Christophe Jaffrelot wrong on India-Israel

 

The Wire has an article by Christophe Jaffrelot about Modi's Israel visit.  

India Under Modi Chooses Israel (Without Saying So)

In 1971, the PLO supported Pakistan in its genocidal war in Bangladesh. Israel supplied much needed military equipment & training to India. Still, the Soviets were broadly anti-Israel and, anyway, it was the Arab countries which had the oil & the money & so India pretended it cared about Palestine. But it didn't really. 

India chose Israel because they were reliable and helped India when it most needed it. This became clear in the mid-Nineties. Indira & Rajiv may have been friends of Arafat (India recognized PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people in 1974) but both were safely dead. 

While post-Independence India has traditionally defended the cause of the Palestinians,

by doing what? Talking? Fine words butter no parsnips.  

the rapprochement between New Delhi and Tel Aviv, which began

in 1968 when Indira opened a backchannel to Tel Aviv through Kao- her trusted Intelligence chief. The 1971 arms-deal was facilitated by P.N Haksar- her closest adviser at the time. 

in the 1990s,

after the collapse of the Soviet Union 

has gained momentum since 2014.

In 2015 President Pranab visited Israel thus preparing the ground for Modi's 2017 visit which resulted in a long term research collaboration on agriculture, cybersecurity & defence. This relationship will deepen and broaden because the two countries need each other. Nobody needs Palestinians. 

Without saying so, the Modi government is siding with Israel today,

The Palestinians aren't a side. They are canon fodder for billionaires sitting in Qatar or Teheran.  

and the prime minister's visit is bound to strengthen this process.

Plenty of European leaders have visited during or after the Gaza war as have the leaders of Argentina & Argentina. But it was Biden's visit which was most consequential. Trump, of course, is even more committed to Israel.  

Under Modi’s rule, Indo-Israeli rapprochement accelerated in 2017 with the prime minister’s visit to Tel Aviv, a first for an Indian prime minister.

But the President had visited two years previously. Pranab Muhkerjee was a very senior politician.  

India has long been a leader in the Palestinian cause.

No. It doesn't have a dog in that fight.  

Historically, it opposed the creation of the State of Israel, with Nehru advocating for the creation of a secular state where the Jewish minority would enjoy protections.

It couldn't oppose the creation of Pakistan. Nobody gave a fuck about what it supported or opposed.  

However, New Delhi recognised the State of Israel in 1950, before providing financial support, from 1951 onwards, to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and, from the 1970s onwards, to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

While passing around the begging bowl so as to be able to feed itself.  

India was then the first non-Arab country to recognise the State of Palestine when it was proclaimed in 1988.

Rajiv was doing Muslim appeasement- as with the Shah Bano case. But, it was the Tamil Tigers he needed to be wary off.  

Things changed when India and Israel established diplomatic relations, allowing embassies to open in 1992,

This didn't matter. The 'back-channel' was highly effective. After Indira's assassination, the Israelis were brought in to design and install a security system for the Prime Minister.  

with New Delhi quickly sourcing weapons from Tel Aviv, particularly during the Kargil War (1999) against Pakistan. But New Delhi strove to keep its distance from Israel. 

It was Abdul Kalam- later the President- who let the cat out of the bag with his lavish praise for Israel. As my Uncle used to say, Israel is the Holy Land for Jews, Christians, Muslims & the Indian Army.  However, what ordinary Indians were enthused about was their water conservation technology- e.g. drip irrigation. Israel gave it away for free but the Indians decided it was worth paying them top dollar for customized solutions. India is still largely agricultural. A dozen years ago, some Rajasthani farmers were sent to Israel for training. They are now millionaires despite living in a very arid zone. 

It must be said, there is now a Palestinian origin Nobel laureate who has found a way to extract water from the air. That's the sort of Palestinian we like. 

Narendra Modi, who had already visited Israel as chief minister of Gujarat, changed the status quo on this issue. Although Atal Bihari Vajpayee had received Ariel Sharon in New Delhi in 2003, the prime ministers of the two countries had not met since then.

Because Manmohan was a cowardly appeaser.  

Modi, the second prime minister from the BJP, resumed this practice at the first opportunity, the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014. His Israeli counterpart, Netanyahu, then   welcomed the promise of this collaboration between two “ancient civilizations“.  A few weeks later, the Union home minister Rajnath Singh visited Tel Aviv to explore avenues of cooperation with the Israeli prime minister to combat the terrorism facing India.  The following year, for the first time in its history, India chose to abstain rather than vote on a resolution condemning Israel at the United Nations Human Rights Commission. This resolution, passed by 45 countries, condemned strikes on Gaza as war crimes, and the Palestinian Authority ambassador to New Delhi said he was “shocked” and “affected” by this decision, which broke with India’s “traditional position” . 

The Palestinians didn't really mind. Unlike the Pakistanis, Indians hadn't actually killed Palestinians.  

 But New Delhi worked to reassure him and restore balance. In fact, after his 2017 visit to Israel, Modi invited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to New Delhi,

because he was Israel's man. They had a common enemy in Hamas.  

and during that visit, he reiterated his support for a two-state solution

one would be shit. The other wouldn't.  

and called for “a sovereign, independent, united and viable Palestine, coexisting peacefully with Israel.”

Meaningless jibber-jabber. If India can't live peacefully with Pakistan, how do you expect the Israelis to do so?  

In December 2017, just before Netanyahu’s visit to New Delhi in 2018, India also supported a vote by the United Nations General Assembly against the unilateral declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by then-US President Donald Trump.

But India didn't raise a peep when Trump recognized Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights. That is what killed off the 'Rodgers Plan' to push Israel back to its pre-67 borders. Clinton almost succeeded by Arafat wouldn't take the deal.  

In 2018, continuing to demonstrate his own brand of diplomatic activism (aimed at attracting attention, perhaps), Modi became the first Indian head of government to visit Ramallah.

i.e. signalling he was for the 'secular' PLO & against Hamas. The Chinese, by contrast, had recognised Hamas.  

Finally, in 2020, India decided to quadruple its aid to UNRWA

No.  It increased its annual contribution to UNRWA from $1.25 million (in 2017) to $5 million per year starting in 2018. In June 2020, India announced it would contribute $10 million over the next two years. This was merely a gesture- not enough to pay even the mooring fees on a super-yacht. 

and voted in favor of a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank. 

In November 2023, India voted in favour of a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements as a way to balance its abstention from a vote calling for a humanitarian truce in Gaza. But the thing was purely routine. 

Between 2014 and 2023, by drawing closer to Israel without betraying the Palestinian cause,

India did nothing to help Palestine though, unlike the Pakistanis, it hadn't killed them during Black September.  

India has maximised its national interest by gaining access to the civil and military technologies mastered by the Israelis. Admittedly, contracts had already been signed to this effect since the 1990s, as evidenced by the delivery of the Awacs radar manufactured under US licence for $1 billion, but Modi’s proactive approach enabled him to gain Israel’s trust and obtain more.

He wasn't a cowardly shithead like Manmohan. Anthony, the UPA defence minister, was allergic to signing off on any deal just in case bribes had been paid.  

His 2017 visit provided an opportunity to create the India-Israel Industrial R&D Technological Fund (I4F),

The spadework had begun when President Pranab visited.  

under which, the following year, leading companies promised to provide India with advanced technologies in the field of medical imaging, for example. Tech Mahindra, a large Indian firm, signed a collaboration agreement with Israel Aerospace Industries in 2018 in the field of cybersecurity. Indo-Israeli collaboration in the agricultural sector—which Narendra Modi had promoted as chief minister of Gujarat—also gained momentum, particularly in the area of irrigation techniques, to such an extent that in 2018, 3,000 Indian farmers participated in the 20th edition of Agritech Israel.

Rajasthan under both Raje & Gehlot profited greatly by getting Israeli help.  

But it is naturally in the military field that progress has been most rapid: Indian companies (Ashok Leyland and the Adani Group) have committed to manufacturing equipment for Elbit, while Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems have sold India some of the most sophisticated missiles.  

There's probably other secret stuff we don't know about. But this is a story which goes all the way back to 1968. Palestine is useless to India. Israel is useful. Also, India pays its debts. Israelis aren't losing any money by working with the Indians. 

The Adani Group also contributed to the deepening of India’s relations with Israel, which took a new turn in 2017 with Narendra Modi’s visit to Tel Aviv.

There was no turn. The spadework had been done. I'd say the double-taxation agreement, signed by Pranab, will be viewed as the most important development.  

In 2018, the Adani Group and Israel’s arms manufacturer, Elbit System, created a joint largest venture to produce a drone, the Hermes 900 UAV, which would be used in Gaza in the 2020s. 

It was used there in 2014. I think about 20 of the Indian made ones have been sent to Israel. 

In July 2022, the Israeli government, which had launched the privatization process for the port of Haifa, announced that the consortium dominated—with a 70% stake—by the Adani Group had won the contract.

Adanis understand ports. They may not be very good at the sort of quality control you need for high tec military gear. 

In September 2024, the Adani Group established a joint venture with the group Israeli Tower Semiconductor to manufacture components used in the production of semiconductors, one of the industrial activities that Narendra Modi considers to be one of his economic priorities. 

I doubt it will succeed. What is needed is young tech savvy guys shuttling between Hyderabad & Tel Aviv getting VC funding for genuinely innovative products- not a 10 year old drone whose 70 % indigenous component is utter shit. 

The attacks of October 7, 2023, and their aftermath changed the situation, India siding with Israel without saying so.

Everyone- save the Iranians- sided with Israel. Hamas are mad dogs.  

India and Gaza: How can one remain neutral in wartime?

How can one help Israel? India can send labour to take over jobs previously done by soldiers. It appears that some Indian made military equipment has gone to Israel. It may not be much, but it is a start. 

India tried hard not to take sides in Israel’s war on Gaza,

No. It genuinely tried to help the Israelis. 

but by abstaining as civilian casualties – and international outrage – continued to mount, it effectively sided with Israel.

Nobody gives a shit about fake outrage of that sort. Arab countries are quite happy to kill Palestinians while weeping over the Nakba.  

It should be noted that India’s failure to condemn Israel at the UN Human Rights Council in the early 2020s was denounced by Palestine’s ambassador to India, who was “shocked” and saw it as a break with New Delhi’s “traditional position”.

He was just going through the motions.  

On October 27, 2023, India abstained from voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on a resolution calling for a “humanitarian truce” (120 countries voted in favour). External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar then stated that India, itself a victim of terrorist acts, sympathized with Israel and could not support a resolution that did not directly condemn the Hamas attack. Admittedly, in December 2023 and then in December 2024, India voted in favour of two UNGA resolutions demanding an “immediate, unconditional, and permanent” ceasefire in Gaza and reiterating the demand for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages. But on June 12, 2025, when more than 57,000 men, women, and children had died, according to official data, under Israeli bombs and bullets, India again abstained from voting on a UNGA resolution calling for a ceasefire and the lifting of the blockade of Gaza to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered. 

A retired Indian army officer, working for the UN, was killed by an Israeli bomb. Indians didn't give a fuck.  

Furthermore, India also abstained in 2024 at the UN Human Rights Council when a resolution on stopping arms sales to Israel was put to a vote.

India was supplying arms to Israel. We hope they were of good quality & that Israel will decide it is in its interests to help the Indian arms industry grow.  

It should be noted that the Indian Supreme Court also ruled in the same vein: when approached by human rights defenders, it refused to oppose India’s arms exports to Israel in October 2024.

It also refused to behead kaffirs- even gay kaffirs. Sad.  

The lethal nature of these deliveries had, however, just been revealed by third parties. In May 2024, Spain banned an Indian ship carrying 27 tons of explosives to Haifa from docking in one of its ports, while another ship, prevented from docking in the same way the following month, diverted to Slovenia with explosives and rockets on board.

In Sept. 2025 they put a formal arms embargo- even on US ships supplying Israel. Trump doesn't seem to have been able to bully them into submission.  

At the same time, India and Israel have stepped up their economic cooperation. In September 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich

A couple of months previously he had been banned from Australia, Canada, NZ, UK & Norway. Israel needs to know it can always rely on India. 

visited India without this highly controversial figure being questioned about his recent positions: leader of the far-right Zionist party Mafdal, supporter of the annexation of all of Palestine and, in 2023, of “total war” in Gaza, in 2024 Smotrich had declared that it was “justified and moral” to “starve” the civilian population of Gaza in order to recover the hostages held prisoner by Hamas. He finally signed an agreement with his Indian counterpart, Nirmala Sitharaman, aimed at increasing trade and investment between the two countries, particularly in the areas of cybersecurity and defence. For his part, the Israeli ambassador met with the head of the Uttar Pradesh government in order to find, in particular, the workforce his country needed in this state  since Palestinians could no longer work there as before. Five thousand people from UP  were recruited.  By the mid-2020s, it was clear that India had chosen Israel, while maintaining that its position remained unchanged – a stance that sparked fierce protests from the Congress, students and certain intellectuals.

Nobody cared. Indians hate jihadi nutters and are delighted when they are slaughtered. Incidentally, there was once a Visa ban on Modi. His becoming PM sparked nothing but joy that at last the country had a decent leader.  Jaffacake had chosen the wrong side. Thus he has become utterly useless because nobody with any power in India will talk to him. 

Besides economic cooperation and arms deals, the Modi government’s pro-Israel stance can be explained by both its ideology and its anti-terrorism doctrine.

Neither matter. India simply isn't in a position to help or harm any one unless it receives a reciprocal benefit.  

Indeed, Hindu nationalists have always had an affinity with Zionism,

No. Sikhs liked kibbutz Zionism because Jews were making the desert bloom while also defeating numerically bigger Armies. Hindus in the Fifties believed stories told by Indian Jews who had gone to Israel & then returned because of what they perceived as racist attitudes- not to mention harsh living conditions.  

which became apparent

after Jews started telling us they had secretly helped us in 1962 & 1965 with small arms & 160-mm Tampella mortar ammunition. True, the '62 aid could be seen as a result of US pressure, but then came '65 & '71. Israel was consistently reliable. The Jan Sangh started making friendly noises re. Israel after 1965. 

in the context of the attacks of October 7, 2022, and the war that followed:

by then the two countries were very close. The Kargil war was a major turning point. Israeli Paveway laser-guided bombs and Litening targeting pods alongside their UAVs & mortar ammo proved invaluable. The fact that they expedited shipments & kept the whole thing under wraps greatly impressed India. 

like the founders of the State of Israel, they define their community not as composed of believers of a religion,

Jaffacake doesn't know that all Jews have a 'Right of Return' even if they are dark skinned Indians or Ethiopians.  

but as a people whose members are united by blood ties

e.g. the people of India & Pakistan 

and who are the sons of the soil, the “race jati ” (to use the words of Savarkar, of a sacred land.

Israel says there is no 'right of return' even for non Jewish people who fled in '48 or '67. To be fair, Arab countries too won't take back Jews who fled at that time. 

Furthermore, they see themselves as victims of a tormented history due to Muslim invasions

Jews had it worse under the Romans & Christians. They were only allowed back into Jerusalem after the Muslim invasion. Herzl's Zionism was appealing precisely because the Ottomans had tolerated, or even promoted, Jews. The Tzar of Russia, on the other hand, sent Cossacks to kill them.  

on the one hand, exodus on the other, and today, living under the threat of Islamists who surround them and form, at least potentially in their eyes, “a fifth column“.

Especially if there are 'pay for slay' killings.  

Even before the rapprochement that emerged from the Gaza war, Israeli diplomats – starting with the Consul in Mumbai – were promoting these ideological affinities.

No. The Consul was useless. He was there to assist Indian Jews who wanted to go to Israel. On the other hand, Israel had plenty of posh Jews who had been at College with senior Indian diplomats & administrators. Consider Manohar Lal Sondhi (who inducted Gen. Jacobs- a Jewish Indian war hero into the BJP). He didn't give two fucks about the Consul- a deeply stupid man who didn't get that Muslims would have been ethnically cleansed if Ayub Khan had won the '65 war. But Sondhi had been to Baliol & the LSE and thus knew plenty of posh or very smart Jews. 

After October 7, 2023, leaders of the Hindutva movement – including ministers and members of parliament – expressed their unreserved solidarity with Israel, denouncing not only terrorists but Muslims in general, as evidenced by popular hashtags such as #IndiaStandsWithIsrael and #PalestineTerrorist.

Hamas supports Pakistani terrorist outfits active in Kashmir. The Palestinian terrorist has loudly proclaimed his support for the Paki terrorist.  

This pro-Israel bias was so widespread that the judiciary once again echoed it by banning demonstrations in support of the Palestinians – on the grounds that Indians had enough problems to deal with at home without worrying about those of others.

The counter demonstrations would have been greater. The thing would end with the majority killing the minority. Interestingly, seven Congress, or Congress coalition ruled states have banned such demonstrations. But then the UK banned 'Palestine Action' 

Many BJP leaders – Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath, for example – ordered the police to hunt down account holders who posted pro-Palestinian messages on social media

Good for him. He will get re-elected.  

India’s pro-Israel stance can also be explained by the Modi government’s anti-terrorism doctrine, which is explicitly inspired by the Israeli “model”. In 2016, when India retaliated against the attacks in Uri, Narendra Modi made this clear in no uncertain terms. In an address to the nation, he said: “Our army’s valour is being discussed across the country these days. We used to hear earlier that Israel has done this. The nation has seen that the Indian army is no less than anybody”. 

That's why he won the 2019 election. Fuck Palestine. Nobody cares about it. Killing terrorists wins votes.  

 In 2023 Hindu nationalist leaders

Comrade Vijayan, the Communist Chief Minister of Kerala, is happy that criminal charges have been filed against 30 girls who tried to organize a pro-Palestine demonstration. He gave the excuse that they were part of a banned Islamist outfit.  

have transposed Israel’s situation to India, analysing its post-October 7 response as a counter-terrorism operation comparable to those that India has or will have to carry out in Kashmir against Pakistan.

We will have to get better fighter jets & drones to keep up with the Chinese assisted Pakistanis. Israel is now more important to India than ever. 

From then on, Israel’s war became their war  for Hindu nationalist sympathisers.  Arnab Goswami made no secret of it: “This is not just Israel’s war. Israel is fighting this war for all of us. They are fighting a group that raped women and took their babies hostage, and killed babies. You may think this is happening far from India. But there are many Hamas-type groups waiting across the border in Pakistan, and some trying to grow in India. If Hamas is not completely destroyed, such groups will try to do something similar in India.”

Jaffacake won't admit that Hamas is meeting with and helping Jihadi outfits in Pakistan.  

Not only is Israel a source of inspiration for India in its counterterrorism operations, but it is also a source of equipment, giving it access to the most sophisticated technologies. New Delhi has become one of Tel Aviv’s best customers in terms of arms sales, with Indian orders accounting for 46% of Israeli deliveries.

Other sources think it is about 34 % 

Modi’s current visit to Israel should result in additional arms deals.

D'uh!  

India is therefore taking sides in West Asia,

Israel took India's side. The Palestinians didn't. Israel's assistance became more and more valuable. But India too could become more valuable to Israel.  

even if New Delhi will probably not go so far as to join Donald Trump’s coalition to rebuild Gaza.

Even the Pakistanis want no part in it. The thing is a shit show.  

To what extent will this allow it to maintain good relations with its other partners in the region?

Who cares? Bangladesh will go down an Islamist road. Sri Lanka no longer matters. Pakistan can be trusted to do stupid shit but there are decreasing returns to stupidity.  

New Delhi already seems to have sacrificed its investments in Chabahar – and its ties with Iran – under pressure from the United States.

Maybe. Maybe not. Let us see if Trump wins the mid-terms. If he loses, he turns into a lame duck. The tariff weapon will be off the table. Already, Supreme Court judges like Gorsuch & Coney Barrett are deserting the sinking ship.  

Will its recent ties with Saudi Arabia withstand its pro-Israel stance, given that Riyadh is already upgrading relations with Islamabad, or will the United Arab Emirates become its main point of support in the Persian Gulf?

The UAE & the Saudi have fallen out over Yemen & maybe Sudan. But that could change. Will Trump hit Iran? Probably not. TACO. Trump always chickens out.  

Plurilateral or multi-alignment diplomacy is not easy to cultivate in times of war

What war? Has Jaffacake not understood that the Gaza war is over? Israel won. Iran lost. Read the fucking memo.  

– isn’t New Delhi having the worst of difficulties remaining also friends with Trump and Putin at a time of war in Ukraine?

No. Putin understands that India is a permanent friend. But it has to be cautious. Hopefully, Trump wiill implode in November & the Americans will focus on domestic issues in the run-up to the Presidential elections.  

India’s foreign policy may well be at the crossroads in the Middle East

Nope. It has been going down the same road since the mid Nineties.  

and beyond because of growing polarisation – a difficult situation that Nehru, by comparison, handled rather well during the Cold War.

He got fucked in the ass by the Chinese. He then said 'we have been living in a make believe world of our own invention'. In 1962, our friend Nkrumah demanded that UK stop helping India against China. In 1965, our friend Sukarno sided with Pakistan against India. In 1971, all the Arab countries supported Pakistan- there's a pattern here is all I am saying.  

This bar is very high indeed.

There is no fucking bar- though the author may well have been drunk when he wrote it.  

Edward Said's stupidity

In 'Criticism & Exile', Edward Said wrote- 

The greatest single fact of the past three decades has been,

i.e. the period between 1970 and 2000. The greatest single fact during that period was the collapse of Communist command economies.  

I believe, the vast human migration attendant upon war, colonialism and decolonization, economic and political revolution, and such devastating occurrences as famine, ethnic cleansing, and great power machinations.

Said's people had begun emigrating to the US in the 1870s with numbers peaking between 1880 and 1924. Migration is more about 'pull' than 'push' factors. 

In a place like New York, but surely also in other Western metropoles like London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin, all these things are reflected immediately in the changes that transform neighborhoods, professions, cultural production, and topography on an almost hour-by-hour basis.

Immigration occurred because standards of living were higher in places still ruled by market-friendly White Christians.  

Exiles, émigrés, refugees, and expatriates uprooted from their lands must make do in new surroundings,

Said is pretending he was an exile. He wasn't. He was a voluntary immigrant.  

and the creativity as well as the sadness that can be seen in what they do is one of the experiences that has still to find its chroniclers,

It has too many.  

even though a splendid cohort of writers that includes such different figures as Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul

immigrants not exiles 

has already opened further the door first tried by Conrad.

An exile. The Russians had suppressed the Polish national movement.  

Said taught English & Comp Lit because that is what he had studied in America. However, he did not understand English English literature because he knew little about England and its history. Consider the following. 

There is a moment in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh that has always had for me the startling and completely pleasurable force of a benign epiphany, despite the fact that the novel itself is as much an artifact of late Victorianism as the characters and attitudes it mocks.

Said was extraordinarily ignorant of English history & Literature. Butler began writing the book in 1873.  The mid-Victorian period is generally defined as the period from 1851–1873. The protagonist has an Early Victorian childhood and comes of age in the mid-Victorian period. Edmund Gosse's 'Father & Son' is late Victorian. Butler isn't. 

Butler asks rhetorically about the appalling life of a clergyman’s children: “How was it possible that a child only a little past five years old, trained in such an atmosphere of

hypocritical 

prayers and hymns and sums and happy Sunday evenings—to say nothing of daily repeated beatings over the said prayers and hymns, etc., …—how was it possible that a lad so trained should grow up in any healthy or vigorous development?”

His aunty helps him. That's why he doesn't turn into a sneak & a snob.  

As the plot goes on to show, young Ernest Pontifex would have a dreadful time because of this strenuously virtuous upbringing,

Butler's point is that no virtue was involved. The boy was being brought up to be a sneak, a snob & a hypocrite.  

but the problem goes back to the way Rev. Theobald, Ernest’s father, was himself brought up to behave.

His father published religious texts. His elder son would inherit the business. The younger son- a dim bulb- was forced to become a clergyman because this promoted the family reputation for piety & orthodoxy in Religion. There was no genuine piety here. There was crass commercialism on the one hand, and hypocrisy & snobbishness on the other.   

“The clergyman,” Butler says, “is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.”

Butler's readers knew this wasn't the case. England always had fox-hunting clergymen. Had Theobald had any talent or intelligence he could have risen as a scholar or missionary or popular preacher.  

This brilliant reversal,

metonymy

by which a person suddenly becomes a day, scarcely needs the preachy explanation given a moment later by Butler. Priests, he goes on, are supposed to live stricter lives than anyone else;

Not in Early Victorian England. Butler's readers understood that this was a family which had risen from the working class through commerce. They needed to 'keep up appearances'. The younger son of a Baronet, who gets the advowson to the Rectory in lieu of anything more substantial by way of inheritance, might have very little piety. Indeed, if he inherits a bit of cash from an aunt, he might hire a curate and spend his time at Bath or Boulogne.  

as vicars their “vicarious goodness” is meant to substitute for the goodness of others;

No. It is meant to inspire an equal piety. 

the children of such professionally righteous individuals end up as the ones most damaged by the pretense.

Only if the righteousness is feigned and no actual enthusiasm replaces it. Having a dad who pretends piety to get his salary is fine if he is teaching you about Darwin.  

Yet for anyone who (perhaps more frequently in an earlier age) was required to dress up, go to religious services, attend a solemn family dinner, and otherwise face the rigors of a day from which many of the sins and pleasures of life had been forcibly swept, to be a human Sunday is an immediately horrible thing.

Nonsense! Ernest's plight is horrible because his dad is horrible. Thankfully he has a nice Aunty.  

And although the phrase “human Sunday” is compressed in the extreme, it has the effect of releasing a whole storehouse of experiences refracted in as well as pointed to directly by the two words.

Said forgets that there is a novel called 'The man who was Thursday'. The human Sunday turns out to be... a nightmare version of God.  

Butler’s novel is not very much in fashion these days.

It came into fashion with the publication of Gosse's 'Father & Son'. Gosse was a well known man of letters. It must be said, 

He stands at the threshold of modernism, but really belongs to an age in which questions of religion, upbringing and family pressures still represented the important questions, as they did for Newman, Arnold, and Dickens.

He was mid Victorian. Erewhon was well received. However, his opposition to both the Church & the school of Darwin relegated him to obscurity.  

Moreover, The Way of All Flesh is hardly a novel at all but rather a semi-fictionalized autobiographical account of Butler’s own unhappy youth, full of scarcely veiled attacks on his own father, his own early religious inclinations, and the pre-Darwinian age in which he grew up, when how to deal with faith, and not science or ideas, was the preeminent concern. It would not, I think, be doing The Way of All Flesh an injustice to say that it provides readers with principally a historical, rather than an aesthetic, experience.

It was an effective complement to Gosse's book. One might say Butler's work is crude but what it caricatures was real enough. Kipling's Ba Baa Black sheep came out in 1888. Butler shows the Oxbridge educated father & even the mother could be just as bad as the lower middle class landlady/ foster-mother.  

Literary art, rhetoric, figurative language, and structure are there to be looked for,

Butler was a fine Classicist.  

to be occasionally encountered and admired, but only minimally and momentarily, as a way of leading readers directly back to particular experiences of life at a particular time and place.

No. Butler is Lamarkian. The servile son is likely to become a bullying father. Change the environment and you change the phenotype regardless of genotype. Incidentally, Gosse's father had proposed the "Omphalos" theory, which suggested God created the world with artificial signs of age (e.g., fossils, tree rings) to represent a pre-existent history.

One neither could nor would want to compare Butler with Henry James or Thomas Hardy,

Nonsense! James is a psychologist of a similar type to Butler. Hardy has a theory of history which one might call Schopenhauerian or a pessimistic Darwinism. Butler too could be pessimistic. What if machines are evolving? Might they not supplant human beings?  

two of his immediate contemporaries: they represent a far more complete encoding of historical experience by aesthetic or literary form.

No. They failed. Of James, H.G Wells said, there was James the First (wisest fool in Christendom & probably gay as fuck) James the Second (who lost his throne because of his mulish obstinacy) and the Old Pretender. As for Hardy, nobody could stand his 'Dynasts'. The feeling was that he should have stuck with tales of the rustic proletariat. Still there's nothing funnier than the ending of Jude the Obscure. 'Old Father Time' kills the kids & himself  because 'we are too menny'. Don't forget, it was Malthus who laid the foundation for Darwin.  

It would be more appropriate somehow to read The Way of All Flesh along with Newman’s Apologia,

Fuck off! Anyway, nobody actually reads that shite.  

Mill’s Autobiography,

see above.  

and even so eccentric and rousing a work as Swift’s Tale of a Tub,

ditto. We get that Professors of Literature have to pretend that unreadable shite aint shite, but Said is overegging the cake.  

than it would to compare Butler’s novel with The Golden Bowl or The Ambassadors, works that have been far more influential in setting the standard for interpretation and critical theory in our time

that theory was utter garbage. Anyway, E.M Forster did that sort of thing much better.  

than the story of Ernest Pontifex.

Which has a lot of verisimilitude & is well written.  

The point I am trying to make in all this, however, is related to the recent trends in the criticism and study of literature that have shied away from the unsettling contentiousness of experiences like this one,

which one? Creaming your pants over the phrase 'human Sunday'?  

or from exiled or silenced voices.

why shy away from shite you can't hear?  

Most of what has been exciting and contentious about the vogue of formalist and deconstructive theory has been

the fact that when it isn't coprophagy, it is finger painting using your own shit? 

its focus on purely linguistic and textual matters. A phrase like “the clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday” is too transparent on one level, too inchoate in its recollection and summonings on another, for the theorists of simile, metaphor, topology, or phallologocentrism.

Nonsense! It is merely a metaphor. Clergymen are associated with Sunday because it the day on which they work while others rest. It is a day of calm spirituality and pious devotion- qualities a man of the cloth is expected to embody. It was Chesterton's nightmarish 'Sunday' who defies analysis.  

Said did not claim to have studied the Orient. However he was an emigrant from that region. Might this not give him some locus standi in critiquing 'Orientalists' in the manner that I- who emigrated to London around the time Samuel Butler's first book came out in the Seventies- have critiqued Said? 

Consider the following-

At bottom, what I said in Orientalism had been said before me by A. L. Tibawi,

His 1963 essay 'English-Speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism' could be said to have been the seed of Said's own chef de oeuvre. Tibawi was the professor of Islamic Education at the London Institute of Education till about 1977 when he retired. 

by Abdullah Laroui,

who argues that the Arab Intellectual has no use for historicism. In other words, Orientals really see the Orient as outside time. In other words, they are saying opposite things- probably because Laroui remained in Morocco while Tibawi settled in London.  

by Anwar Abdel Malek,

a Copt who settled in France. He was a Marxist & Pan-Arabist. As such, he understood that what some stupid Professors said didn't matter in the slightest. Money matters & so do guns.  

by Talal Asad,

who settled in the UK after studying in Pakistan. His father was a Jewish convert to Islam. He is an anthropologist who, quite rightly, points out that a lot of anthropological field work was short on theory. Sadly, what succeeded it was short on field-work. Indeed, it was utterly worthless & paranoid.  

by S. H. Alatas,

Malaysian. He bridled at the European depiction of Malays as lazy though, truth be told, it was the Chinese who proved this must be the case. To his credit he opposed nativist 'bhumiputra' policies- which is why he had no political future.  

by Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire,

Martinique had the sense to remain with France 

by Sardar K. M. Pannikar

a brilliant writer & diplomat though a little too pro-China.  

and Romila Thapar,

a cretin, but well connected & close to the dynasty 

all of whom had suffered the ravages of imperialism and colonialism,

None had. They benefited from it. Martinique was lucky because it remained with France.  

and who, in challenging the authority, provenance, and institutions of the science that represented them to Europe,

None did. Tibawi criticised some books by Christian missionaries which did the Prophet less than justice. But the Brits already viewed Prophet Muhammad favourably because of Carlyle. Tibawi was preaching to the converted which is why the Brits appointed him a Professor. 

were also understanding themselves as something more than what this science said they were. 

No Science was involved unless Hope Risley & anthropometrics is meant. But this was eroded by the Boas critique (i.e. adaptation to the environment) & the rise of genetics. 

As an patriotic, albeit immigrant, American, not a Palestinian exile, Said should be praised for pushing forward the American 'Rodgers Plan' to return Israel to its pre '67 borders. Other Americans- including WASPs like Clinton- harboured the same illusions as Said.

Still it was possible to believe

even after Arafat sided with the butcher Saddam 

that the Palestinian cause continued to represent an idea of justice and equality around which many others could rally.

It made some Palestinians very rich.  

By being for Palestinian rights we stood for nondiscrimination, for social justice and equality, for enlightened nationalism.

In other words, an independent Palestine would be like Israel, not Saddam's Iraq.  

Our aim was an independent sovereign state, of course. Even though we had lived through our loss, we were able to accept a compromise whereby what we lost in 1948 to Israel (contained within the prewar 1967 lines) would be lost forever, if in return we could have a state in the Occupied Territories. We had assumed (and I do not recall much discussion of this particular option for the future) that our state would have sovereignty, our refugees would have the right of some sort of repatriation or compensation, and our politics would be a distinct advance over those of the Arab states, with their oligarchies, military dictatorships, brutal police regimes.

So, Said thought the Palestinians would have elections & courts of law in the same manner as the Jews.  

During the period that was effectively terminated by the Oslo agreement of 1993 I recall quite distinctly that most of the intellectuals, professionals, political activists (leadership and nonleadership), and ordinary individuals I knew well lived at least two parallel lives.

Most people have two parallel lives- viz. a professional one, during office hours, and a personal one the rest of the time.  

The first was in varying degrees a difficult one: as Palestinians living under different jurisdictions, none of them Palestinian of course, with a general sense of powerlessness and drift. Second was a life that was sustained by the various promises of the Palestinian struggle, utopian and unrealistic perhaps, but based on solid principles of justice and, at least since the late 1980s, negotiated peace with Israel.

So, this cretin wasn't aware that Hamas- which was founded in 1987.  

The distorted view of us as a people single-mindedly bent on Israel’s destruction that existed in the West bore no relationship at all to any reality I lived or knew of.

Because Said was an ignorant American.  Between 1990-1992 Hamas candidates won an average of 30 percent of the seats in elections for professional organizations (engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.) in the West Bank and Gaza, according to observers.

Most of us, the overwhelming majority, in fact, were most interested in the recognition and acknowledgment of our existence as a nation, and not in retribution; everyone I knew was flabbergasted and outraged that the Israelis, who had destroyed our society in 1948, took our land, occupied what remained of it since 1967, and who bombed, killed, and otherwise oppressed an enormous number of us, could appeal to the world as constantly afraid for their security, despite their immense power relative to ours.

Israel was able to convince the US that unilateral reversion to pre-'67 borders meant the country could not be effectively defended. To counter the argument, you need a military expert not a fucker who teaches literature to morons.  

Few Westerners took seriously our insecurity and real deprivation: somehow Israel’s obsession with its insecurity and need for assurance—with its soldiers beating up Palestinians every day after twenty-eight years of occupation—took precedence over our misery. I vividly recall the anger I felt when I learned that starting in the fall of 1992 under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an organization of which I was a member, a group of privileged Palestinian intellectuals met with Israeli security officials in secret to begin a discussion of security for settlers and army personnel who would remain in the Occupied Territories should there be some form of Palestinian self-rule arrangement.

What's wrong with 'confidence building talks'? It is part & parcel of peace-keeping initiatives in different parts of the world. Why did the thing make Said so angry? The answer, I suppose, is that as an immigrant, not an exile, he didn't really care what happened in a far away country.  

This was a prelude to Oslo, but the fact that there was an acceptance of the Israeli agenda and a scanting of real Palestinian losses struck me as ominous, a sign that capitulation had already set in.

Peace, for Hamas, means capitulation unless all the Jews & other kaffirs are killed.  

Another sign of capitulation was the efflorescence of Islamic movements whose reactionary message (the aim of which was to establish an Islamic state in Palestine) testified to the secular desperation of the nationalist cause.

In other words, if Arafat & the 'secular' forces made peace, then it would be 'capitulation' unless all the Jews were killed or enslaved.  

Let me skip directly to Oslo and after. The mystery there—indeed, from my viewpoint, the only interesting thing—is how a people that had struggled against the British and the Zionists for over a century (unevenly and without much success it is true) were persuaded—perhaps by the international and regional balance of power, the blandishments of their leaders, the fatigue of long and apparently fruitless struggle—to declare in effect that their hope of real national reconstruction and real self-determination was in effect a lost cause.

because 'real national reconstruction' meant killing all the Jews. This was a lost cause because the Jews were better at fighting and not as corrupt as fuck.  

One of the advantages of so extraordinary a volte face

like Germany surrendering to the Allies?  

is that one can see what is happening against the immediate and also the more distant background.

Said couldn't see shit. 

History of course is full of peoples who simply gave up and were persuaded to accept a life of servitude;

America was once full of such people. They are called the First Nations.  

they are all but forgotten, their voices barely heard, the traces of their life scarcely decipherable. History is not kind to them since even in the present they are seen as losers, even though it is sometimes possible, as Walter Benjamin says, to realize that “whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (Illuminations, 256).

Those of Benjamin's people who moved to Israel did become victorious.  

How does the cause of a people, a culture, or an individual become hopeless?

In the case of Palestinians, they couldn't form a fiscally viable state in 1948 or at any later date.  

We had once believed as a people that there was room for us at the rendezvous of destiny. In the instance I have been discussing, it was certainly true that a collective sentiment developed that the time was no longer right, that now is the period of ascendancy of America and its allies, and that everyone else is required to go along with Washington’s dictates.

Sadly, Arafat refused to take the very good deal Clinton offered. Clinton Parameters presented in December 2000, or the subsequent Taba negotiations in January 2001. These proposals suggested a Palestinian state in 94-96% of the West Bank, full control of Gaza, and East Jerusalem as the capital. Arafat's procrastination would cost the Palestinians dear. After 9/11, the whole of NATO was killing Muslim terrorists with a vim and vigour even the Israelis had never displayed. It now appears, that the Palestinians will never regain the whole of Gaza while losing more and more land in the West Bank & East Jerusalem. America has already recognised the annexation of the Golan Heights and accepted Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. 

A gradual shift in perspective revealed to the collective consciousness that the cause of Palestinian nationalism, with its earlier yet long-standing and uncompromising position on

killing all the Jews 

sovereignty, justice, and self-determination, could no longer be fought for:

because the Jews were better at killing 

there had to be a change of strategy whereby the nation now thought of its cause less as something won than as something conceded to it as a defeated people by its opponents and by the international authority.

A self-defeating people. But Lebanon too has turned to shit. The Saids have a holiday home there.  

Certainly for Palestinians the sense of isolation among the other Arabs had been growing inexorably. What used to be the great Arab cause of Palestine was so diminished that it became a bargaining card in the hands of countries like Egypt and Jordan, who

hated Palestinians with good reason. The Palestinians had tried to take over Jordan with the result that Pakistani pilots flying Saudi Arabian planes bombed Palestinian refugee camps- a great example of pan-Islamic cooperation. Egypt's Anwar Sadat was angered by Abu Nidal's killing of his friend & Minister of Culture, Yusuf Sibai in 1978. The feeling was that Palestinians are mad dogs. Some years earlier, when the Palestinians killed a senior Jordanian politician in Cairo, one of them took the trouble to lick his blood. These aren't Muslims because these aren't men. They are rabid beasts. 

were desperately hard up for American patronage and largesse

they were fed up with Palestinian craziness. 

and therefore tried to position themselves as talking realistic sense to the Palestinians.

Fuck that. Expel the cunts & make peace with Israel. They aren't the enemy.  

Whereas in the past Palestinians gathered hope and optimism from the struggles of other peoples (e.g., the South African battle against apartheid), the opposite became true:

They became pessimistic because Mandela & his crew didn't kill every White person and then lick their blood. 

they were successful because their circumstances were more favorable, and since we did not have the same conditions, we needed instead to become more accommodating.

Fuck that. Just immigrate to some place where Jews are safe.  

What had once been true for liberation movements was no longer applicable in our case.

Because liberation isn't about killing people and licking their blood. This may be a difficult concept for Palestinian intellectuals to comprehend.  

Soviet help was nonexistent, and besides the times had changed. Liberation was no longer a timely cause—democracy and the free market were,

Said, as a Palestinian, thinks democracy is very evil. Nobody should be allowed to choose what to buy or sell or whom to vote for. Liberation means killing lots of people & licking their blood. Somebody should explain this to Mandela.  

does the consciousness and even the actuality of a lost cause entail

anything other than than being smart enough to see you have lost? No.  

that sense of defeat and resignation that we associate with the abjections of capitulation

There can be capitulation without defeat & defeat without capitulation or resignation 

and the dishonor of grinning or bowing survivors who opportunistically fawn on their conquerors and seek to ingratiate themselves with the new dispensation?

Who says that is dishonourable? Guys who aren't happy unless they are killing people and licking their blood?  

Must it always result in the broken will and demoralized pessimism of the defeated?

No. The Brits lost the American War of Independence. You didn't see them repining. The South lost the American Civil War. They didn't start obsequiously fawning over African American lieutenant-Governors.  

I think not, although the alternative is a difficult and extremely precarious one, at least on the level of the individual.

Not for WASPs. Palestinians may be differently constituted.  

In the best analysis of alternatives to the helpless resignation of a lost cause that I know, Adorno

a shithead 

diagnoses the predicament as follows.

'At a moment of defeat: For the individual, life is made easier through capitulation to the collective with which he identifies.

No. It is made easier by capitulating to the guys who have defeated that collective. Thus, when Germany was defeated, smart Germans ingratiated themselves with the occupying powers. They didn't capitulate to equally abject Germans.  

He is spared the cognition of his impotence; within the circle of their own company, the few become many.

I suppose there were underground cells of Hitler worshippers who, during the day, worked in menial occupations for the occupying power.  

It is this act—not unconfused thinking—which is resignation.

No. What is being described as 'magical thinking'. Resignation represents clear thinking if there is no way to reverse the outcome. Thus if I am diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, I resign myself to dying. I don't join a group of people with brain tumours who say 'our tumours make us immortal. It is the guys who don't have tumours who will die in a month or two.'  

No transparent relation prevails between the interests of the ego and the collective to which it assigns itself.

Nonsense! My relation to my family is transparent. That's the 'collective' to which I belong by natural  'oikeiosis'.  On the other hand my relationship to the collective represented by winners of the Fields medal isn't transparent. It is wishful thinking because I am as stupid as shit. 

The ego must abrogate itself, if it is to share in the predestination of the collective.

This is not necessary at all. I may join the Iyer Liberation Army which is predestined to be defeated in its attempt to reclaim Ireland from Marathi leprechauns like Leo Varadkar, but my ego swells in doing so. It isn't abrogated at all.  

Explicitly a remnant of the Kantian categorical imperative manifests itself:

Everybody should kill everybody and lick their blood? Is that the Palestinian categorical imperative?  

your signature is required.

No it isn't unless you are acknowledging receipt of something beneficial to you.  

The feeling of new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking.

Stupidity or being as crazy as shit has that effect. 

The consolation that thought within the context of collective actions is an improvement proves deceptive: thinking, employed only as the instrument of action, is blunted in the same manner as all instrumental reason. (167–168)

Adorno was stupid. What he studied & taught was nonsense. Instrumental reason is what scientists and businessmen & Mums display.  

As opposed to this abrogation of consciousness, Adorno posits as an alternative to resigned capitulation of the lost cause the intransigence of the individual thinker whose power of expression is a power—however modest and circumscribed in its capacity for action or victory—that enacts a movement of vitality, a gesture of defiance, a statement of hope whose “unhappiness” and meager survival are better than silence or joining in the chorus of defeated activists:

Very true. Did you know that Sartre achieved the Liberation of France by writing some shite? Eisenhower played no role in that happy outcome.  

In contrast, the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither superscribes his conscience nor permits himself to be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give up.

Adorno, in truth, was one of those who was so terrorized that the action he took involved fucking off to the US in 1938.  

Furthermore, thinking is not the spiritual reproduction of that which exists.

Thinking about a dog doesn't turn you into a spiritual reproduction of a dog. What an amazing discovery! 

As long as thinking is not interrupted, it has a firm grasp upon possibility.

Not if the thinking is done by shitheads who study or teach stupid shit. 

Its insatiable quality, the resistance against petty satiety,

why be content with licking the blood of one person you murdered? Why not kill everybody and lick all their blood?  

rejects the foolish wisdom of resignation. (168)

because fantasizing about licking blood isn't foolish at all.  

I offer this in tentative conclusion as a means of affirming the individual intellectual vocation,

These guys are idiots. They have no fucking intellect.  

which is neither disabled by a paralyzed sense of political defeat nor impelled by groundless optimism and illusory hope.

The Frankfurt School couldn't understand why the proletariat didn't want Communism. What was the reason for their own defeat in Democratic countries? The answer is they had shit for brains & this was fucking obvious. But this was an answer they couldn't accept more particularly if they had tenure as 'drunken helots' whose intoxication with Marxism made their cretinous antics an example & a warning to the jeunesse doree.  This was also the reason Rawls & Sen & other such shitheads were taught to undergrads. 

Consciousness of the possibility of resistance can reside

in guys who are smart and who see how, when & were resistance can be successfully mounted.  

only in the individual will that is fortified by intellectual rigor

so not these shitheads then 

and an unabated conviction in the need to begin again, with no guarantees except, as Adorno says, the confidence of even the loneliest and most impotent thought that “what has been cogently thought must be thought in some other place and by other people.”

Sadly, stupid magical thinking of the same type appears in every age and every milieu. How can we resist the ravages of cancer? My solution is masturbation. It is stupid but I bet lots of people have wanked in the hope of ridding themselves of illness. But smart sciencey guys have found ways to shrink or remove many different types of tumours. In this case, it is better not to reinvent the wheel. Just go to where these smart people are and learn the technique from them.  

In this way thinking might perhaps acquire and express the momentum of the general, thereby blunting the anguish and despondency of the lost cause, which its enemies have tried to induce.

Why not just take a lot of drugs & get someone to tell you that the Palestinians have killed all the Jews and are busy licking up all their blood?  

We might well ask from this perspective if any lost cause can ever really be lost.

We might, if we are as stupid as shit. The South won't rise again. Charles III won't reconquer what George III lost. Palestinians, however, will keep killing but even they seem to have given up licking blood. That's like so not halal.  

Clive James on Edward Said

The late Clive James wrote-

Edward Said (1935–2003) was the most spectacular intellectual asset of the Palestinians in exile.

James 'read' English. Thus, he considered Said an 'intellectual'. But Palestinians considered Mahmoud Abbas, who had a PhD from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, to be their greatest intellectual asset. Indeed, he is still, at 90, the President of the Palestinian State as recognized by UK, France, etc. 

Because he had been exiled all the way to Columbia University,

He was an American citizen who went to American Prep School & Colleges.  

where he was professor of english and comparative literature, it was possible to say, as the perennial crisis in the Middle East continued to shape his scholarly and critical work, that he was caught between New York and a hard place.

No it wasn't.  Said family’s holiday home is in the Lebanese village of Dhour el Shweir. His sister taught at the American University of Beirut. Still, it is true that the family lost property in Israel. Boo fucking hoo. 

But there is no call to doubt his integrity just because he had been raised in transit on luxury liners, laurelled at Princeton and Harvard, and otherwise showered with all the rewards that Western civilization can bestow.

More importantly, his family was Anglican (or Episcopalian, in America). Thus, even fellow Palestinian Christians felt his people were opportunistic turn-coats.  

What can be doubted is his accuracy. His influential book Orientalism (1978) painted a picture in which Western students of African, Arab and Eastern cultures had practised racist imperialism under the guise of a search for knowledge.

Whereas Arabs had practised racist imperialism by killing people and taking over their territory. 

The book was hugely influential: its “narratives of oppression” became the tunnels through which non-Western academics came to preferment in the West.

They got to teach worthless shite. What is the point of 'reading' Literature at Collidge unless you are congenitally illiterate? 

Said’s ideas found such favour on the international left that he became a whipping boy for the right, but it is important to say that there were some Arab thinkers who equally found Orientalism a wrong-headed book.

It isn't important at all unless you studied stupid shite at Uni.  

According to them, it encouraged a victim mentality by enabling failed states to blame the West for their current plight:

James did not live to see diversity-hire, Kamala, blaming everybody but herself for her defeat.  

a patronizing idea, common to the Western left, which the emerging non-Western intelligentsia would find that much harder to rebut when endorsed by someone with Said’s credentials and prestige.

The intelligentsia didn't read Said. People studying worthless shite at Uni did. Why? Grievance Studies went hand in hand with Affirmative Action. You have to admit shitheads because you need the tuition fee income. Find some shit for them to 'study'. Then appoint them Professors of utter shit.  

Though most of Said’s Western admirers were never aware of it, this ambiguity marked Said’s written work thoughout his career: he was continually telling the people he professed to be rescuing from Western influence

He never made any such claim. He wasn't the Arab Ali Shariarti. He wasn't even the Palestinian Michel Aflaq.  

that they were helpless in its embrace. A quality of self-defeating ambiguity also characterized Said’s role as a practical diplomat.

James is ignorant. He doesn't get that Republican administrations always tried to get Israel to revert  to something close to its '67 borders. Reagan was bound to continue the 'Rodgers Plan' approach after he and Gorby reached a modus vivendi. Reagan also set the ball rolling on ending Apartheid after the Cubans agreed to pull out of Angola. Said could have been useful if he had Arafat's ear. But what really mattered was the Soviet Union. Once it started to unravel, all bets were off.  

In 1988 he helped secure the breakthrough by which the Palestinian National Council finally recognized the State of Israel’s right to exist,

He could play no role because the US would not then, and still will not, recognize Palestine. What mattered was that Egypt's recognition of Israel had held up. The other factor was the Syrian intervention in Lebanon. Assad didn't like Arafat. He had sent his soldiers to help the Christian Maronites against the PLO in 1976. The Taif agreement in 1989 confirmed the marginalization of the Palestinians. Syrian forces only left the country in 2005. Arafat had to accept that everybody else in the region had their own modus vivendi with Israel. 

but in 1991 he resigned in protest at the Oslo peace process, before Arafat had even had a chance to scupper it.

Because he was useless.  

If a solution had been secured it could well have meant that the lives of everyone involved on the Palestinian side of the negotiating table would have been forfeit, but Said was unlikely to be put off by Arab extremists, who for a long time had been threatening him with death in one ear just as loudly as extreme Zionists had been threatening him in the other.

Why kill a useless Professor of a worthless subject?  

Yet Said was exemplary in his insistence that Israel had an historic claim in Palestine and that anti-Semitism, with the Holocaust as its centrepiece, had better be understood by the Arab nations or there would be no end to the conflict.

This is hilarious. There is money in conflict. There isn't in teaching Literature.  

When he simplified history, it wasn’t because he was a simpleton:

It was because he was had spent his life studying and teaching shit. This is a guy who noted that you need to tell your Graduate students that Dr. Jonathan Swift was not a medical Doctor. If, in one of his texts, he mentions the project of turning shit into food, this does not mean you should stir your own turds into your coco-pops. Don't eat your own shit. It is bad for you.  

though many a buffoon hoped to acquire points for intelligence by sitting beside him,

Arafat was a buffoon- albeit a homicidal one.  

his dignity was unimpaired, and he still looked wise even when accompanied by Tariq Ali looking serious.

Tariq Ali's celebrity predated Said's. Also, he was a Pakistani Aristocrat. The Pakistanis had clever diplomats and might use Ali to send a message or seal a deal. What was hilarious was General Zia and the Pak Air Force, slaughtering Palestinians during Black September, with the tab being picked up by Saudi Arabia. The PLO supplied anti-aircraft missiles to the Bhutto brothers so they could try to avenge the death of their father by bringing down the Presidential plane. They muffed it. Later, the younger was poisoned by his Afghan wife (or so the Bhutto family believe) while the older was killed on orders of his brother-in-law. 

Said’s writing on the arts, at its best, has the exuberance that his writing on one art, music, always has.

Do Musicians find it valuable? Or, is his writing on art itself of great artistic merit? If not, it matters as little as whether Said farted exuberantly or scratched his arse in a lugubrious manner.  

He played the piano to professional standard: a piquant demonstration that the Western and non-Western worlds of creativity had not been symmetrical.

Fuck does that mean? Prof. Leavis was shite at playing the Didgeridoo?

But his answer to that was convincing: if both sides had not created the music, they could both perform it.

Which is why F.R Leavis was greatly remiss in not playing the Didgeridoo to an acceptable standard.  

After his death, his orchestra plays on: the West-Eastern Divan, founded by him and Daniel Barenboim, has performed in the Occupied Territories.

And weren't taken hostage. Sadly, they refused to play the Didgeridoo. At the very least, they could have hired a token wallaby in the strings section.  

Said was an accomplished and charming man who presented his admirers on the left with the dangerous illusion that by appreciating his writings they were being fast-tracked to an understanding of the history of the Middle East in a refined form,

Nonsense! He'd have had to bang on about the vested interests of big corporations to achieve that. Said was too lazy to go down that particular rabbit-hole.  

without having to study it in further detail. There were non-Western scholars who thought that he had the same illusion about his nominal subject, and that no Orientalist has ever been more damagingly superficial than he.

No. The notion that 'colonial epistemic systems' must be dismantled chimes with the old anti-colonial ideology which became the basis for State sponsored postcolonial ideology in the Global South. Thus, if the Indians decide to call their Penal Code the 'Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita', some hack will mention Said's Orientalism.  

There can be no doubt, alas, that some of his themes were cartoons. His argument that every Orientalist racist imperialist scholar since the Enlightenment was furthering the territorial ambitions of his home country broke down on the obvious point that the best of them came from Germany, which before the twentieth century had no colonies to speak of.

So what? The fact is Hanover- which was in personal union with England- got in on the act first and did earn some money from John Company. Germany had a lot of Universities. Its pedants were poor. They could get paid a little money for doing donkey work which actual colonial administrators from other countries might nevertheless find it worthwhile to subsidize.  

Simply because they believed in the objective nature of knowledge, the great European students of foreign cultures were all humanists before they were imperialists,

Fuck off! Most were Missionaries or believed in Proselytization save where that would be fatal to the commercial and geopolitical interests of their country.  

and often defended the first thing against the second, out of love and respect.

The fact is, if you study recondite shite, you have to pretend it is really Humanistic recondite shite.  

Today’s Indian scholars of Indian languages

are poorly paid pedants 

further the work of English scholars whose names they revere,

Like whom? G.U Pope? Caldwell? This may have been true a hundred years ago. Today, there is the awareness that crazy linguistic chauvinism and sub-nationalism gave rise to corrupt, gangsterish, local politics. 

The plain fact is, there is no part of the world where scholars of Literature or Philology are respected.  

one fact among the many that Said found it convenient either not to mention or never to know.

He was an Arab Anglican. His Bishops were happy to gas on about such things till the cows came home.  

Also his idea that Napoleon had wrecked Egypt’s advance into the modern age was not one shared by Naguib Mahfouz, who said that Egypt had Napoleon to thank for everything modern it possessed.

The French had to leave quite soon. Mehmet Ali- an Albanian by birth- took over after the French withdrawal. He was the founder of modern Egypt. Mahfouz's charm, as a writer, is his resistance to the siren song of Pan-Arabism. Like Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, he saw Egypt as possessing a distinct culture and nationality. 

Said was right to this extent, however: Occidental intellectuals find out very little about what is thought and written in the Oriental world.

Intellectuals tend to be ignorant and stupid. If they aren't we would call them rich dudes or dudes with a lot of power.  

Very few of Said’s admirers in the West could begin to contemplate

anything at all. They were too stupid.  

the fact that there are some bright people in the East who thought of Said as just another international operator doing well out of patronizing them, and with less excuse.

Still, if your son or daughter is a complete moron, they might as well do a PhD in Saidian shite and get tenure on the basis of affirmative action.  

I finished writing the piece that follows not long before Said finally succumbed to cancer, and I have left it in the present tense to help indicate that I was treating him as a living force, brave in a cause that was very short of his kind of soldier.

Because the Palestinians need terrorists not tenured Professors.  

'I pressed harder. What about the admiring caresses lavished by the camera on Mathieu marching into Algiers?'

—EDWARD SAID, REFLECTIONS ON EXILE, P. 286

The natural answer to the question would be to ask how lavishly Said had caressed his dick till it jizzed into his popcorn as he gazed longingly at the French dude in question. 

ANNOYINGLY UNDATED except for its opening phrase, “A few months ago,” Said’s essay on Gillo Pontecorvo

the runt of the litter of a high IQ Jewish family.  

is the account of a personal meeting that probably took place in the late 1990s, by which time Pontecorvo had not made a film in many years.

By then, Islamists in Algeria were discovering what the Army already knew- viz. the French had won the war. It was just that the game was not worth the candle- financially speaking.  That changed when oil prices soared. France and Italy soon became best buds of the dictators in their former North African colonies. 

But he had once, in 1966, made a film that Said continues to admire as a masterwork of political analysis: The Battle of Algiers.

I saw it in Baghdad. The message was simple. Bull doze the fucking Souk. Get rid of the old narrow streets. Anti-Baathist elements- Islamists, Bazaari Capitalists, Feudalists- are likely to entrench themselves there.  

I feel the same, but for different reasons,

 Pontecorvo married a wallaby who played the Didgeridoo?

and by focusing on the second of these two quoted sentences it is easy to make the difference plain. Said wants the film to be an outright condemnation of imperialism,

So did I. It would have been much shorter. Just get a wallaby to play the Didgeridoo while other wallabies stand about shouting 'Fuck you Imperialism! Fuck you very much!'  

with no concessions made to the forces of oppression. Said thinks that the French claims to have extended civilization to Algiers had nothing to be said for them, and that the rebellious native Algerians, whatever atrocities they might have committed, were well within their rights, considering the magnitude of the atrocity that had been committed against them.

Wallabies, too, have much to complain about.  

I want the film to be what it is. It certainly does condemn imperialism, but it shows that the French imperialism in Algeria was the work of human beings, not automatons.

nor wallabies. Similarly, I want every film- even those I don't like- to be what it is rather than a wallaby up my bum. The odd thing is, I didn't 'read' English at Pembroke College. I guess I was just born stupid. Some people are lucky that way.  

It need hardly be added that Said is right about how their apparently successful colonial efforts in Algeria corrupted the French into illusions of manifest destiny.

Do I need to point out that there was a dude named Napoleon who conquered a large portion of Europe? It was he who gave the French delusions of gloire. The French conquest of Algeria began 15 years after Waterloo. 

Elsewhere in the same book, Said gives an exemplary caning to Tocqueville, who was respectful enough about the repressed minorities in America, but who chose to despise Islam when he became gung-ho for a French Algeria.

James should give an exemplary caning to both Tocqueville and Said for ignoring the plight of wallabies.  

Said’s only mistake,

was to have studied and taught and written stupid useless shite. He may have done well as an importer of dates and other dry goods.  

but a crucial one, is to question Pontecorvo’s directorial emphasis at the exact moment when Pontecorvo is being most sensitive. At his most sensitive, he is at his most comprehensive, and comprehending. In letting the camera, and thus the audience, be impressed by the French general’s heroic stature as he marches into Algiers at the head of his paratroopers, Pontecorvo shows

he knows which side his bread is buttered on. The Algerian government financed the film.  Colonel Houari Boumédiène had seized power. He was the counterpart to the French General who, in consequence, must be depicted as heroic. 

why he ranks with Costa-Gavras as a true auteur of the political film.

In my part of South India, films were genuinely political- i.e. changed politics. 'Reel Society' took over 'Real Society'. Film stars or Scriptwriters dominated politics. 

In Costa-Gavras’s film The Confession, there is a similarly penetrating moment when Yves Montand, released from gaol, meets his torturer in the street, and can show nothing except embarrassment, while the torturer (Gabriele Ferzetti) assumes that the victim will join him in blaming the whole episode on unfortunate circumstances.

Nonsense! The torturer knows that both their fates depend on the Kremlin. The Czechs simply weren't free agents. They were a conquered people.  

These are human reactions, in all their ambiguity.

In Soviet controlled Czechoslovakia- maybe. Otherwise, if you meet your torturer in the street, you very unambiguously kick his head in- if it is safe to do so.  

In The Battle of Algiers, the paratroopers’ commander, Mathieu (in real life he was General Jacques Massu), is greeted with rapture by the pieds noirs as he leads his soldiers down the main street. They cheer, weep, do everything but lay palm fronds before his polished boots. He is greeted with hosannas because he looks like a saviour. Here is the man who will take the necessary measures to ensure that our innocent children are no longer blown to pieces in the nightclubs and restaurants. When the camera is on him, it has the eyes of his worshippers. If the camera bestows admiring caresses, it is because the crowd is doing the same.

I suppose the gerontocrats ruling the country in the 1990s hoped they too would be seen as Messiahs for the ruthless manner they crushed the Islamists.  

Since 1834, generations of the French in Algiers had grown up believing they inhabited part of France. In 1963 they believed de Gaulle when he said that Algeria would stay French.

Nonsense! De Gaulle recognized Algerian Independence in July 3, 1962. But it was the January 1961 referendum which was decisive. 

To them, the paratroopers looked like the guarantee that it would do so. The paratroopers believed it too, and the film, in its tragically logical unfolding, shows that belief being undermined by horror at the tenacity of the other belief that they encountered, and at what they must do to fight it.

Militarily, the French gained the upper hand. But the game was not worth the candle.  

“Non siamo sadici,” the general tells the press: “We are not sadists,”

i.e. did not derive pleasure from inflicting pain. Sadly, a reputation for sadism can be salutary for an occupying army.

and one of the measures of the film’s unique subtlety is that we believe they are not, even as they set about doing sadistic things.

The experience of the World War showed what humanity was capable of. Forget genocide, the Great Powers were developing weapons which could blow up the entire planet.  

There is a key moment when a couple of the paratroopers say a respectful “Courage!” to the man who is about to be tortured.

Perhaps they had family members who had been in the Resistance.  

Said might legitimately have objected to that. In any military group conducting interrogation by violence, no matter how reluctantly the policy is pursued, there are always a few genuine enthusiasts who relish the opportunity to make their sinister dreams come true.

Sadly, torture is a specialised profession. One needs empathy and imagination to get under the skin of your victim. I suppose the French soldiers thought they were dealing with 'terrorists'. 

But Said’s objection is directed elsewhere, at the very idea that the French in Algeria might have had a point in thinking that they had something to protect.

Both the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Indo-China and Algeria seem to have believed that National Glory was connected to keeping Colonies. It seemed obvious that such possessions were the source of wealth. Yet, this was not actually the case. France grew rapidly after giving up its colonies. Refugees from Algeria filled the factories and enabled France to become an affluent Welfare State.  

Wedded to his conviction that imperialism is always and exclusively a force bent on destruction, Said writes as if the French could have had no reason to believe in their mission civilisatrice.

In some cases- e.g. Martinique- the colonial possession chose to remain part of France. Recently, some people in Lebanon were wishing France was still the mandatory power.  

He writes as if they would only have had to take thought to see the truth.

Said himself was an admirer of French literary culture. People like him were conscious of a divided loyalty.  

But they had been bred to believe that there was something to it.

It did appear that the might of the French Army would prevail. Surely, the US would back its ally against Left wing Arabs? 

In the opening sequence of the movie, Pontecorvo showed that their belief was an illusion. As the future insurgents look on silently from the gaol window, an anonymous colleague, with frightening efficiency and speed, is executed in the courtyard. Civilization means the guillotine. But the pieds noirs thought the repression of the natives was incidental, not fundamental.

There is an element of truth to this. The Colonists believed that the indigenous people were tribal and lacked a sense of nationalism. They were being misled by Communist agitators who would turn the territory over to their Soviet masters. This was also a popular view in Apartheid South Africa.  

They had developed a culture, had some reason to believe in its superiority, and were concerned to protect it.

Sadly, once Egypt became Nasserite, it was obvious that more and more Algerian & Libyan & Tunisian Arabs would receive military training & plenty of weaponry. The French could either fuck off or lose a war of attrition.  

(There is a constant assumption behind Said’s writings that multiculturalism, in imperial times, was an a priori view that had to be suppressed by propaganda,

The French weren't into multi-culturalism. The Brits were.  

rather than a view which grew out of the imperial experience as a result of the contact.)

The French believed they had a civilizing mission. The Brits believed they should conserve existing institutions- more particularly if there were kingdoms. That's the reason Uganda was a Protectorate while Kenya was a Crown Colony.  

For the French in Algeria, their mission to rule by right

might, not right.  

was an understandable belief. Even Camus shared it to a certain extent: he could be single-minded in despising Nazism and communism, but he was in two minds about Algeria until his last day.

French Algerians had been there for generations. Few thought they would have to leave en masse. But most became much better off as a result.  

How would Said have had Pontecorvo film the scene in question, the one about the paratroopers arriving in Algiers like redeeming heroes at the striding heels of their suave commander?

He would have wanted him to enter humbly like Allenby entering Jerusalem. Don't forget, it was Allenby who insisted on u.d.i for Egypt in 1922. Back in the Thirties, it seemed possible that the Brits would favour the Arabs over the Jews. Sadly, Arab fanaticism- contained by Tegart- and the fiscal infeasibility of a Palestinian state meant that the Brits had to do a deal with the East European Jews whom they despised. 

Should the actor playing him have been uglier, even though Massu looked like a film star in real life? Should his dialogue have been less subtle, even though Massu was well aware that a holding action was the best that could be hoped for, and said so? Should he have been wearing a swastika armband?

No. He should have been humble, like Allenby, and flanked by Imams and local potentates wearing robes and carrying scimitars.  

Said has similar objections to the glamour of the Marlon Brando character in Pontecorvo’s other big political statement, Quemada!

A stupid film. Portugal is England's oldest ally. The Brits wouldn't try to take over a Portuguese colony. It would be cheaper to deal with the existing administration.  

The imperialist looks too good.

Film stars tend to look good. That's why my own Hollywood career never took off even though I was willing to put out to Jane Fonda.  

This bothers Said even though Quemada! like The Battle of Algiers, is scrupulous in attributing all the impetus and justification of history to the insurgents: scrupulous, relentless and disturbingly convincing for those of us who doubt the efficacy of the outcome.

It was stupid shit. That's why Turd Worlders wouldn't watch that shite.  The plain fact is, it looked like the Kremlin's neo-colonialism- not that of the Brits who, after all, had peacefully transferred power to Socialist politicians like Nehru, Nyerere etc. 

Said doesn’t doubt it, yet he detects in Pontecorvo a lingering tendency to admire the envoys of established power.

Said rejected 'established power'. He refused to remain in the US. He went to Bangladesh to help feed the starving during the 1974 famine. He also married a Trotskyite wallaby.  

The same tendency can’t be imputed to Said. One detects in him a puritanical determination to remain unsullied by the blandishments of his own cultural sympathies.

One would detect this only if one also believed that Said was working on famine relief in Bangladesh while married to a Trotskyite wallaby.  

As a critic and man of letters he has an enviable scope,

But he was a shite critic. If Said said 'x is a good film or novel' everybody understood that it was tedious shite.  

but it is continually invaded by his political strictness. It would be foolish to blame him for this.

What was foolish was to think he had any genuine political standing.  

If he had a secular Islamic intelligentsia

Secular Islamic is a fucking oxymoron. 

behind him, he could leave a share of his self-imposed task to others.

There were plenty of Ivy League cretins happy to plough his sterile farrow.  

But he is pretty much on his own, and needs his absolutism if he is to fight his battle.

i.e. his business is to say Whitey be debil.  

Though his aesthetic judgements are often finely nuanced, there can be few nuances in his basic political position, so he is easily put out when the same turns out not to be true for an established Western radical he would like to admire without reserve.

Why can't Whites just slit their own fucking throats already?  

At the end of his encounter with Pontecorvo, he is disappointed to discover that Pontecorvo

hadn't slit his own fucking throat 

has been making commercials without telling anybody. The implication is that if Pontecorvo had lived up to the seriousness of his early masterpieces, he would now be living in a tent,

like Gaddaffi?  

and proud of it. But Pontecorvo, until 1956, was a Communist, and Said has underestimated—or, rather, overestimated—the grandees of the Italian Communist intelligentsia.

Like other Arabs, he felt they had done a good enough job supporting Libyan independence, denouncing the monarchy, condemning Suez etc. The fly in the ointment was support by intellectuals like Toni Negri for the Zionist kibbutz which they considered a challenge to the Arab absentee landlord urban bourgeoisie  

Few of them ever embraced the privations of the proletariat.

The Italian proletariat was doing okay. It was the peasants in the South who faced privation.  

The Italian intellectuals of the post-war sinistra might have paid lip service to Gramsci but their true models were among the perennial left-leaning artists of Europe: the Picasso who disguised his limousine as a taxi, and the Brecht whose rough-looking blue work-shirts were tailored for him out of matted silk.

Every country had plenty of Champagne Socialists.  

The luminaries of the Italian left were concerned with taking their place in a current society, not a future one.

Some thought there would be a revolution in the Seventies and that they themselves would move into the offices and mansions of the Cabinet Ministers.  

Fundamentalism was corrupted by the temptations of civilization, and Said might eventually reach the conclusion that it would be better if the same thing could happen in the Islamic world.

Said's generation of Arab intellectuals assumed that 'Secular Socialist' Generals would rule the roost. If the bazaari Middle Class allied with the Mullahs and sought to take power, they would be slaughtered. Iran was a different case. It wasn't Arab.  

In his fine long essay “Nationalism, Human Rights and Interpretation” (appearing as chapter 36 of Reflections on Exile) there is an encouraging sign that he has already reached it.

It suddenly occurs to him that 'Secular Socialist' kleptocrats were shite. The bazaari middle class might prevail.  

He notes that the Lebanese writer Adonis,

greatly hated now because he failed to support the Syrian uprising 

like Salman Rushdie, was reviled for suggesting that a strict literalism in the reading of sacred texts kills the spirit.

Hilarious! This is like saying- 'Aleister Crowley suggested that the Archbishop of Canterbury really ought to try sodomy with a goat'.  

Said is only a step away from saying that no text is sacred.

The Quran isn't sacred for Christians. Nobody gives a toss about a Christian saying the Biblical God is a bit of a shit.  

He is brave enough to take that step: he is used to having his life threatened.

By whom?  

His other fear is the disabling one: the fear of giving aid and comfort to the automatic enemies of Islam. But one is not necessarily an enemy of Islam for saying that although all good books are holy, no book is the word of God.

Good books aren't holy.  

Even the greatest books are the work of human beings, in all their frailty. Without the frailty, there would be no art, or even any thought.

If humans weren't frail, they wouldn't be humans. They would be rocks.  

When Said saw the general up there on the screen looking so seductive, he

jizzed in his pants?  

thought that he had caught Pontecorvo in a weak moment.

what makes for good cinema is strong from the cinematic point of view 

But the weak moment was a moment of strength.

 We'd rather Count Dracula be played by a handsome actor rather than a guy who looks like me. 

Pontecorvo had asked himself: “How would I have reacted, if I had been a French Algerian, and had been there in the street for the arrival of the strongman who had come to reassure me that my life had not been wasted?”

Strong men don't have to be good looking.  

By looking into himself, he was able to see everything else: the sign of the artist.

Because he was an artist- not an actuary.  

As for Pontecorvo the ex-artist, he made those commercials

which were artistic 

in order to maintain his way of life as a figure of prestige, a man who counts.

A guy who provides for his family.  

And after all, the prestige was impressively brought into play when Pontecorvo strode forward as a headline act in the demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan.

Nobody gave a fuck.  

There he was, up there on the screen: the great director, being lavished with the camera’s admiring caresses. One imagines that Said was pleased enough to see that.

It would have been a reminder of the utter futility of his own shitty career.