209 Keith Windschuttle on Edward Said's "Orientalism"

Keith Windschuttle on Edward Said's "Orientalism"

Re item 1 (Edward Said/Keith Windschuttle): see my comments interspersed through the text, in {curly brackets}.

(1) Edward Said’s "Orientalism" revisited
(2) Ukraine's new president Yanukovich overturns the Orange Revolution - Eric Walberg
(3) Sudan's Christian South prepares to secede
(4) Guantanamo "suicides" exposed

(1) Edward Said’s "Orientalism" revisited

Keith Windschuttle

http://www.unibas-ethno.ch/redakteure/foerster/dokumente/h20071022-1.pdf

Early in 1998, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney staged an exhibition entitled “Orientalism: From Delacroix to Klee.” It contained 124 paintings and 50 photographs, most of which were produced by European artists in the nineteenth century on subjects in North Africa and the Levant. In the notes published in the exhibition catalogue, the aesthetic authority whose name is mentioned most frequently is not, as one might expect, an art critic, but the literary critic Edward Said. What the paintings confirmed, patrons were told, was Said’s thesis about the “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture” and “the aggressiveness necessitated by the colonial expansion of the European powers.” This endorsement was strong enough to create a queue of buyers at the gallery bookshop, all eager to procure the prominently displayed, recently revised Penguin edition of Said’s celebrated work, Orientalism. [1]

Some of these purchasers may well have been puzzled by the cover of Said’s book, which features a reproduction of a painting by one of the artists prominently featured in the exhibition, the Viennese-born, Paris-based Ludwig Deutsch, who did most of his work between 1885 and 1905. Titled A Guard with a Zither Player in an Interior, the cover picture is one of a series by Deutsch of scenes inside North African palaces and harems. To the untutored eye, these paintings seem fabulous. The architecture is sumptuous, the clothing and ornaments are rich and lavish. The whole effect appears to be a highly romanticized celebration of Islamic culture. Moreover, the Nubians standing guard at Deutsch’s dwellings, like the black servant attending Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment, seem to be making a political point, suggesting that it is their Arab masters who are the imperialists in Africa. And yet the exhibition catalogue assures the spectator that this uninformed impression must be naïve, because art critics who follow Said have determined that these paintings are primarily a reflection of European arrogance and Western prejudices: “the idea of Oriental decay, the subjection of women, an unaccountable legal system—pictorial rhetoric that served a subtle imperialist agenda.”

Edward Said looms large over the current cultural landscape. The influence of this American- Palestinian professor of literature is so great that a remarkable number of commentaries about European art, literature, cinema, music, and history now ritually genuflect to his ideas and to the wider “postcolonial” critique they helped engender. Newspaper reviews of performances of Verdi’s Aida now frequently feel bound to cite Said’s opinion that the opera is “an imperial notion of the non-European world.” Surveys of the American cinema now identify an Orientalist genre that extends from The Sheik through Casablanca to Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the prodigious new reference work Companion to Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley, an entire chapter is devoted to Said, giving him as much space as the whole corpus of ancient Greek historians. Above all, he holds sway over the literary criticism of the nineteenth-century novel. His most recent magnum opus, Culture and Imperialism (1993), is a critique not only of those authors like Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad who wrote about Europe’s colonies and dependencies, but also of such quintessentially domestic writers as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. In the new Penguin Classics edition of Austen’s Mansfield Park, the editor’s introduction approvingly quotes Said’s explanation of the Bertram estate “as part of the structure of an expanding imperialist venture,” and even the cover blurb feels obliged to call attention to the introduction where “the family’s investment in slavery and sugar is considered in a new postcolonial light.” For analyses of this kind, The New York Times in September 1998 declared him “one of the most important literary critics alive.”

The book that made Said famous was Orientalism, published in 1978. This is a critique of the academic field of Oriental Studies, which has been a scholarly pursuit at most of the prestigious European universities for several centuries. Oriental Studies is a composite area of scholarship comprising philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts. Said makes it clear that he is not attempting to cover the whole area. His focus is on how English, French, and American scholars have approached the Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East. He has nothing on the other areas that traditionally comprised the field such as Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Indian, and Far Eastern cultures, nor does he discuss the attitudes of German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese Orientalists. The period he covers is more restricted than the scholarly field, too, extending only from the late eighteenth century to the present, whereas European scholarship on the Orient dates back to the High Middle Ages. Within his time frame, however, Said extends his examination beyond the works of recognized Orientalist academics to take in literature, journalism, travel books, and religious and philosophical studies to produce a broadly historical and anthropological perspective.

His book makes three major claims. The first is that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends. Orientalist scholarship provided the means through which Europeans could take over Oriental lands. Said is quite clear about the causal sequence: “Colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.” Imperial administrators like Lord Curzon, a Viceroy of India, agreed that the products of this scholarship—“our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the East but with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history, and religion”—had provided “the sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the future the position we have won.” In the late twentieth century, the field helps preserve American power in the Middle East and defends what Said calls “the Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine.” Today, however, there is much less interest in the traditional fields of philology and literature. American academic centers for Middle Eastern studies are more concerned with providing direct advice to the government on public policy. Overall, Said submits, his work demonstrates “the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s difficult civilizing mission.”

His second claim is that Orientalism helped define Europe’s self-image. “It has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” The construction of identity in every age and every society, Said maintains, involves establishing opposites and “Others.” This happens because “the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alter ego.” Orientalism led the West to see Islamic culture as static in both time and place, as “eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself.” This gave Europe a sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority. The West consequently saw itself as a dynamic, innovative, expanding culture, as well as “the spectator, the judge and jury of every facet of Oriental behavior.” This became part of its imperial conceit. In 1810, the French author Chateaubriand called upon Europe to teach the Orient the meaning of liberty which he, and everyone after him, believed the Orientals knew nothing about. Said says he thereby provided the rationale for Western imperialism, which could be described by its perpetrators not as a form of conquest, but as the redemption of a degenerate world.

Thirdly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture. This happened primarily because of the essentialist nature of the enterprise—that is, the belief that it was possible to define the essential qualities of Arab peoples and Islamic culture. These qualities were seen in uniformly negative terms, he says. The Orient was defined as a place isolated from the mainstream of human progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce. Hence: “its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habit of inaccuracy, its backwardness.” Where this approach first goes wrong, Said says, is in its belief that there could be such a thing as an Islamic society, an Arab mind, an Oriental psyche. No one today, he points out, would dare talk about blacks or Jews using such essentialist clichés. Where Orientalism goes even further astray, he claims, is its anachronistic assumption that Islam has possessed a unity since the seventh century, which can be read, via the Koran, into every facet of, say, modern Egyptian or Algerian society. The notion that Muslims suffer such a form of arrested development not only is false, he maintains, but also ignores more recent and important influences such as the experience of colonialism, imperialism, and, even, ordinary politics.

The faults of Orientalism, moreover, have not been confined to analyses of the Orient. Said claims there have been counterparts in “similar knowledges” constructed about Native Americans and Africans where there is a chronic tendency to deny, suppress, or distort their systems of thought in order to maintain the fiction of scholarly disinterest. In other words, Said presents his work not only as an examination of European attitudes to Islam and the Arabs but also as a model for analysis of all Western “discourses on the Other.”

This strategy has worked remarkably well. Today, twenty years after his work was first published, Said is widely regarded by students of literature and cultural studies as not only one of the founders of the postcolonial movement in criticism and of multiculturalism in politics, but still one of their chief gurus. This is despite the fact that his work was not original, as Said himself acknowledges. It is a synthesis and elaboration of two separate theses. One was an analysis that emerged among a number of Muslim academics working in Europe in the 1960s. Said cites the Coptic socialist author Anwar Abdel Malek, who wrote in France using the then latest Parisian versions of Freudian and Marxist theory. He accused the Orientalists of being “Europocentric,” of failing to pay enough attention to Arab scholars like himself, of being obsessed with the past, and of stamping all Orientals with “a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist character.” This essentialist conception of the peoples of the Orient, Abdel Malek wrote, expresses itself through an “ethnist typology . . . and will soon proceed with it towards racism.”

The other source of Said’s inspiration also derived from Paris in the Sixties. This is the writing of Michel Foucault, especially his notion that academic disciplines do not simply produce knowledge but also generate power. Said uses Foucault to argue that Orientalism helped produce European imperialism. “No more glaring parallel exists,” Said says, “between power and knowledge in the modern history of philology than in the case of Orientalism.” He also borrowed from Foucault the notion of a “discourse,” the ideological framework within which scholarship takes place. Within a discourse, all representations are tainted by the language, culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. Hence there can be no “truths,” Said argues, only formations or deformations. No scholar or writer can rise above these limitations, and even a towering figure like Louis Massignon, who dominated French Orientalism until the 1960s, was no more than “a kind of system for producing certain kinds of statements, disseminated into the large mass of discursive formations that together make up the archive, or cultural material of his time.”

Said quickly assures us that putting it this way does not dehumanize poor Louis. But what it does mean is that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” Note that this is not a contingent matter. Said is not merely talking about what Europeans actually did say, but rather what they possibly could say. In short, the prevailing discourse renders Europeans, of necessity, racists. Before pointing out some of the problems with these arguments, it should be acknowledged that Said does score a few hits. He shows that there were plenty of nineteenth-century European travel writers and journalists who visited the Orient and quickly developed an illinformed opinion of the Arabs and their religion. It is a surprise to find the historians Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt expressing some agreement with such views. It is not so surprising to find genuine racists of the period—like Joseph Arthur Gobineau, whose Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races later provided the Nazis with a rationale—espousing such views.

Although Said makes excuses for him, one of the worst offenders in this regard was plainly Karl Marx. Said cites the following passage:

We must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. ... England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.

But none of these examples, nor indeed all of them combined, are sufficient to sustain Said’s thesis. It is not difficult to show that each of his three main claims about Orientalism is seriously flawed.

For a start, he should have realized that Abdel Malek’s analysis of the essentialist failings of Oriental scholarship and Foucault’s thesis that knowledge always generates power are quite incompatible. If, as Malek and Said claim, Orientalism’s picture of the Arabs is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Orientalist essentialism is not knowledge, but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgment, bad estimates, and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them.

{Said's argument, about European domination of non-European peoples, is along the lines of Marx' notion of False Consciousness. That this "knowledge" is in the service of power - a rationalisation, a justification. Not totally false: partly revealing, but partly concealing the truth. There is no question of the rulers themselves being deceived by the falsity within it, for they have concocted it. The same applies to Jewish domination of the West today: it's partly acknowledged, and partly concealed - Peter M.}

In fact, Said’s whole attempt to identify Oriental Studies as a cause of imperialism does not deserve to be taken seriously. The only plausible connection he establishes between Oriental scholarship and imperialism is the example of the Comte de Volney, who wrote two travel books on Syria and Egypt in the 1780s suggesting that the decaying rule of the Ottoman Empire in those countries made them ripe for political change. Napoleon used Volney’s arguments to justify his brief, ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798, though Volney himself was an opponent of French involvement there. But nowhere else does Said provide an analysis of the thoughts and reasons of the imperial decision-makers at the time they actually entered upon Europe’s Oriental adventures. At most, Said establishes that Orientalism provided the West with a command of Oriental languages and culture, plus a background mindset that convinced it of its cultural and technological advance over Islam. But these are far from sufficient causes of imperial conquest since they explain neither motives, opportunities, nor objectives.

Said gives the impression of offering more when he cites speeches and essays by Lord Cromer, Arthur Balfour, and Lord Curzon that paid some recognition to the work of Orientalist scholarship in helping to manage the Empire. But all of these quotations come from works written between 1908 and 1912, that is, more than twenty-five years after the peak of Britain’s imperial expansion. Rather than expressing the aims and objectives of potential imperial conquests, these speeches are ex post facto justifications, sanctioned by hindsight. In Curzon’s case, the speech, from which the extracts above are quoted, was given in the House of Lords in 1909, four years after he returned from India. It was made to support the funding of a new London school of Oriental Studies. He had been recruited to the school’s founding committee and, not surprisingly, was painting its prospects in the best light he could.

Apart from Foucault’s grandiose hypothesis that knowledge always generates power, Said provides no support at all for his contention that “colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism” because he fails to cite evidence about the actual causal sequence that led to the annexation of any of the territories occupied by England or France in the nineteenth century. Where real historians have attempted this, they have come to quite different conclusions, with trade, investment, and military causes predominating. The decisions of the British to move into North Africa and the Middle East in the 1880s, for instance, were based on rivalry with the French, the need to guarantee the sea routes to India and China, and to protect British financial interests from nationalist challenges after Egypt became bankrupt. Philology did not come into it. Even Lenin has a more convincing explanation of imperialism than Said.

Said’s inept handling of historical material is evident throughout the book. He claims that, by the end of the seventeenth century, Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean, whereas in reality the Levant was still controlled for the next hundred years by the Ottomans, and British and French merchants could only land with the permission of the Sultan. Said describes Egypt as a “colony” of Britain, whereas the legal status of British occupation of Egypt was never more than that of a protectorate. This is not merely a semantic difference because a real colony, like Australia or Algeria, was a place where large numbers of Europeans settled, which never happened in Egypt. Even on Islamic history, Said is unreliable. He claims that Muslim armies conquered Turkey before they took over North Africa. The facts are that the Arabs invaded North Africa in the seventh century, but what is now Turkey remained part of the Eastern Roman Empire and was a Christian country until conquered by the Seljuk Turks late in the eleventh century. The fact that these howlers have been preserved in the 1995 edition of the book suggests that Said lacks friends, admirers, or advisers with expertise in history who might have sent him a list of corrections.

Said justifies his decision to omit German Orientalists from his analysis by claiming that German scholars came to the field later than the British and French, and merely elaborated on the work originally done by their European rivals. This claim has generated considerable scorn among contemporary Oriental scholars. Bernard Lewis argues that “at no time before or after the imperial age did their [British and French] contribution, in range, depth, or standard, match the achievement of the great centers of Oriental studies in Germany and neighboring countries.” To omit German scholarship in this way is like trying to do a survey of the discipline of sociology without mentioning Weber, Simmel, or Tönnies.

{what about Werner Sombart? He's been "written out" more that any other sociologist. Perhaps because he locates Judaism, not Protestantism, as the focal-point of the Capitalist ethic, and central to power? - Peter M.}

It is quite clear, however, where Said derived the incentive for this strategy. The Germans were prominent Orientalists, yet Germany never went on to become an imperial power in any of the Oriental countries of North Africa or the Middle East. For the Germans, knowledge did not generate power in the way that Foucault’s theory said it should. So, rather than admit this or try to explain it away, Said conveniently omits Germany from his survey.

The second part of Said’s thesis has just as little to recommend it. The notion that Western culture has needed an “Other” to define its own identity derives from the structuralist version of Freudian theory that became prominent in France in the 1960s. An individual’s selfconcept, this thesis maintains, emerges only when he recognizes himself as separate from and different from others. Cultures need to go through an analogous process, it is claimed, and so must identify themselves through an alter ego. In other words, the need for an “Other” is built into human nature at both the individual and collective levels. This is a central concept of Said’s thesis but, unfortunately, it leads him into a direct contradiction with one of his core methodological dicta: his rejection of essentialism. In the afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he complains that the book has been misread by hostile critics as an essentialist polemic against Western civilization. He says he would condemn any “attempt to force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct breeds or essences. … This false position hides historical change.” His own approach is “explicitly anti-essentialist.” It is difficult, though, to reconcile this assertion with the way he characterizes Western identity. He argues that, from its origins, the West’s self-concept was defined by its opposition to Asia.

Consider first the demarcation between Orient and the West. It already seems bold by the time of the Iliad. Two of the most profoundly influential qualities associated with the East appear in Aeschylus’s The Persians, the earliest Athenian play extant, and in The Bacchae of Euripides, the very last one extant. … The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.

{From 538 BC to 331 BC, Asia meant the Persian Empire, which, far from being defeated, was dominant, and even playing off Sparta against Athens. Ionian Greeks were part of the empire; the Greek city-states were but a blip on its western edge. Further, the empire was as "Aryan" as the Greeks. Emperor Darius I (521 - 486 BC) identified himself as "a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, having Aryan lineage": http://mailstar.net/persian-empire.html - Peter M}

These same motifs persist in Western culture, he claims, right down to the modern period. This is a tradition that accommodates perspectives as divergent as those of Aeschylus, Dante, Victor Hugo, and Karl Marx. However, in describing “the essential motifs” of the European geographic imagination that have persisted since ancient Greece, he is ascribing to the West a coherent self-identity that has produced a specific set of value judgments—“Europe is powerful and articulate: Asia is defeated and distant”—that have remained constant for the past 2500 years. This is, of course, nothing less than the use of the very notion of “essentialism” that he elsewhere condemns so vigorously. In short, it is his own work that is essentialist and ahistorical. He himself commits the very faults he says are so objectionable in the work of Orientalists.

The proposition that produces this contradiction is the claim that every culture needs to be defined by an Other. This is not an historical statement at all, but an epistemological assumption derived from structuralist theory. It is now such a standard refrain within cultural studies that it usually goes unquestioned. There is, however, very little to recommend it. Although they have long distinguished themselves from the barbarians of the world, Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes from their own heritage. Europeans identify themselves as joint heirs of classical Greece and Christianity, each tempered by the fluxes of medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernism.

In other words, Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one thousand years.

The final component of Said’s thesis, the allegedly false essentialism of Orientalism, not only contradicts his own methodological assumptions, but is a curious argument in itself. Going back to the origins of a culture to examine its founding principles is hardly something to be condemned. This is especially so in the case of Islam where the founding book, the Koran, is taken much more literally by its adherents than the overt text of the Bible is taken by Christians today. In several countries, the Koran is both a religious and legal text. In others, like Egypt and Algeria, there are political movements prepared to resort to terrorism to have it made the basis of national law and authority. Moreover, one could not understand the most bitter division in the modern Islamic world, that between Shi’ites and Sunnis, without knowing its origins in the conflicts over succession after the death of Muhammed in 632, any more than one could properly understand events in contemporary Northern Ireland without some knowledge of the breach in the Christian world that occurred during the Reformation. One Muslim critic, Sadik Jalal al-’Azm, has argued that the kind of religious essentialism of which Said indicts Orientalism is actually necessary to understand the Muslim mind:

[I]t is true that in general the unseen is more immediate and real to the common citizens of Cairo and Damascus than it is to the present inhabitants of New York and Paris; it is true that religion “means everything” to the life of the Moroccan peasants in a way that must remain incomprehensible to present day American farmers.

Of course, Said would be right to complain were Western ideas about Islamic peoples confined solely to stereotypes derived from their founding texts and early history. But it is simply untrue that the whole body of Oriental scholarship has made this kind of mistake. Take Said’s claims about economic studies of Islamic countries. He condemns the work of Western observers whose economic ideas never extended beyond asserting the Oriental’s fundamental incapacity for trade, commerce, and economic rationality. In the Islamic field those clichés held good for literally hundreds of years—until Maxime Rodinson’s important study Islam and Capitalism appeared in 1966.

Anyone, however, who takes the trouble to read the one book he favors, Islam and Capitalism, will find it actually tells a different story. Rodinson is a Marxist sociologist and his work, like most in its mold, is based on secondary sources. A large section of the book is a debate with, and critique of, those Western economists and their Muslim allies who do not, in fact, see the Arabs as having an inherent “incapacity for trade,” but instead regard these societies as capable of adopting capitalist commerce and industry. He discusses in some detail the work of six economic commentators who expressed views of this kind between the 1910s and the 1950s. Though Rodinson agrees there are many observers who share the assumptions identified by Said, and though his main aim is to see Islam adopt socialism, the evidence of his book is a clear refutation of Said’s sweeping generalization about Orientalist economics. In a later work, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (1987), Rodinson dismisses the kind of homogeneity that Said wants to impose on Oriental Studies, insisting that the field has always included “a multiplicity of issues coming under the jurisdiction of many general disciplines.”

Outside economic studies, Said’s claims about the essentialism of Oriental Studies are just as misleading. Bernard Lewis has produced his own survey of European attitudes towards Islam since the Middle Ages, Islam and the West (1994). He argues that Europe’s initial theological and ethnic prejudices had been largely overcome within serious scholarship by the end of the eighteenth century when the study of Islam was established as an academic subject worthy of attention and respect.

The Muslims were no longer seen purely in ethnic terms as hostile tribes, but as the carriers of a distinctive religion and civilization; their prophet was no longer a grotesque impostor or a Christian heretic but the founder of an independent and historically significant religious community.

In other words, rather than being necessarily ethnocentric and racist, Oriental Studies was one of the first fields within European scholarship to overcome such prejudices and to open the Western mind to the whole of humanity.

Although each of the three components of Said’s thesis is therefore untenable, this is unlikely in the short term to affect his status as an academic celebrity among students of literature and cultural studies in the West. He is not only one of those writers who helped create the current hegemony of identity-group politics and multiculturalism within the university system, but is also one of its chief beneficiaries. In accomplishing this, he has both endorsed the prevailing cult of the victim, upon which identity-group politics are based, and milked it himself to an indecent degree. “My own experiences of these matters,” he says in Orientalism, “are in part what made me write this book.”

The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny.

Coming from any grown man, such wallowing in victimhood would be bad enough, but from a tenured full professor at Columbia University in New York City— that is, from one of the most materially and occupationally privileged human beings on the planet, who enjoys the added indulgence of being permitted to make whatever criticism he fancies of the country that sustains him—it is simply embarrassing. It certainly calls into question the judgment of his more ardent admirers, especially Camille Paglia, who sees him as “an inspiring role model for a younger generation of critics seeking for their cultural identity.”

In the East, however, Said is regarded today in quite different terms. While he acknowledges that translations of his book have won him support among Islamic fundamentalists who see him documenting the violation of Islam and the Arabs by a predatory West, he is much less of an influence in other circles. He has had a highly publicized falling out with the Palestine Liberation Organization, but a better indicator of the regard in which he is widely held would be the notice taken of his views on his own turf, as a cultural critic. It must be something of a disappointment to him to see his analysis of the European arrogance and Western prejudices purportedly built into Orientalist cultural artifacts being completely ignored. For instance, at the time he wrote his book in the late 1970s, about half of the nineteenth-century Orientalist art that was put to auction in London and Paris was being bought by dealers for Arab clients living in the West. Today, collectors of North African, Near and Middle Eastern descent totally dominate the market for these paintings, with Western and Japanese buyers all but priced out. Islamic collectors have voted with their petrodollars. Palaces and mansions throughout North Africa and the Persian Gulf are now liberally adorned with those same portrayals of their culture by Delacroix, Ingres, Gérôme, Deutsch, and others that Said and his followers claim are so demeaning. How could their owners be so mistaken? The Moroccan curator Brahim Alaoui has explained that, despite Said, the romantic portrayal of the nineteenth-century Orient by European artists is now regarded as a valued part of Arab and Islamic heritage.

That image of the Orient which set the Occident dreaming in the nineteenth century returns something to those Orientals who also seek an image of their past. They find in this painting a world on its way to disappearing: this Orient that is highly colored, shimmering, this Orient of arabesques, of costumes, and the richness of forms is in the process of being eclipsed by a much more modern world. The image that was fixed by the Occident in the nineteenth century—the Orientals are now attempting to recover it.

Reference:
Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Pantheon, 1978; revised edition: London,
Penguin, 1995

(2) Ukraine's new president Yanukovich overturns the Orange Revolution - Eric Walberg
Yanukovich -- Man for all seasons by Eric Walberg

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 20.01.2010 12:59 PM

Ukraine's new president -- unless there is another Orange Revolution -- has fashioned a comeback worthy of Nixon, marvels Eric Walberg

Yanukovich -- Man for all seasons by Eric Walberg

Tuesday, 19 January 2010

http://ericwalberg.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=221:ukraine-elections-yanukovich-man-for-all-seasons&catid=37:russia-and-ex-soviet-union-english&Itemid=90

Ukraine's presidential elections Sunday were remarkable in more ways than one. The winner of the first round and favourite to lead Ukraine at a crucial moment in its history is the one politician observers long ago dismissed as a has-been. Viktor Yanukovich is mocked by his opponents as an illiterate bumpkin, a puppet of Ukrainian business magnates, a former criminal and communist, a conspirer against the brave democrats of the legendary Orange Revolution of 2004. Have I left anything out? Does he kick dogs or beat his mother?

As the results came in, pro-Western commentators rushed to claim that Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (25 per cent) would surge past Viktor Yanukovich (36 per cent) in the runoff 7 February, Tymoshenko announcing she would immediately seek the support of the also-rans to "move forward with uniting the democratic forces." However, the two candidates who came third and fourth, former Central Bank chief Sergei Tigipko (13 per cent) and former parliament speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk (seven per cent), said they would not support any candidate in the second round. President Viktor Yushchenko polled five per cent and Ukrainians are holding their breath till they see the last of him.

The real story behind the rivals is not as it appears. Tymoshenko, with her faux peasant blond braids and matriushka doll demeanour, amassed a fortune in her years of speculative buying and selling of Russian gas, for which she spent several months in prison under president Leonid Kuchma, Her pretenses as a populist democrat are skin-deep.

Yanukovich comes from a working class background and worked his way up honestly literally from rags to hard-won respectability. He lost his mother at the age of two and grew up in bleak post-WWII Ukraine. His attitude towards dogs is unclear, but he was indeed jailed for hooliganism at the age of 17, apparently learned his lesson, was released after eight months for good behaviour and never looked back, at least until the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004. In the waning days of the Soviet Union, he graduated in engineering from the Donetsk Polytehnic Institute and joined the Communist Party, when it was no longer fashionable or of much use, suggesting he is much more a populist than any of his elite rivals (Yushchenko and Tigipko are bankers). He served under president Leonid Kuchma as prime minister, and was the favourite to succeed him.

Certainly, the 2004 elections were marred by electoral rigging, but to blame Yanukovich and ignore the fact that the whole process was infiltrated by US-sponsored NGOs determined to produce a pro-US outcome is a mistake. Ukraine is sharply divided -- a legacy of Stalin -- between the anti-Russian west (formerly part of Poland) and the pro-Russian east, with rigging taking place according to these preferences across the country whenever possible.

The first results in the previous elections were probably more or less fair, with Yanukovich winning, but Western-organised street protests and the possibility of rioting and bloodshed (a la Iran this past summer) convinced Yanukovich to allow a rerun. Of course, when you blink, people figure you're the loser. His rival, Viktor Yushchenko, had dramatically claimed he was poisoned by his namesake, a ploy now consigned to storybooks, but with all the Western-backed media hype, Yushchenko managed to claim the laurels of victor from the rival Viktor. Ukrainian affairs lurched from one crisis to another under the Orange revolutionaries, including arming the mad Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in his wars against Russia. Doubts about the possibility of a truly fair election this time linger, with 57 per cent saying the results could well be manipulated.

In an interview with The Times, Yanukovich outlined his policies, stating clearly Ukraine would not join NATO, but that it "can and must take an active part in the creation of a European collective defense system." He wants to return relations with Russia to a friendly basis: "Relations should be natural, as they are between the Ukrainian people and the Russian people." He has expressed sympathy for retaining the Russian Black Sea fleet in Simferopol when its lease expires in 2017, a wise move considering that Crimea has a large Russian population that would be delighted if Russia took it back (it was ceded to Ukraine on a whim by Khrushchev in 1954). He has indicated he would recognise Georgia's two breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia (as well might Turkey, with its large Abkhazian diaspora) and said he would sign up to a Russian-led economic co-operation agreement between former Soviet republics.

Russia, despite accumulated grievances over the past five years, has stayed out of the fray this time, bracing itself for the possible election of Tymoshenko, who fancies herself a compromise bridging the east-west divide in Ukraine.

But in addition to her Orange baggage, she is assiduously courted by Saakashvili, who Russian media reported sent three charter flights with 400 "athletic" Georgians to Kiev and Donetsk, both strongholds of Yanukovich, prior to election day, part of a planned 3,000 Georgian election "observers" apparently approved by Tymoshenko. "Some of them had lists of all polling stations in the region, though they told border guards that the purpose of their visit was to meet with Ukrainian girls they met on social networking sites." The Georgians were to "interfere in the electoral process with an aim to change the outcome of the elections and disrupt the vote," Party of the Regions member Mykola Azarov told a news conference on Saturday. Yanukovich called for them to stay in Tbilisi on Sunday.

Is this perhaps the latest ploy by Saakashvili and his National Endowment for Democracy advisers to ensure the survival of his fraternal colour revolutionaries? Stranger things have happened when NED gets involved in ensuring democratic procedures are observed.

Georgia continues to be the region's loose cannon, with both the Russian Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service accusing it of harbouring and funding terrorist groups from the Caucasus. The US continues to pour millions of dollars of weapons into Georgia, and it can only be concluded that Washington is well informed of what Saakashvili is up to. NATO will soon approve the 2010 Action Plan for Georgia. "It is important for us to continue the reforms that bring Georgia to the organisation," Georgia's European Integration Minister Giorgi Baramidze said last week.

A victory in the runoff for Tymoshenko will be a bitter blow for Ukrainians who seek accommodation with Russia, most of whom according to polls would prefer a union with their neighbour to the present hollow independence. This yearning by Ukrainians and Russians alike for union is perhaps hard for outsiders to understand. Explains James Sherr, at the London-based Chatham House, "Ukraine, for Russia, is not just a neighbour. Ukraine, for Russia, is part of Russia's own identity. Kiyv and Rus is the origin of the Russian, as well as the Ukrainian state."

Despite the ravages of Stalin in Ukraine in the 1930s, this sense of a common identity is shared by virtually all Ukrainians except for those in the west who identify more with Polish (hence, anti-Russian) history. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is the most popular foreign politician and, according to one poll, would have won the Ukrainian presidential election if he had run.

Bizarre as Ukrainian politics are, both Yanukovich and Tymoshenko acted as prime ministers under the pockmarked president, the former, briefly, because of an early falling-out between Tymoshenko and her democratic comrade-in-arms. Yulia, a shrewd politician, managed to mend fences with both Yushchenko and the Russians and is still PM. She talks now only of her beloved "democratic forces", but her claims that she will breeze past the nasty, undemocratic Yanukovich are belied by the fact that she shares the blame for the disaster of the failed Orange Revolution (she makes no mention of it these days, to be sure). This is confirmed by the refusal of her rivals to have anything to do with her, though her American advisers -- the firm of Obama's closest political adviser David Axelrod -- assure her this problem can be overcome.

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/

(3) Sudan's Christian South prepares to secede
From: WVNS <ummyakoub@yahoo.com> Date: 20.01.2010 12:19 PM

Sudan's SPLM prepares for independence

By Mohamed Vall in Africa

January 15th, 2010

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/africa/2010/01/15/sudans-splm-prepares-independence

Muslim members expected to fend for themselves as the party of former southern rebels gravitates towards secession in next year's crucial referendum.

It is now official: Salva Kiir, Sudan's first vice-president, will run for president of south Sudan in April's elections, leaving the post of national presidency to be contested by Yassir Arman, a lower-ranking northern member of his party.

The decision means the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) is both adamant about and sure of secession to result from next year's referendum on the future of Southern Sudan.

So the southern leaders don't want to remain entanged with the North one second after the referendum results are out. They will retreat to their new capital Juba in the south, create their state and leave their northern comrades (including Arman) to rule the north where he belongs.

This also means they will try to keep the north under their wing if their candidate wins the race! But he won't!

He is popular neither in the south nor in the north!

The SPLM leaders are stupid or maybe they just know they won't win and this nomination is just for the political game to continue until they can break away smoothly.

Unresolved issue

The SPLM has had a big but understated issue: what to do with its northern Muslim members like Arman and Mansour Khaled.

They fought in the SPLM's ranks during the civil war and they continued to dedicate themselves to the southern cause. But that was at a time when the late SPLM leader John Garang was promoting a unionist agenda.

He professed to fight for the rights of all marginalised Sudanese and to be working for one free and united Sudan. Thus he drew many non-southerners, including Arab Muslims, to his ranks.

But when Garang died, those who followed had neither his charisma nor his political skills.
They couldn't hide their separatist inclinations or continue to win Arab and Muslim Sudanese to their side.

Widening rift

The rift between the so-called Garang boys - those who believe in one united Sudan - and the SPLM hawks - those who insist on secession as the only way ahead - has started to widen.

The northern members of SPLM, especially the senior ones like Arman and Khaled, began to feel out of sync with the new SPLM leadership and thus out of any future place in the south.

They have been increasingly sidelined and alienated from the inner circles of the SPLM.

So the nomination of Arman, to my understanding, is a political deal with them, basically a nice way of saying "Thank you, and good bye! Take power in the North if you can, that's your share and that's where you belong. But forget about the South!"

(4) Guantanamo "suicides" exposed

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 21.01.2010 02:53 PM

The Guantánamo "Suicides": A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle By Scott Horton

This is the fulltext of an exclusive advance feature by Scott Horton that will appear in the March 2010 Harper's Magazine. The issue will be available on newsstands the week of February 15.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to "restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great." Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base "shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order." Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners there are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama's young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously-and may even have continued-a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths "suicides." In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. "I believe this was not an act of desperation," he said, "but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners' families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners' deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report-a reconstruction of the events-was simply unbelievable.
According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell's eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Al-Zahrani, according to the report, was discovered first, at 12:39 A.M., and taken by several Alpha Block guards to the camp's detention medical clinic. No doctors could be found there, nor the phone number for one, so a clinic staffer dialed 911. During this time, other guards discovered Al-Utaybi. Still others discovered Al-Salami a few minutes later. Although rigor mortis had already set in-indicating that the men had been dead for at least two hours-the NCIS report claims that an unnamed medical officer attempted to resuscitate one of the men, and, in attempting to pry open his jaw, broke his teeth.
The fact that at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their mouths, went unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard operating procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy guards on duty after midnight to "conduct a visual search" of each cell and detainee every ten minutes. The report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets or blankets to hide their activities and shaped more sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping in their beds, but it did not explain where they were able to acquire so much fabric beyond their tightly controlled allotment, or why the Navy guards would allow such an obvious and immediately observable deviation from permitted behavior. Nor did the report explain how the dead men managed to hang undetected for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on duty, having for whatever reason so grievously failed in their duties, were never disciplined.

A separate report, the result of an "informal investigation" initiated by Admiral Harris, found that standard operating procedures were violated that night but concluded that disciplinary action was not warranted because of the "generally permissive environment" of the cell block and the numerous "concessions" that had been made with regard to the prisoners' comfort, which "concessions" had resulted in a "general confusion by the guard and the JDG staff over many of the rules that applied to the guard force's handling of the detainees." According to Harris, even had standard operating procedures been followed, "it is possible that the detainees could have successfully committed suicide anyway."

This is the official story, adopted by NCIS and Guantánamo command and reiterated by the Justice Department in formal pleadings, by the Defense Department in briefings and press releases, and by the State Department. Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9-10, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report-a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.

All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners' deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper's Magazine that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards' accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred.

.................................[the full expose of the US death camp is at
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368] ==

Army to investigate company's placement of references to Bible passages on combat rifle scopes RICHARD LARDNER Associated Press Writer January 19 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) Army officials said Tuesday they will investigate whether a Michigan defense contractor violated federal procurement rules by stamping references to Bible verses on combat rifle sights used by American forces to kill enemy fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.courant.com/news/politics/sns-ap-us-military-weapons-bible-passages,0,1085826.story