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The canard that Said supports Arab terrorism goes back to the '70s, and it is supported, his critics say, by the fact that from 1977 until 1991 he was a member of the Palestine National Council, a Palestinian parliament-in-exile consisting of some 400 members worldwide, which serves as an umbrella for the P.L.O. as well as for nonmilitary and nonterrorist organizations. Never mind that Said has always urged the P.L.O. to seek the conference table, not the car bomb; or that, to the U.S. government, the P.N.C. and the P.L.O. were wholly distinct. For the Israeli right and its American supporters they were one and the same thing. Thus in 1988, at the height of the Israeli crackdown in occupied Palestine, when Secretary of State George Shultz proposed talking to Said and another Palestinian-American professor, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, to discuss his Middle East peace effort, Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vehemently objected. The meeting took place anyway.
None of Said's political foes have been able to cite a single utterance by him that could be construed as anti-Semitic or as condoning either tyranny or terrorism. Hence they fall back on innuendo, smear tactics or -- in the case of Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi whose recent book Cruelty and Silence, directed against Arab acquiescence in the horrors of Saddam's regime, also fiercely attacks Said -- on distortions of his views. The feud between Makiya and Said has been seized on, to the pleasure of neither, by American anti-Arabists. Said, declaimed A.M. Rosenthal in the New York Times last April, is the kind of Arab intellectual who preaches to other Arabs that "the enemy is, guess ! -- the West, not the despotisms among whom they chose not to seek tenure." Such folk, he added, are the "silent servants" of terrorism and tyranny.
And such punditry is wide of the mark. Far from lending support to Middle Eastern despotisms, Said has harshly criticized them. He spoke out (while academe remained largely silent) for Salman Rushdie against the Iranian mullahs and their fatwa: "Those of us from the Moslem part of this world cannot accept the notion that democratic freedoms should be abrogated to protect Islam." He has inveighed against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez Assad in Syria. The "traditional discourse" of Arab nationalism, he wrote on the eve of the Gulf War, is "unresponsive, anomalous, even comic." The Arab media are "a disgrace," incapable of dealing with "life in the Arab world today with its terrible inequities, its self-inflicted wounds, its crushing mediocrity in science and many cultural fields." In sum, if Said is the Arab world's propagandist, it should hire a new one fast. He has always rejected the "tyranny and atavism" of Islamic fundamentalism, in the name of the secular, liberal and humane strand in Arab culture whose voices are silenced by Middle Eastern regimes and ignored in America. "People try to characterize me as a spokesman for the Arab states," says Said, "but I'm not. I've always tried to retain my independence. I've always spoken out against the leaders."