Prophet say, ‘Allah hates for you for asking too many questions.’”

Koran 89:5 “There surely is an oath for thinking man.”

Koran 92:8 “We will make smooth for him the path to misery.”

Ishaq:519 “Hajjaj said to the Apostle, ‘I have money scattered among the Meccan merchants, so give me permission to go and get it.’ Having got Muhammad’s permission, he said, ‘I must tell lies.’ The Apostle said, ‘Tell them.’”

Koran 8:58 “If you apprehend treachery from a people with whom you have a treaty, retaliate by breaking off relations with them.”

Koran 47:24 “Do they not understand the Koran? Nay, on the hearts there are locks preventing them from understanding.”

Ishaq:548 “By Allah, the black mass has spread. Abu Bakr said, ‘There is not much honesty among people nowadays.’”

Koran 5:41 “Whomever Allah wants to deceive you cannot help. Allah does not want them to know the truth because he intends to disgrace them and then torture them.”

Koran 5:101 “Believers! Do not ask questions about things which if made plain and declared to you, may vex you, causing you trouble.” Koran

5:102 “Some people before you did ask such questions, and on that account they lost their faith and became disbelievers.”

Ishaq:567 “Muhammad informed Umar [the second Caliph], and he called the Prophet a liar.”

Tabari IX:36/Ishaq:596 “‘Prophet, this group of Ansar have a grudge against you for what you did with the booty and how you divided it among you own people.’ ‘Ansar, what is this talk I hear from you? What is the grudge you harbor against me? Do you think ill of me? Did I not come to you when you were erring and needy, and then made rich by Allah?’ ‘You came to us discredited, when your message was rejected by the Quraysh, and we believed you. You were forsaken and deserted and we assisted you. You were a fugitive and we took you in, sheltering you. You were poor and in need, and we comforted you.”

Bukhari:V6B60N662 “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Some eloquent speech is as effective as magic.’”

Tabari VI:110 “When Muhammad brought a revelation from Allah canceling what Satan had cast on the tongue of His Prophet, the Quraysh said, ‘Muhammad has repented of [reneged on] what he said concerning the position of our gods with Allah. He has altered [the bargain] and brought something else.’ Those two phrases which Satan had cast on Muhammad’s tongue of were in the mouth of every polytheist. The Messenger said, ‘I have fabricated things against Allah and have imputed to Him words which He has not spoken.’”

Koran 40:32 “O my People! I fear a Day when there will be mutual wailing. No one shall defend you against Allah. Any whom Allah causes to err, there is no guide. That is how Allah leads the skeptic astray.”

Ishaq:248 “Allah has sealed their hearts and their hearing, blinding them so that they will never find guidance. And that is because they have declared you a liar and they do not believe in what has come down from their Lord to you even though they believe in all that came down before you. For opposing you they will have an awful punishment.”

Koran 2:6 “As for the disbelievers, it is the same whether you warn them or not; they will not believe. Allah has set a seal upon their hearts, upon their hearing, and a covering over their eyes. There is a great torment for them.”

Koran 2:9 “They deceive Allah and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves, and realize (it) not! In their hearts is a disease; and Allah has increased their disease. Grievous is the painful doom they (incur) because they (lie).”

Koran 8:18 “This and surely; Allah weakens the deceitful plots of unbelieving infidels.”

Koran 8:30 “Remember how the unbelievers plotted against you (Muhammad). They plotted, and Allah too had arranged a plot; but Allah is the best schemer.” Ishaq:323 “I am the best of plotters. I deceived them with My guile so that I delivered you from them.”

Koran 8:49 “When the hypocrites and those in whose hearts is a disease said: ‘The religion has deceived and misled them.’”

Koran 8:71 “If they try to deceive you, remember they have deceived Allah before.”

Tabari VII:85/Ishaq:363 “The Jews of the Qaynuqa replied, ‘Muhammad, do you think that we are like your people? Do not be deluded by the fact that you met a people with no knowledge and you made good use of your opportunity.’”

Ishaq:365/Tabari VII:94 “Muhammad bin Maslamah said, ‘O Messenger, we shall have to tell lies.’ ‘Say what you like,’ Muhammad replied. ‘You are absolved, free to say whatever you must.’”

Bukhari:V5B59N369 “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Who is willing to kill Ka’b bin Ashraf who has hurt Allah and His Apostle?’ Thereupon Muhammad bin Maslamah got up saying, ‘O Allah’s Apostle! Would you like me to kill him?’ The Prophet said, ‘Yes,’ Maslamah said, ‘Then allow me to say false things in order to deceive him.’ The Prophet said, ‘You may say such things.’”

Koran 61:5 “Moses said: ‘O my people, why do you annoy and insult me, when you well know I am Allah’s Messenger?’ Then when they turned away, Allah caused them to be deceived.”

Bukhari:V4B52N233 “Allah’s Apostle forbade the people to travel to a hostile country carrying copies of the Koran. [He said:] Unbelievers will never understand our signs and revelations.”

Ishaq:248 “Allah increases their sickness. A tormented doom awaits the Jews. Allah said, ‘They are mischief makers. They are fools. The Jews deny the truth and contradict what the Apostle has brought. I will mock them and let them continue to wander blindly.’”

Bukhari:V4B52N147 “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘A man may seem as if he were practicing the deeds of Paradise while in fact he is from the people of Hell.’”

Koran 13:27 “Say, ‘God leads whosoever He wills astray.’”

Ishaq:383 “One of the young men’s fathers confronted Muhammad and said, ‘You have robbed my son of his life by your deception and brought great sorrow to me.’”

Koran 3:24 “They have been deceived by the lies they have themselves fabricated; their religion has deceived them.”

Ishaq:397 “Then Allah said, ‘It is not for any prophet to deceive.”

Ishaq:442 “By Muhammad’s order we beguiled them.”

Tabari VIII:23 “The Messenger and his Companions continued in the fear and distress that Allah has described in the Koran. Then Nu’aym came to the Prophet. ‘I ‘ve become a Muslim, but my tribe does not know of my Islam; so command me whatever you will.’ Muhammad said, ‘Make them abandon each other if you can so that they will leave us; for war is deception.’”

Ishaq:496 “‘By Allah you lie,’ one said to another. ‘Liar yourself!’ ‘You are a disaffected person arguing on behalf of the diseased.”

Bukhari:V4B53N408 “When the Prophet wanted to perform the Umrah, the Quraysh stipulated that he could not preach (Islam). So Ali started writing a treaty. ‘This is what Muhammad, Apostle of Allah, has agreed to.’ The (Meccans) said, ‘If we believed that you were the Apostle of Allah we would have followed you. So write, ‘This is what Muhammad bin Abdallah has agreed to.’ The Apostle could not write, so he asked Ali to erase the expression: ‘Apostle of Allah.’ On that Ali said, ‘I will never erase it.’ Muhammad said, ‘Let me see the paper.’ The Prophet
erased the expression with his own hand.”

Please read this, its very informative about "the clash of civilizations".

Islam and globalisation
Until late last month, when Salman Rushdie added his name to those of a few other like-minded souls and signed a statement attacking Muslims for having been outraged by a set of Danish cartoons depicting their prophet with satirical ridicule, something seemed amiss in that whole global uproar, writes Hamid Dabashi*

With Salman Rushdie's signature at the bottom of a statement declaring a global proclamation against "Islamic totalitarianism", in the aftermath of the Danish cartoon row, we have entered a new phase in what might be termed "Islam and globanalisation" -- a twilight zone of uncertainty where we are all at the mercy of fastidious knowledge produced about bugbears of nightmarish proportions, in this particular case what Rushdie and his associates curiously call "Islam".

"After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism", Salman Rushdie and his colleagues have declared, "the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism." How so, and by what authority? One looks in vain in the list of the statement's twelve signatories allied with Rushdie for someone with the remotest sense of demonstrable knowledge about this goblin of their perturbed imagination that they keep calling "Islam" -- and yet they do declare and designate this "Islam" as a global threat, next and akin to "fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism". The world is now at the mercy of such proclamations -- and Rushdie's name does carry, what Kent detected and declared in Lear and called, "authority". By what authority, how, when, what, and "who gave thee this authority" to declare such things -- no one dares to ask.

"We, writers, journalists, intellectuals", announce Salman Rushdie and his associates, "call for resistance to religious totalitarianism." They can of course call for whatever they wish -- but we are also entitled to ask "writers, journalists, intellectuals" of what particular and combined learning and erudition, knowledge and audacity, about the ghostly apparition that has disturbed their slumber. And why should the world attend and heed such proclamations? Is this thing they call "Islam" the faith of millions of people around the globe, or the bugbear of a band of neocon artists? It's hard to tell.

The case of the Danish cartoon row, in the furious rapidity of world events already an old issue, might be considered as perhaps the best example of how a boisterous banality now governs the principal mode producing public knowledge and thus perceiving Islam and its contemporary historical whereabouts. The row has a history, and the domain of its import implicates Europe in its entirety. It is not just the Danish paper Jyllands- Posten that initially commissioned and published these cartoons. Editors of newspapers and magazines throughout Europe, in print and on the Internet, jubilantly joined their Danish counterparts in massively distributing these cartoons and thus registering their European solidarity in the matter. One such incident after another adds fury and momentum to the way an increasingly globalised audience, Muslim and non-Muslim, conceives and disposes of "Islam".

Selected scenes from scattered Muslim reactions to the publication of these cartoons, pictorially staged and carefully choreographed by the leading European press to sustain their historical record of showing Muslims in the worst possible angle ever seen through a camera have been systematically characterised as yet another sign of a fundamental discrepancy between (this the most enduring binary opposition manufactured by Orientalists in the course of their prolonged services to colonial modernity) "Islam and the West": clean-shaven, civilised white men properly attired in business suits posited against poor, enraged, and furious Muslims.

That some Muslims around the world are outraged and multitudes of them have gone out on a rampage is yet another example of how they misread the domestic affairs of Europeans and Americans and take them for a global assault on themselves. The primary and principal target of these cartoons, with the denigration of Muslims they entail, is in fact labour immigrants of Muslim descent suffering the racism of their host country in one shade, shape, and form or another. A similar misreading was exactly the case when Samuel Huntington issued his own proclamation a few years ago, positing Muslims and Islam as the principal threat to what he still insists on calling, "Western Civilization." On that occasion too, Muslims around the world took Huntington's prognostication to heart and thought he was talking to them, while he, along with a band of like-minded neocon artists like Francis Fukuyama and Alan Bloom, was in fact deeply troubled by massive demographic changes within the United States. By proposing that "Islam" posited a civilisational threat to "the West," Huntington and Co sought to silence massive bodies of old and new, Arab and Muslim, immigrants to the United States demanding a pride of place in terms domestic to their cultural heritage and moral authority.

That the immediate target of the Danish cartoonists was not a remote abstraction called "Islam", but an immediate leviathan appearing in the shape of immigrant communities of Muslim background in their own midst there is no doubt. What remains a puzzle is why leading European opinion-makers, led by a group of yuppie racist journalists, continue to be in a dire need of reminding themselves that they are God's gift to humanity and that Jews and Muslims, the flipped sides of the same coin, or by extension Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans, have no place among them. It is here, and in the immediate vicinity of that question, that lapsed Muslims like Salman Rushdie become handy.

The leading European press (but by no means all) is now having an all-out orgy with its journalistic ethnic cleansing -- and the bravura cannot be entirely explained by the fact that certain kinds of Europeans, carrying their Christianity up their sleeves or else brandishing their "Laïcité" like a saber of unmerciful certainty, do not wish to see any Jews or Muslims, Africans, Asians, or Latinos, among them. With some bizarre sense of irony, the colonial history of Europe, having plundered the globe many times over, has now brought millions of Muslims from Asia and Africa home to roost -- and it would seem that some white Christian Europeans are frightened out of their wits. Oriana Fallaci is now chief among European soothsayers demanding the ethnic cleansing of her Europe. Between Fallaci and Berlusconi, the legacy of Mussolini's fascism is no history -- and Rushdie's "Islam" no substitution.

In the midst of this row -- militant Muslims and racist Europeans at each other's throat -- one cannot but wonder, with a modicum of reason, what is behind the quarrel. What we are dealing with here is the intersection of medieval signs and modern sensitivities, both brought to bear on a brutalised malignancy that resembles two belligerent and silly school children going at each other. To put things in perspective, one can of course begin with the inhibition of figurative representation in Islamic doctrinal disposition -- a fact very much compromised by the range of Persian, Indian and Turkish miniature paintings, and by the effervescence of figurative royal paintings in the 18th and 19th centuries throughout much of the Muslim world.

Against the doctrinal inhibition of figurative painting, such paintings do in fact abound in Islamic art. This inhibition assumes a particularly curious turn when it comes to the figural representation of Prophet Muhammad that it might be quite instructive to know at this point. When the late Syrian filmmaker Moustapha Akkad, tragically killed in the course of a suicidal violence in Amman late last year, made a feature film on the career of Prophet Muhammad, The Message (1976), he opted, out of respect for Muslim sensitivity, not to show the face or figure of the Prophet and simply suggested his presence.

The evident presence of this doctrinal inhibition does not mean that pious Muslims the world over do not look for and produce pictorial representations of their holy men, including their Prophet. The Shias, in particular, have absolutely no qualms whatsoever having the images of Prophet Muhammad and their Imams depicted -- painted on a canvas or woven into a decorative carpet -- and sold in the markets of Najaf, Mashhad, Qom, or Beirut. Pious and believing Muslims buy these pictures and hang them proudly and reverentially in their homes or in public without any hesitation.

The question then is why when a Danish newspaper depicts Prophet Muhammad in a ludicrous manner, or previously when a Pakistani author goes on a fictive rampage denigrating the sacrosanct moments of a people's history, some Muslims, particularly those suffering the terror of tyrannical rulers at home or else the indignities of labour migration abroad, are outraged. Career opportunist novelists or talent-less cartoonists, trying to make up for their lack of creative talent with scandalous marketing ruses, are of course entirely, unconditionally, and ipso facto entitled to make any fool out of themselves, for such acts of juvenile superciliousness are entirely within their civil and human rights, and no one is even in a position to grant or deny them such inalienable rights. But whence the anger, and whereby the fury?

This obviously is a clear case of the context and not just the text -- when you have a representation of a prophet with headgear that looks like a bomb and a nose straight out of the old European racist apothecary boxes, and lay him out thick against the background of a systematic record of white supremacist, masculinist, and European racism against Jews and Muslims, then you have a different story on your hand.

The current anti-Muslim plague, running loose throughout Europe and the United States, banks on the white Christian repertoire of anti- Semitism that has now shifted its focal attention away from the Jews and re-directed itself towards Muslims. Under the guise of the freedom of expression, and positing their racist prejudices in colourful colonial Enlightenment shades, prominent European opinion-makers, as fully evident in their leading newspapers and magazines, are letting loose their racist bigotry in ways unprecedented since the horrid records of European pogroms that ultimately led to the Jewish Holocaust, as is exemplified in the Prophet Muhammed cartoon row or the front covers of The Economist and most other right-wing papers and magazines up in arms against "gypsies" swamping "their lands", loudly declaring that "9 out of 10 asylum seekers are conmen," and that they ought to be "kicked out".

With a combination of mental laziness and a jaundiced visual imagination, these European newspapers are in fact regurgitating the selfsame anti-Jewish insignia definitive to their history and applying them to Muslims all over again. Contorted faces, prominent noses, frightful dispositions, angry demeanours, and grotesque postures have been and continue to be definitive to the way old-fashioned European racism sees Jews and Muslims alike. The self-inflicted surgical bodily mutilation of middle class Muslims -- ranging from plastic surgery of the most grotesque sorts to removal of bodily hair to colouring their hair blonde and wearing colorful contact lenses -- is the mirror image of the very same aesthetic hegemony of white Europeans.

What we are witnessing over the cartoons that the Danish Jyllands-Posten has commissioned and published, however, is not limited to a mere recycling of European anti-Semitism. There is a contemporary anxiety that feeds that pathological knee jerk. Placing headgear in the form of a bomb (a ticking bomb as Alan Dershowitz and Michael Ignatieff would say in the United States) on the head of Prophet Muhammad is the functional equivalent of placing a sign of a German concentration camp (the phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei," for example), or a sign of the massacre of Native Americans, or a reference to the My Lai massacre of 1968 in Vietnam, or a picture of Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib, over the head of Christ in a Crucifix. It is a matter of combining medieval icons and modern barbarities, fusing the two in order to implicate the sacrosanct icons of a people in their entirety in those acts of barbarity. Using the figure of Prophet Muhammad with a suggestion of terrorism, as it is defined by the US and its European allies (while they are systematically going around the world and torturing, maiming and murdering people on the assumption that they might be Dershowitz-Ignatieff ticking bombs), effectively implicates some 1.5 billion people of Muslim background around the world in such acts of degenerate violence -- itself the continued reverberation of an entire history of European (and now American) colonial plundering of the globe.

Marking this event, two diametrically opposed reactions to the cartoon row now mirror and complement each other: first is the inexcusable anti-Semitic response of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, either denying the Jewish Holocaust, and thus belittling the unending suffering it has caused Jewish people the world over, or else encouraging anti-Semitic tirades in his homeland; and second a band of neocon artists, led by the functional equivalent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Salman Rushdie, branding a figment of their own turgid imagination "Islamism" and calling it "totalitarianism." While in Iran, the legitimate and absolutely necessary criticism of the apartheid state of Israel has now degenerated into anti-Semitism, in Europe and the United States, a band of equally ignoramus career opportunists are denouncing what they call "Islamism", a pathologically nervous hiding, and thus all the more revealing, of their own collective hatred of a people and their received notions of sanctity.

Initially published in Charlie Hebdo, a French weekly and one of the European papers to reprint the caricatures, the Rushdie and Co declaration warns that "after having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism." Thus in the esteemed estimation of these signatories, the imminent threat to humanity is not the environmental catastrophe posed by the gargantuan waste and abuse of natural resources by the US and the entire industrial calamity it represents; not the manifestations of obscene wealth, on the one hand, and unfathomable poverty, on the other, in the heart of Europe and the United States (remember hurricane Katrina); not the fact that according to the UN some 870 million people go to sleep hungry every night around the globe while the military budget of the United States between the year 2000 and 2008 is estimated at 32 and eleven zeroes in front of that figure; not the unconscionable destitution of innocent people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, all created and conditioned by the globalised capitalism over which presides the US and Western Europe; not the prevalent racism, sexism, and a whole gamut of transcultural manifestations of endemic patriarchy, economic inequality, social injustice, and gender apartheid; not the systematic eradication of civil liberties in the heartlands of their cherished "West"; not the widespread network of torture chambers in Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, Guantànamo Bay, and a whole subterranean labyrinth of CIA-run dungeons in Europe -- no, none of these frightful facts, in the opinion of Salman Rushdie and his comrades, poses any threat to the globe, when compared to a handful of pitiful, scattered, and pathetic Muslim reactions, all out of fear, frustration, and despair, to the Danish caricature of their prophet.

This has of course been a long season of migration to the lucrative right, and not just sanity but sheer literacy has lost to self-promotion, conducted on the broken backs of poverty- stricken people. For while the varied forms of totalitarianism, fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism (all vintage European inventions) were state-sponsored ideologies that wreaked havoc first and foremost on citizens caught in the snare of their lunacy, what they call "Islamism" (out of sheer historical illiteracy of what has happened in and to Islam over the last 200 years) is a US-sponsored propaganda gadget manufactured to generate and sustain an illusory enemy to justify warmongering and global domination.

A band of supercilious journalists publish a number of cartoons in Denmark and scores of Muslims are killed while protesting in the US-occupied Afghanistan, its neighbouring Pakistan, a client-state of the selfsame US, and then in other parts of the Muslim world. Where, and at what level of a rudimentary political literacy, does Islamic "totalitarianism" enter this scene? The only country in the world that carries the epithet of an "Islamic Republic" -- mirroring in its religious disposition the Jewish State, the US Christian Empire that supports it, and the Hindu Fundamentalism that aspires to its apartheid racism -- is Iran, where the theocratic tyranny of a band of useless medieval jurists is systematically and valiantly contested by its own citizens. Whence and where did Islam become a "totalitarian" state apparatus like fascism, Stalinism, and Nazism? There is not a single so-called "Muslim country" the inhabitants of which are not actively engaging and challenging the most sacrosanct principles of their faith. Just in their modern history, and over the last two hundred years, Muslims themselves have turned their collective faith upside down questioning the most definitive aspects of their faith. In facing and opposing the unfathomable barbarity of European colonialism, Muslims have left not a single stone unturned in their own religious doctrines and dogmas -- they did not and have no need to wait for a band of illiterate opportunists to tell them what is wrong with their faith and what they need to do. Nothing of that noble and continued history -- of a people launched against themselves -- is now a matter of global public knowledge, and yet the premise of everything said and conceived of Islam is precisely what illiterate prognosticators like Salman Rushdie and Co have deigned to tell their European and American clientele.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims the world over swallow their pride, turn their face from this ghastly European racism and go about their daily lives. Small bands of militant Muslims, angered by insults they think targeted against people they hold holy, go on a rampage and scores of them are beaten and even killed by the police in their respective countries. The very same press that started this horrid row takes pictures of these mobs and juxtaposes them against clean-shaven white European statesmen in their business suits and soft-spoken newspeak -- thus triggering the hurried reaction of these "writers, journalists, intellectuals", as they call themselves, self- promoting career opportunists as they are. Where did "totalitarianism" come into play? "Totalitarianism", let it be remembered, is a state ideology, presiding over a massive military machinery, the way Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini did -- all of them European, all of them white, all of them male, and yes, all of them Christian by birth and breeding.

To the everlasting shame of not just the signatories of this logically flawed and categorically racist document, signed and sealed by Salman Rushdie, but of every European who has remained silent or compliant in the course of the cartoon row, the principal target of this horrid act of racism remains not a stilted abstraction called "Islam", nor indeed millions of Muslims living outside the European racist imaginary. The principal target of these cartoons was (and is) an Afghan woman teacher in Denmark, a Pakistani child on her way to school in Norway, an Algerian busboy hiding from the police in France, a Moroccan street sweeper on his way to work in Italy, an Iranian cab driver negotiating his way in a city in Holland, a Turkish illegal immigrant scared to open her mouth in Germany, an Egyptian student fearing for her future in Spain, a Syrian restaurant-owner wondering if he will have a customer somewhere in Sweden, and then millions of others like them suffering the indignities of desperate labour migrations into Europe and weathering the monumental manifestations of European racism on a daily and regular basis. Now enter Salman Rushdie and Co, putting their ignoble names to a document that seals their approval of global injustice and racism towards 1.5 billion people, imagining themselves the beneficiaries of a European Enlightenment that in its very philosophical inception denied them and their homelands and cultures entry even into the category of "human" and considered their entire pedigree beneath contempt.

Today signs of a horrid collective racism are becoming evident in post-war European cities and towns dangerously and conveniently forgetting the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust -- when white European racist Christians sought systematically to eradicate an entire people on the single premise that they were Jews. Leading European newspapers have reprinted the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad not out of a ludicrous sign of solidarity with their yuppie and illiterate Danish colleagues, but to frighten millions of European Muslims into submission, shame, fear, and intimidation. Millions of Muslim children across Europe now go to school frightened, ashamed, feeling a false sense of guilt, and thus petrified out of their collective consciousness. What these newspapers are effectively doing is to make it impossible for Muslims to oppose violence and barbarity of all sorts, particularly those done in their name, in any way other than denouncing their collective faith, dying their hair blonde, bleaching their faces white, and thus metamorphosing into a walking denigration of themselves. Those children are the principal targets of every ghastly newspaper in Europe that reprinted those cartoons -- to make sure that they are bullied in their schools and neighbourhoods, discriminated against in their future job markets, growing up ashamed of their culture and character, and obedient to a globalised and whitewashed Eurocentricity with which the classical European anti-Semitism now wishes to mark its history.

"Islam and globanalisation", or giving European and American space to Muslim names to denounce their own Islamic phantasms, is a new phase in the social manufacturing of domination -- using nominal Muslims against Islamic abstractions. This -- pitting lapsed Muslims against Islamic sensibilities -- is ultimately an exercise in futility. The fate of the globe, Europe included, is written elsewhere, somewhere between the lines of massive labour migration, on one side, and the global reconfiguration of the capital that systematically seeks to abuse it, on the other. The culture war this has occasioned in the meantime is a murderous nightmare for many, a lucrative pastime for some, a headache for others, and yet at the end an entirely negligible footnote to history.

* The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (Second Edition, Transactions, 2006), and Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (Verso, 2001), the founder of "Dreams of a Nation: A Palestinian Film Project", and the editor of Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (Verso, 2006). His forthcoming book, Iran: A People Interrupted , is scheduled for publication this year by the New Press.

A Plague on both houses

Yes, that's what I'm looking for. I didnt think 3:28 was enough by itself for this justification. Understanding 3:28 and anything else you offered in its context takes a long time of study. Probably more than even I have to invest.

I want to be able to back Taqiyya up with full understanding of Quranic text and other islamic teachings and be eloquent enough to explain it as Robert does.

Thanks for the referances. I just dont like it when I see/read Islamic appologist techniqies of deception, even if they should counter my own arguments and I cant counter argue like Robert does. Its frustrating...

Many of use try to play catch up with Robert, never will but every piece of evidence is helpful.

I guess some of us look for a higher intelectual understnading of Islam than just believe what someone tells us.

George Will differentiates between "well educated" and "well schooled." I think Ms Rice is of the latter.

@bigbird

that was a big turd you laid on us!

Like his predecessor Arafat, this Mahmoud Abbas speaks with forked tongue, or from both sides of his mouth, or what best describes the doublespeak is: talks out of two orifices (one in his face, the other down below). The latter is what describes him to a "T."

bigbird writes:
"Please read this, its very informative about "the clash of civilizations"."

Actually, it wasn't very informative at all,
just more blather, a complete waste of time,
very low signal to noise ratio. What did you
find informative about it?

What'd he say. What'd he say? What's-his-name that bigbird or shtbird, whatEver!

NCKaffir, you talk about Ronald Reagan, but he blew his big chance to nip the Islamic terrorism we see today in the bud. His response to the Beirut bombings of 1983 when 241 US peacekeepers were brutally murdered should have been the cue to go after Hizbollah and Iran, especially as Iran was at war with Iraq back then, but instead he pulled troops out of Beirut. This, probably more than the Iran hostage crisis, gave that shot in the arm for the Jihadis, and persuaded them that for the first time in the 300 years since the Siege and Battle of Vienna, that for all its advanced weaponry, the West had suddenly become weak. Back in 1979, Khomeini probably thought Carter was the only US President in history who would show cravenness to an act of aggression, but little did he know that Reagan would do something arguably worse four years later.

Thanks to A_Plague_on_Both_Houses and Pelayo I have come to the conclusion that Condi Rice is well schooled, but ignorant of the basics of Islam. This stupid diplomacy and support of a terrorist organization should not be allowed to stand. Whatever happened to the Bush doctrine?

"Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." - George W. Bush

they lie about lies that they lied about....

The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (Second Edition, Transactions, 2006), and Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (Verso, 2001), the founder of "Dreams of a Nation: A Palestinian Film Project", and the editor of Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (Verso, 2006). His forthcoming book, Iran: A People Interrupted , is scheduled for publication this year by the New Press.

Bigbird seems in love with this Arabeast "professor"... Note he is at Columbia in NYC.. enjoying all the benefits of Western Civilization while constantly driveling on about "racist whites" who plunder the planet. What a damn hypocrite!

The racist, Herr Professor, der bist DU!

Bigbird, please refrain from posting this offensive drivel next time. A link would more than suffice. Your offensive and overly lengthy post keeps us from reading each others' comments.

Thank you.

VIVE LA RESISTANCE!!!

As possibly the only person in the world to have read everything written in English by Hamid Dabashi, I can grimly report that his primitive notion of scholarship, the laborious piling on of details, never given shape, never subject to analysis, never endowed with any significance, makes him one of the greatest embarrassments of Columbia today, the school where Jacques Bazun once taught, once administered.

But forget the nonsense above is one more tedious variant on the "Muslims are the new Jews" business and, to simultaneously cheer yourself up and depress yourself, simply google "Hamid Dabashi" and "Edward Said," in order to read the former's treacly tribute to the latter, in the style of assorted Odes to Stalin.

Go ahead. Google. Read. Laugh. Cry.

The whole charade is absurd -- absurd by those carrying it on in stage whispers, as Abbas pretends to "convince" Hamas to utter some meaningless formula which he declares to them is meaningless, don't worry, and yet at the same time Condoleeza Rice and others in the American government and of course in the E.U. and assorted member states, all wait with bated breath for the phony words uttered phonily so that the Jizyah, which the Infidel peoples over whom these rulers rule do not wish to pay, but their rulers, because they are of a terrifying mediocrity, do not know how to stop, do not dare to stop, may be resumed.

There is no "solution" to the Arab and Muslim siege of Israel. Israel sits on land that was once possessed by Muslims. Its size is irrelevant. It cannot conceivably, in Muslim and Arab eyes, be allowed to permanently exist. The only quarrel between Abbas and Hamas is over tactics and timing. Abbas wants the slow jihad of growing economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, and internal demographic conquest -- all with Israel as the victim. Hamas wants the Fast Jihad, and no pretense of ever acquiescing in Israel's existence.

Slow Jihad, Fast Jihad -- there is no difference as far as Israel's final fate is concerned. And not only did Muhammad counsel that "war is deception" but, in the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, showed just how Muslims should regard all agreeements made with Infidels. And the way in which he first signed and then, as soon as he felt that he was strong enough, broke the treaty and attacked the Meccans, has been held up as the model for all time, for all treaties between Muslims and Infidels. This is clearly understood by everyone in the Muslim world. It is written about, endlessly. It is spoken about, endlessly. It can be found in that excellent guide, by Majid Khadduri (Fouad Ajami is the "Majid Khadduri Professor" of something or other at Johns Hopkins. Does Fouad Ajami know what Majid Khadduri so carefully explained about Muslim views of treaty-making with Infidels? If he doesn't, he should. If he does, and if he is not a fake, then he has an obligation to convey such knowledge to the American officials who are so impressed with him, and to the wider public.

And the moral of all this? Israel must give up nothing more. It should have permanently annexed in June 1967 everything it took, but who then knew about Islam in the Israeli government? And more importantly, who in the Israeli government knows a sufficient amount now?

Because if the Israeli government understood the permanent nature of the implacable Muslim and Arab hostility, rooted in the immutable texts of Islam, including in those texts the acts and words of Muhammad as recorded in Hadith and Sira, and understood by all Muslim jurisconsults, then the nonsense of further surrender of territory critical to Israel's survival -- territory to which it has legal, moral, and historic title, not least by the preamble and express provisions of the Mandate for Palestine established by the League of Nations)-- would end.

Here's a final suggestion. This is what Abbas and the "Palestinians" must be asked to do. Not to repeat a vague formula such as "we recognize Israel's existence" (i.e., the fact that it presently exists.) Not any such transparent fudging and nonsense.

No, that will not do. Here is what must be done, and would be done by an Israeli government that knew where to put its feet and hands. That government should raise the issue of Muslim treaty-making. It should bring forth to the attention of the world what Majid Khadduri so ably set down: the principles of Muslim jurisprudence applicable to all agreements made with Infidels. The Israeli government should discuss, at great length, in public, whether or not Muslims can be expected to abide by any treaty made with Infidels, when both the clear doctrine, and the practice, of Islam tell us otherwise.

That's it. Abbas and Hamas and all the Arabs and Muslims must forswear the principles that have for 1350 years governed the attitude of Muslims toward agreements with Infidels.

That has to be publicized. That has to be put as an explicit condition. Nothing less can be accepted.

And that goes for all Infidel governemnts everywhere -- not least for the current administration now making an utter mess in Iraq and with the so-called "Palestinians" who are merely the local Arab shock troops of the endless siege of Israel.

Rice got the job because

1) she's a woman
2) she's black
3) she's educated

Bush, wanting to create an aura of being progressive, showing a black, and female, face in his high profile cabinet, and pandering for black, and female, votes, decided condi would be perfect.

That is the extent of her qualification to be Secretary of State for the United States of America.

Actually understanding what makes the world tick, actually understanding about what makes bad people do bad things, actually understanding anything about islam, actually understanding the peril facing the US at this time, is not actually part of the requirements to get the job of Secretary of State.

Bush could have just as easily made her Secretary of Defence, or Secretary of Agriculture, or head of the EPA, for all experience matters. When you give out jobs to your cronies, it matters not if you are good for that job. It just matters that you are loyal to your boss. And Bush said in 2000, after the election, that he picks people for his cabinet based on loyalty. "He's someone I can trust" was his phrase he used to explain various choices upon which he was queried.

The only job Rice could not get was Surgeon General. For that you need to actually have a degree in medicine. But for Secretary of State? No big deal. You can give that to some woman you met at a cocktail party at a fundraiser who, before she was National Security Advisor, (ironic) she was a political science professor at Stanford University.

Yes, Stanford University.

Actually, any university is a poor place to find people who might know anything about islam.

Nonetheless, George tapped a Stanford University professor to represent America in the islamic world.

Way to go, George.

What about Jane Fonda for Secretary of Defence? And Jack Kevorkian for Surgeon General? Paris Hilton for chairman of the Federal Reserve?

So that everyone has immediately available the full text of Hamid Dabashi's tribute to Edward Said, it is presented here as a public service:

The Moment of Myth
Edward Said (1935-2003)
By HAMID DABASHI

Close proximity to a majestic mountain is a mixed blessing -- one is at once graced by the magnanimity of its pastures and the bounty of its slopes, and yet one can never see where one is sitting, under the shadow of what greatness, the embracing comfort of what assurance. The splendor of mountains -- Himalayas, Rockies, Alborz -- can only be seen from afar, from the safe distance of only a visual, perceptive, appreciative, awe-inspiring grasp of their whereabouts.

A very happy few -- now desolate and broken -- have had the rare privilege of calling Edward Said a friend, fewer a colleague, even fewer a comrade, only a handful a neighbor -- the closer you came to Edward Said the more his intimate humanity, ordinary simplicity, the sweet, endearing, disarmingly embracing character -- his being a husband, a father, a father-in-law, an uncle, a cousin -- clouded and colored the majesty that he was. Our emails and voicemails are still full of his precious words, his timely consolations, anecdotal humor, trivial questions, priceless advice -- all too dear to delete, too intimate to share. We were all like birds flying around the generosity of his roof, tiny dandelions joyous in the shade of his backyard, minuscule creatures pasturing on the bounteous slopes of the mountain that he was.

The prince of our cause, the mighty warrior, the Salah al-Din of our reasoning with mad adversaries, source of our sanity in despair, solace in our sorrow, hope in our own humanity, is now no more.

In his absence now it is possible to remember the time when you were and he was not part of your critical consciousness, your creative disposition, your presence in the world -- when he did not look over your shoulder watching every single word you wrote.

If remembering the time that you were but he was not integral to you is not to be an exercise in archeological futility, then it has to account for the distance, the discrepancy, between the bashful scholasticism of the learning that my generation of immigrant intellectuals received and the confidence and courage with which we can stand up today in face of outrageous fortune -- hand in hand with our brothers and sisters across races and nations, creeds and chaos -- and say, "NO!"

Today, there is a solidarity of purpose among a band of rebels and mutineers -- gentiles are among us and Jews, Christians and pagans, Hindus and Muslims, atheists we are and agnostics, natives and immigrants -- who speak truth to power with the voice of Edward Said the echo of our chorus. How we came here -- where we are, hearing with his ears, seeing with his eyes, talking with his tongue -- is a question not for making an historical record but for taking moral courage.

Now in the moment of his myth, when Edward Said has left us to our own devices and joined the pantheon of mythic monuments, is precisely the time to have, as he once said, a Gramscian inventory of our whereabouts -- once with, and now without him. Today the world is at once poorer in his absence and yet richer through his memory -- and precisely in that paradox dwell the seeds of our dissent, the promise of our future, the solemnity of our oath at the sacred site of his casket.

I come from a generation of immigrant intellectuals who mark the origin and disposition of their critical intelligence from the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). The shape of our critical character, the voice of our dissent, the texture of our politics, and the very disposition of our courage, are all rooted in every nook and cranny of that revelatory text. It was in the year of the Iranian Revolution, 1979, less than a season after the publication of Orientalism, that Samuel Klausner, who taught us theory and method, first introduced me to Edward Said's spectacular achievement in an utterly prosaic manner. I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, finishing a dual degree in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies. By the time I read Orientalism (inhaled it rather, in one deep, satisfying swoop -- drank it like a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade on a hot summer day), I had already read Karl Marx, Max Scheller, Max Weber, and George Herbert Mead on the sociology of knowledge. What Said had argued in Orientalism was straight out of a sociology of knowledge angle -- and yet with a globality of vision, a daring, defiant imagination, and with such an assured audacity that I remember I could not believe my eyes -- that I was reading these words in that particular succession of reason and rhetoric.

By the mid-1970s, my generation of sociologists at Penn had already started reading Michel Foucault in a systematic and rather unusual curriculum given that the discipline of sociology was then being rapidly sold out to federally funded policy research and demography -- a downward spiral from which a once groundbreaking discipline never recovered. But at that time at Penn, Phillip Rieff, Digby Baltzell, Samuel Klausner, Harold Bershady, Victor Lidz, and Fred Block were serious theorists with a relatively universal approach to their sociological concerns. I wrote my doctoral dissertation with Phillip Rieff advising me on the sociological aspect of my work and with the late George Makdisi on the Islamic aspect. But the seed that Orientalism had planted in my critical consciousness never left my thoughts after that fateful Fall semester of 1979 when we read it with Samuel Klausner in that dimly lit, tiny room on the fifth floor of McNeal Building off Locust walk on the Penn campus -- smack in the middle of the hostage crisis in Iran, when I could hear a chorus of Penn undergraduates shouting in unison, "Nuke Iran, Maim Iranians!"

Take Orientalism out of that curriculum, Edward Said out of our consciousness, and my generation of immigrant intellectuals would all be a bunch of dispirited souls susceptible to chronic melancholy, or else, horribile dictu, who would pathetically mutate into native informers of one sort or another -- selling their souls to soulless sultans in DC or else to senile patriarchs in Princeton.

I had no clue as to Edward Said's work in literary criticism prior to Orientalism, and for years after my graduation I remained entirely oblivious to it. It was Orientalism that would not let go of the way I thought and wrote about modern or medieval Islamic or Iranian intellectual history. From then on, I began a journey, at once professional and personal, moral and intellectual, that brought me literally to his doorstep on the campus of Columbia University -- where I now teach. To my dying day, I will cherish the precise spot next to Miller Theater on the corner of 116th and Broadway where I met Edward for the first time and went up to him and introduced myself -- the gratitude of a liberated voice in my greetings.

I discovered Edward Said first from Orientalism then his writings on Palestine, from there to his liberating reflections on the Iranian Revolution, and then from there I began an almost Jesuit training in every single book he ever wrote and the majority of his essays and articles, reading and re-reading them like a dutiful student preparing for a doctoral exam, long after I was giving doctoral examinations.

Today, of the myriad of things I have learned from Edward Said, nothing matters to me more than the rhapsodic eloquence of his voice -- the majesty, confidence, courage, audacity, and poise of his diction, without which my generation of immigrant intellectuals would have been at the mercy of mercenary academics and embedded journalists who have now flooded the gutters of the mass media -- uttering their pathologies with thick Arabic, Persian, or South Asian accents and yet speaking with a nauseating "We" that sides with the bankrupt architects of this predatory empire. In Edward Said's voice, in his princely posture and magisterial air of confidence, the fragile tone of our almost silent objections and the frailty of our say in the matter suddenly rose to the occasion.

Through Edward Said we suddenly found comrades we never knew we had, friends and families we never suspected in our own neighborhood -- Asia, Africa, and Latin America suddenly became the extension of our home away from home. Jose Marti I discovered through Edward Said, as I did Kojin Karatani, Chinua Achebe, Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, Seamus Deane, Masao Miyoshi, Ngugi wa Thiongo. Everyone else we thought we knew he made new sense of for us -- Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahmoud Darwish, Nazim Hikmat, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

As the color of our skin began to confuse the color line drawn tyrannically between blacks and whites in the United States -- segregated in the respective corners of their misplaced confidence about their races -- we Asians and Latinos, Arabs, Turks, Africans, Iranians, Armenians, Kurds, Afghans and South Asians were instantly brought together beyond the uncommon denominator of our origin and towards the solidarity of our emerging purpose, the nobility of our handshake with Edward Said.

For years after I had come to Columbia, I could not quite reconcile the public, mythic, iconic Edward Said, and the immediate Edward of my increasing acquaintance and friendship, camaraderie and solidarity. It was as if there was an Edward Said the Magnificent for the rest of the world and then another Edward for a happy few. The two were not exactly irreconcilable; they posited a question, a distance in need of traversing -- how could a mortal so fragile, frail, and accessible cut a global figure so monumental, metaphoric, parabolic?

When two years ago an infamous charlatan slandered me in a New York tabloid and created a scandalous website to malign my public stand against the criminal atrocities he supports, my voicemail was flooded with racist, obscene and threatening messages by the lunatic fringe he had let loose. Smack in the middle of these obscenities, as if miraculously, there was a message from Edward -- a breath of fresh air, refreshing, joyous, re-assuring, life-affirming: "Hamid, my dear, this is Edward . . ." Life was so amazingly beautiful. I kept listening to those obscenities just for the joy of coming to Edward's message. There was something providential in his voice -- it restored hope in humanity. Today at Edward's funeral, the heartbroken few who could look over the shoulder of the pallbearers of Edward's coffin were witness to yet another sublime restoration of hope when Daniel Barenboim played Bach's Prelude in E-Flat from Part I of the Well-Tempered Clavier as a musical tribute to his deceased friend. Those in the vicinity of this miracle saw and heard that the Maestro's loving farewell was no longer just a virtuoso pianist playing a beautiful piece of music-- but that they were privy to Daniel Barenboim speaking with Edward Said for the very last time, in the common language of their choice, privilege and transcendence.

Edward Said was the walking embodiment of hope -- one extraordinary incident that sought and detected an extraordinary sparkle in otherwise very ordinary people who happened on his watch. Years before, when I had open heart surgery and my dear, now departed, friend and colleague, Magda al-Nowaihi was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Edward was extraordinary in his support: calling on us regularly, sending us his new books and articles, reading our manuscripts, making fun of what he called our postmodernisms -- he was the sound of our laughter, the color of our joy, the shape of our hope. Magda fought her malignant cancer for years until her young children became teenagers; I defied my congenital fate and lived -- Edward, the model of our endurance, the measures of our truth, the meaning of our daring to walk into a classroom.

The closer I became to Edward the more impossible it seemed to tell what exactly it was that went into the making of his heroic character in such mythic measures -- by now I was too close to the mountain, embraced by its grace, oblivious to its majesty. But even in public, the account of his life that Edward Said published is no different. One reads his Out of Place (1999) in vain looking for a clue, a succession of historical or psychological causes and traits, as to what great or consequential events make for a monumentally moral life. Everything about Edward Said was rather ordinary, and yet an extraordinary adventure was made of the prosaic occurrences of this very life.

Born in Palestine in 1935, named Edward after the Prince of Wales, he lived a life of exile like millions of other Palestinians in the Arab world. Sent to Mount Hermon High School in New England, and subsequently to Princeton and Harvard for his higher education, Edward Said reports of no extraordinary event that one can identify, analyze, theorize as the defining moment of the mythic figure that he cut at the time of his untimely death. Edward was an ordinary man. Edward Said was a giant. The distance was covered by nothing other than the glory of his daring imagination.

Knowing Edward Said personally was a study in how heroes are made from the flesh and blood of the most ordinary and perishable realities. A Palestinian, an exile, an academic intellectual, a teacher, a scholar, a husband, a father, a friend: none of this common and abundant evidence of a disjointed world can account for the sum total of Edward Said as a towering figure measuring the very definition of a moral life.

"Did you know Professor Said," I asked Chaplin Davis here at Columbia when looking for a place for Miriam Said to receive the flood of visitors who wanted to pay their respects last Friday. "I never met him," she said, "but I know he was a warrior," and then she looked at me with a bright set of shining eyes and added ". . . for justice." "It was just like a light going off on campus," another colleague said of Edward's death.

If one is to begin anywhere to place the particulars of Edward Said's moral and intellectual life together it is not in the prosaics of his exilic life that he shares with millions of others, Palestinian or otherwise, but in the poetics of his creative defiance of his fate -- where he was able repeatedly to give birth to himself. At his death, Edward Said was the moral mandate, the volcanic outburst of a life otherwise wasted in and by accidents that accumulate to nothing. Exile was his fate and he triumphantly turned it into the fruit of his life -- the gift he gave to a world now permanently cast into an exilic departure from itself.

We can find few places in Out of Place that reveal the creative concatenation of such moments better than the concluding paragraph of the book. Like his life, Said's autobiography has to be read from its endings and not from its beginnings. "Sleeplessness for me," he says, "is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost" (295). He stayed awake when the world went to sleep -- the insomniac conscience of the world, conversant with Minerva, observant with his eyes wide awake, like a wise owl, all-seeing, all-hearing, vigilant. "There is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night's loss, than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely a few hours earlier."

It is here, in the twilight borderline of repeated promises of a dawning light against the assured persistence of darkness, when it appears that the darker moments of our despair must yield to brighter hopes, that we always find Edward Said waiting for the rest of us to awake, to arrive. "With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place." Right here, I believe, Edward Said has rested his case and left his indelible mark on the rest of us, trying, as we are, to learn from him how to complement fatefully while remaining humanly incomplete. That, in my judgment, is the principal reason why such a multitude of people ordinarily at political and ideological odds with each other deeply loved Edward without contradicting themselves or him. His was a spontaneous soul -- he generated and sustained good will and moral purpose on the impulses of the premise he was given, not on the projected idealism of some metaphysical certainty.

What was paramount about Edward Said is that in his utter solitude he was never alone. He always spoke for an otherwise muted possibility of living a moral life against all odds, a graceful David swinging his sling and launching his stones against the Goliath of a world so mercilessly cast in the logic of its own madness -- to be the moral voice of a people, and to turn the tragic fate of that people into the tragedy of a global predicament in which we have all become homeless Palestinians. His virtue was to turn the vices of his time into momentous occasions for a more universal good that went beyond the specificity of one wrong or another. There was a catholicity to his liberating knowledge, a generosity to his moral rectitude, that easily transgressed boundaries and put to shame all territorial claims to authenticity. He was, as he rightly said, always slightly out of place, but that only brought out what was wrong with that place that could not completely accommodate him in the entirety of his character and culture.

In his legacy, Said has made a universal virtue out of the particular predicament that the world handed him at birth. Born in Palestine but denied his ancestral claims on that land, raised in Egypt but schooled with a British colonial education, dispatched to the United States by way of his father's claiming a more permanent part of his American dream but constantly driven to speak the truth of that lie to the powers that hold it, Said turned the inevitability of his fate into the defining moment of his stature as the iconic figure of an entire generation of hope -- against a whole culture of despair.

Edward Said's life has its most immediate bearing as an eloquent testimonial of a people much maligned and brutalized in history. His life and legacy cannot and must not be robbed of that immediacy. It is first and foremost as a Palestinian -- a disenfranchised, dispossessed, disinherited Palestinian -- that Edward Said spoke. The ordinariness of his story -- particularly in those moments when he spoke openly, frankly, innocently of his early youth, adolescence, sibling rivalries, sexual maturity, etc. -- is precisely what restores dignity to a people demonized by a succession of purposeful propaganda, dehumanized to be robbed of their homeland in the broad daylight of history. No assessment of his multifaceted achievements as a teacher, a critic, and a scholar, no laudatory endorsement of his universal humanism, no perfectly deserving appreciation of him as a musician, an essayist, a subaltern theorist, a political activist, etc. -- nothing should ever detract from his paramount significance as a Palestinian deeply wounded by the fate of what he repeatedly and wholeheartedly called "my people."

But Edward Said was not just a Palestinian, though a Palestinian he proudly was. Edward Said also became an icon, a moral paragon in a time when taking desperate measures have cast doubt on the very possibility of a moral voice, and here the ordinariness of his life makes the extraordinary voice that he was even more enduring. Said was not just a Palestinian. But he made every one else look like a Palestinian: made homeless by the mad logic of a brutal game of power that has robbed the whole world of any semblance of permanence.

How to remain an incessantly moral voice in a morally impermanent world, how to transfigure the disfigured mutations of the world into a well-mannered measure of truth, how to dismantle the power that false knowledge projects and yet insist that the just is right and the truth is beautiful -- that is the legacy of Edward Said, right from the mountain top of his majestic peak visible from afar, down to the slopes of his bountiful pastures which few fortunate souls were blessed to call home."

[Hamid Dabashi is the Chair of the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) Department, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies, and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.]

Please read it aloud to friends and family. Bring to dinner parties, cocktail parties, post-game parties, parties and meetings and gatherings of every kind. And whenever you have the chance, pull out your print-out of Hamid Dabashi's tribute to Edward Said and read it aloud. With feeling. Just the way you imagine that Hamid Dabashi himself, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia, would read it, were he present to do so.

And don't stop there. E-mail it around the world to friends, acquaintances, anyone at all who needs cheering up. What could be more likely to induce laughter than such a product, of such an author, and what could be funnier than the fact that that author is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor at Columbia University?

Regarding Frieda's response about Condi Rice's supposed high level intelligence, I wasn't aware that gullibilty and ineptitude were signs of intelligence and accomplishment. Nor was I aware that a background in academia (especially in liberal arts/non-technical fields such as political "science") equals great intelligence. But I do agree that the real problem with Rice is not her intelligence level--or lack thereof--but rather her sense of right vs. wrong, and specifically her apparent personal favoritism for the Islamic world at the expense of Israel (and Jews in general). Her predecessor had the same leanings, and Rice has not made the situation any better than it was with Colin Powell (and he was quite horrible).

Regarding the previous comments about Reagan and Pope John Paul II, that was in reference to their courageous stands against communism. Today we desparately need world leaders who will take a similarly courageous stand against Jihad. I agree that Ronald Reagan and Pope JPII fell short with regard to their handling of Islamic terrorism and expansion, and (especially with Pope JPII) that they sometimes resorted to appeasement.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2533702461706761547&q=relentless

And we should listen to /believe Abbas because?????
Nothing new smae old, same old,,,,,

"he primary and principal target of these cartoons, with the denigration of Muslims they entail, is in fact labour immigrants of Muslim descent suffering the racism of their host country in one shade, shape, and form or another."

from the poster bigbird, aka big turd, can you explain the exploitaton by the Saudi to their workers in Saudi Arabia? the drivel you wrote all l can say is bring on the violins!

According to an expert from Bar Ilan Univ in Israel, the differences between Fatah and Hamas are not ideological. Rather the diffs are over control of money, power and jobs in the palestinian authority. As you may know, arafat set up a system of state-licensed economic monopolies, to favor the few, plus an abundance of armed bands, the better to prevent any one band from getting too strong, plus patrimonial favoritism in most areas of government.
The two factions, Fatah and Hamas are based on different clans, families, factions, coteries of friends, etc. Fatah favored the friends and families of insiders for all sorts of favors. Hamas represents the clans and families that were left out and wants to take its share. Otherwise both sides hate Israel and want to destroy it/us. The talk about a "palestinian national unity government" is not likely to be fulfilled because of the material conflicts of interests separating the two sides. Both sides are prepared for more struggle, even civil war. On the other hand, the "national unity" talk is itself a political and psychological warfare weapon.
[the article appeared in yesterday's Makor Rishon]

The fact that Condi Rice accepts abu mazen's claims at face value or pretends to accept them, is a very bad sign. It means that George W's administration is not committed to a struggle against terrorism.