AMY GOODMAN: A story by Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz begins like this: “For nearly three hours two Sundays ago, farmer Mohammed Abu Samra Zakarna sat in the vineyard [where] he works, the bodies of his wife and daughter stretched out before him. For part of that time, his young son lay crying and dying next to them. Mohammed’s hands were tied behind his back, and his pants had been taken away at the order of the soldiers who had just killed his family. It happened in [a vineyard] which Zakarna works as a tenant farmer, at the side of the Jenin bypass road, in the early morning hours, when the soldiers thought that their tank had hit a roadside bomb. Only there was no bomb, and the soldiers shot and shelled the Zakarna family, the parents and their two children, who were picking grape leaves.”

The story continues: “Every morning, they would get up at 5:20, eat a little breakfast and then go out at six to … [the] the field. … Every day, they took two of their children along and left two at home with their grandmother. … It was too hard for the grandmother to watch four children at once, so they took two of the children to the field with them. Now the only two left are Yasmin, 7, and Hilmi, 18 months.” That piece by Gideon Levy of Haaretz.

Today, as U.S. newspapers are justifiably focusing on the most recent Palestinian suicide bombing, which killed a baby girl and her grandmother and injured dozens more, we’ll take a look at representations and misrepresentations of Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims in the U.S. mainstream media. The story of the vineyard farmer received barely a mention in the U.S. press.

We’re going to spend today with a speech given by Edward Said at Chapman University in California a few weeks ago. Professor Said is a leading cultural critic and author of over a dozen books, including Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, also Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process. Edward Said is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Professor Said.

EDWARD SAID: Given the period of time that we’re living in now, especially after the atrocities of September the 11th, with a war going on, I think it’s worthwhile trying to understand the history and the context of this relationship between the U.S. and the Arabs, and Muslims, I guess, not to try to justify but to try to understand to see perhaps a wider picture than the rather more narrow picture which so far we’ve been living with on a daily basis, the idea being that — I strongly believe this — that to understand is to make life in an interdependent world livable. So, this is a — the aim of this talk is how to understand and promote coexistence.

Now, for my purposes, the Arabs are a Muslim, Christian and Jewish people whose language is Arabic, whose common culture is Islamic — they don’t have to be Muslims to have an Islamic culture — and whose geography stretches from the North African west, Morocco, to the Gulf east and includes such countries as Egypt, Sudan and Greater Syria. On the other hand, a large amount of ink and a tremendous amount of wind has been expended as to — recently, to discussing as to whether the Arabs exist as a whole and whether Arab nationalism has now either outlived its usefulness as a concept or has in fact expired completely as a movement.

My simple supposition, however, is that the Arabs, in their common political, social and intellectual culture, exist the way Europe exists, as a community, with a lot of divisions between them, as well as over 20 nation-states. But that the Arabs do exist as a discernible collectivity seems to be indisputable, although the forms of that existence are still a matter of debate. It would be impossible to speak about all this with even the most rudimentary accuracy in as small a time as I have. No one has the competence to do so, in any case, were there world enough in time. But there is, I think, considerable justification, as I suggested, for speaking in these collective terms about the Arabs, precisely because a massive tradition constituting a common culture and discourse does in fact exist and is available for discussion in such a framework as I am suggesting. The tradition and the discourse about the Arabs have been made by the Arabs themselves, as well as by Europeans and Americans and others who have discussed, studied and exchanged ideas with them. Much the same applies to the West, generally, and the U.S., in particular, geographical notions that herd under them collective identities very much a topic of recent, as well as traditional, discussion.

But it’s the two terms together that I want to look at — the Arabs and the U.S. — as each entails and involves the other at a very difficult moment. My aim will be to restore to scrutiny and evaluation the often turbulent, and therefore dimly perceived, relationship beyond that of war and terrorism and what goes with those two things, and to do so in the interest, first, of a cultural historian, which is what I am, somebody who belongs to both sides of the discussion — I’m an Arab and an American — and, second, in the hope of stimulating mixture and involvement where there’s so often been denial and distance. In any case, whether I speak of the Arabs or the U.S., it must be remembered that although these terms refer to huge and complex realities out there, both the Arabs and the U.S. are constructions. They’re not natural objects nor inert entities. They are made by men and women in history. What I shall be talking about, therefore, is the making, and often the unmaking, of these two frequently polemical and volatile structures: images and identity.

Now, we owe it to a large number of scholars to have understood that the relationship between the Christian West and the Arabs in Islam has been a tormented and, on the whole, a deeply unsatisfactory one, which I’ve talked about in my book on Orientalism. In the work of many scholars, including my own, the influence of the early Christian polemicists against Islam, beginning in the 8th and 9th century, when Islam first appeared — the influence of these early Christian polemicists who attacked Islam from Europe are traced, as well as, later on, the influence of the Crusades, the penetration and defeat of the conquering Arab armies at Poitiers, the rise and downfall of the Ottomans, the spread of European hegemony and imperialism, and, in recent times, the liberation of Algeria, the emergence of a widespread movement of so-called Muslim fundamentalism, as it has influenced states such as Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, among others, and the festering question of Palestine and the associated problem of Israel. No one who has written on these subjects from the Western point of view has been entirely free from the actual, as well as retrospective, polemics of these engagements.

In the relationship between the West and Islam and the others, there’s always been — it’s always been a topic of galvanizing interest, fascination and fear, at least since Napoleon invaded Egypt at the end of the 18th century. And since that time, Arabs and Muslims have been concerned about the role of the West in their lives and lands. There’s now also a considerable literature by and about the Arabs, in particular, who have lived the transformation of their societies since the period of one of the earliest of the princes of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, who ruled Egypt after Napoleon, until the present.

Now, this is a very cursory and far from exhaustive sketch that makes the point, for my purposes, that Arab cultural historians in the 20th century have distinguished themselves from other Muslims, not for ethnocentric reasons, let’s say, from Muslims in Turkey and Iran and Malaysia and Pakistan — not for ethnocentric reasons, but because there’s a specific quality to the relationship, to the Islamic relationship with the West and the U.S., that carries a unique charge when it comes to the Arabs. Indian, Iranian, Malaysian, Indonesian and Turkish Islam present a very different profile towards the West than do the Arab Muslims. For one, there’s a much older history of active, actual and sustained conflict between the Arabs as Arab Muslims and the West than between, say, Indians and Europeans. For another, the sheer geographic proximity of Arabs and Westerners to each other, with a series of protracted struggles and counterstruggles, from the Crusades to Suez, has made for an unusually unresolved history.

And if we look at the period of interaction between the West, generally, and the United States, in particular, between the West and America, on the one hand, and the Arabs, on the other, we will find no easily identified watersheds of reconciliation and mutuality in this history, which, from the U.S. point of view, is a very short history. And since our country is a new country, relatively speaking, it’s quite easy to sketch the first almost 200 years or 180 years of the relationship between the Arabs and the United States by saying, first, that they were introduced to each other during the period of the Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa in the late 18th century and the early 19th century, when the Marines were sent in and there were fights against the North African Arab pirates who plied the coast. Then, in the 1820s and '30s and continuing throughout the 19th century, the American missions, religious missionaries, discovered the Arab world, particularly the areas around Palestine, of the holy land. And there was a consistent interchange between the Arabs and America on religious grounds. And then, in the 1880s, and ’70s and ’80s of the 19th century, there was a kind of mania for Palestine, which is to be found — I mean, evidence of it is to be found, for example, in Mark Twain's book The Innocents Abroad, where lots of Americans went to the Middle East — in particular, Palestine, but also Egypt — to see the traces of ancient history, biblical history, history that people had grown up with but had never been to. Travel was made easier, so they went.

And that was really it. I mean, there wasn’t much of an involvement, until the period after World War I, when oil was discovered in the '20s and the ’30s, and the Americans began to take an interest in the Arab world, and especially after World War II, with the dissolution of the classical empires of Britain and France, the Americans, the United States, became the leading power, along with the Soviet Union, that remained. And, of course, American involvement in the Arab world has deepened ever since, but I would argue that it's deepened in ways that have not been terribly satisfactory.

Finally, in the popular imagination of the United States, a charge of positive enmity and antagonism occurs whenever the Arab Muslims are in question. And I think this predates 9/11. I’ll discuss later how this has given added impetus when Israel is part of the mix, but I want to say now that there’s no other culturally sanctioned antipathy with a full — again, before 9/11 — with a full repertoire of dehumanizing images, from the mad terrorist to the voluptuous yet ideologically enraged or totally passive woman and the screaming fanatic, as that directed towards the Arabs inside the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Edward Said, speaking at Chapman University in California. Back with him in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to Columbia University professor Edward Said on power, politics and culture.

EDWARD SAID: … of the present iceberg, again, before 9/11. I’ll quote for you a passage of almost casual description that crops up in an interview with Norman Mailer that appeared in May 1991 in Esquire magazine. As I say, this is before 9/11. Now, Norman Mailer, who happens to be a friend of mine, is neither an inconsequential, raving fanatic nor an uneducated, provincial bigot. He’s an important and world-famous novelist who has politically represented the very summit of contemporary American literature. What he has said about feminism, for instance, has been deeply contentious, but it’s been provocative and prejudiced in such a way as always to permit response and counterargument. With his views of the Arabs, however, there can be no discussion at all. Listen to what he says: “The Arab nation has been deprived of power for two thousand years … [They] have had two thousand years of living in the desert, fighting over nothing very tangible, until oil wells came along [very] recently. They have learned to negotiate and trick and play and maneuver and distort realities in such a way that we are encountering a mind, geopolitically speaking, that is more evil than any mind we have encountered before.”

Now, it’s hard to know where Mailer — where exactly Mailer got this description — as I say, well before 9/11 — since nothing in Mailer’s writings suggests — and I’ve read all of his works — suggests any familiarity with, much less any real knowledge of, the Arabs, their history or civilization. As a semi-crazed construction left over from the propaganda of the Gulf War, it has some plausibility. But where did he get it? It comes, I believe, from a demonized geography in which the “sand people,” the Arabs, roam as the permanent opposite and threat to everything we hold important. The string of activities he ascribes to the Arabs — “to negotiate and trick and play and maneuver and distort realities” — might as well be only one activity, so unpleasant and indiscriminate are they, and so carelessly trivial the ands that connect them to each other.

Mailer represents an elevated cultural view, and the fact that Esquire presents — prints views like his so unthinkingly, as it never would about someone articulating equally blanket condemnations of Jews, Armenians, Japanese or Afro-Americans, must also mean that there’s ample precedence for, receptivity to these views elsewhere. Hate literature as between countries at war is common enough. A depressing example during World War II between the United States and Japan is provided by John Dower in his book War Without Mercy, which is an account of the horrible hate propaganda between Japan and the United States, on both sides, went. Yet neither the West nor the U.S. was, properly speaking — and, of course, after World War II ended. But neither the West nor the United States was, properly speaking, at war with the Arabs as a people. And so the presence in metropolitan centers, like London, New York, perhaps even Paris, of a virulent anti-Arab literature is quite striking.

Ever since the middle 1970s, a flood of pamphlets, books, TV documentaries, articles, both elite and popular, has been informing an apparently receptive mass audience in English about the Arabs. And you could see this in the work of, oh, a huge number of people, which I’d be happy to talk about later, if there’s some question about it. I mean, you pick up William Safire, and he says basically tremendously racist stuff that he would say about no other people, you know, rather like the passage I read from Mailer.

So, such people who talk about the Arabs, in general, they and the discourse they elaborate and distribute have a unique and cultural legitimacy, drawn in part from the discourse of Orientalism, which took its stance, so to speak, on the inferiority of something called the Oriental mind. From contemporary commentators in America, we learn that Arabs are addicted to incest, to lying and violence of every conceivable and inconceivable kind, to deceit, hypocrisy, slavery, racism, xenophobia, as well as psychopathic and abnormal sexuality. Uncounted films and studies have by now permanently impressed the average consumer of TV news and movie entertainment that Arabs are basically terrorists, and that unlike any other people connected to monotheism, such activities as permanent war against infidels and the gratuitous abuse of women and other disadvantaged people are congenital to the Arab psyche, even though, in fact, when it comes to tolerance for other religion, the record of Arab Muslims is much better than that of Christianity.

The curious thing about such views is that they coexist with all ideologies, whether on the left or on the right. But equally regrettable, from my point of view, is that there’s no mass of literature, no fund of popular knowledge, no mobilizable discourse of means to bring in as an antidote to writings about the Arab, such as those by Mailer and many others like him. There has been some measure of success by Arab Americans in sensitizing people to the courseness of equating the word “Arab” with vagrancy, as Webster’s Dictionary did, or of openly blaming Arabs and Muslims for global violence and human degradation, you know, decades before 9/11. But this is a very far cry from having ready examples at hand for circulation that specify positive contributions of the Arabs to science, to world literature, to even so modest a thing as popular wisdom. These may exist in libraries, but the images, the values, the knowledge they represent don’t circulate. There’s a prohibition against narrating the Arab story, as it were, which in the U.S. has been equated not with a complex history of an entire people, but only with being opposed to Israel. That’s what the Arabs, in the end, are mostly known for.

A sublime instance of this quite amazing theory will remain, for me, at least, the way The New York Times announced, in October, that Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian novelist, had won the Nobel Prize for that year, for literature. The second or third sentence in the story was a quotation from the Israeli consul in New York, who, according to some, to say the least, nocturnal logic, had been solicited for his opinion — I mean, he wasn’t known as a literary critic — as if to say, “Our readers, readers of The New York Times, want to know if Israel finds this award in any way objectionable or threatening.” Generously, her certified Mahfouz as unobjectionable.

Three years later, the same newspaper of record produced a full-page bibliography for its readers who, it suggested — this is during Gulf War — might have wanted to know a little about Iraq, as well as its demonic president and its people, with whom the United States was just about to go to war. Not a single book on the very extensive list was written by an Arab or, in fact, dealt with anything about modern Iraq after Sumer and the Chaldeans.

And if I could mention one more thing also having to do with this, this is a personal experience of mine of Mahfouz. Before he won the Nobel Prize, about in the early '80s, my publisher, who was a major commercial publisher who worked for a division of Random House, asked me — he said, “You know, we'd like to publish some Third World novels, and could you give us some suggestions?” And I did. I gave him a list of about eight or nine novels, including two or three by Naguib Mahfouz, who in those days wasn’t known very well, so — plus others from Africa, some of them written in French, Spanish novels from the Caribbean and so on. And I saw him a few months later, and I said, “By the way, what have you done?” He said, “We’re going to publish some of those books.” And I said, “What about Mahfouz?” “Oh,” he said, “we can’t do that. We’re not doing any Mahfouz.” I said, “Why?” And listen to the answer — could you turn off your cellular phones, please? His answer to me is “We can’t do Mahfouz because he writes in Arabic. And Arabic,” he added, “is a controversial language.”

Now, fairness requires me to say something about the conditions and state of knowledge about the United States at the level of popular awareness in the Arab world, where, as you know from reading USA Today today, there’s a great deal of anti-Americanism. Here I shall be summary, although I want to insist that what I’m discussing are the popular and elite constructions of America, as well as the popular and elite constructions of the Arabs, rather than some stable and monolithic West or America or Arab world. The role played by institutions, by history, by interests shapes and influences what gets prominence and what does not. The power of these is critical.

In the contemporary Arab world today — let me just start with this — there is no academic institution devoted solely to the critical study of the West or the United States. Such institutions that study the United States exist in countries like Germany, China, Brazil and Russia, as befits partners, even hostile partners, in dialogue. As the largest and most powerful country with a role to play in the Arab world, the U.S. is incomparably the most written about, the most widely portrayed in the media of all foreign societies. American films, TV shows, consumer goods, magazines and popular images are to be found in profusion everywhere in the Arab world. In contrast, hardly any Arab fiction or cultural analysis is devoted to the United States. And if it is, virtually none of it is read in the United States, has any effect at all, say, in New York or Los Angeles, except amongst expatriate groups. There is, thus, even in culture, an almost absolute disparity in power. And it’s this disparity that characterizes the relationship between the Arabs and the U.S., which results, on the one hand, in a bitterness and dependency leading to Islamism or fundamentalism, in some cases, and, on the other, on the American side, in triumphalism and ignorance that are extremely depressing, especially after September the 11th.

Granted that the militaristic national security states that emerged after independence and still dominate the Arab world are not shining successes. But where, if not on their sides, did the United States position itself? Tacitly supporting the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath regimes, the Kuwaiti and Saudi oligarchies, the Moroccan throne, the Afghani mujahideen, and not, decidedly not, the movements within the Arab world for democratic and human rights, movements that could also be said to represent a secular, democratic and egalitarian expression of Arab nationalism.

Especially since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has become by far the most important and influential source of influence and power in the Arab world, and has therefore played an important role in shaping the dismal landscape that confronts any Arab today. Corrupt regimes, tyrannical regimes, inefficient, economically failing regimes — all these exist in the Arab world today. Yet no critic who talks about the Arab world can exonerate the West and the United States for at least some of the responsibility.

There is a human rights movement in the Arab world. There’s a women’s movement in every Arab country. Almost without exception, nearly every serious cultural figure in the Arab world, nearly every important writer, artist, journalist, scholar, playwright, poet, historian, essayist, filmmaker, is in opposition to governments and their alienating — to the Arab governments and their alienating, self-serving bureaucracies and official spokesmen. There’s a secular movement throughout the Arab world committed to ideas of inter-Arab cooperation, sharing of resources and responsibility, development and harmony. And yet, all of what we hear about in this country is Hamas and Hezbollah. In the Palestinian movement, if not in the Palestinian Authority, there remains a continuing fight for democracy that was once embodied in the First Intifada of the late ’80s that inspired and stimulated the courage and will of people all over the world, from Eastern Europe to South Africa to Tiananmen Square, all of whom cited the Intifada as a forerunner for what they tried to do on behalf of democracy.

In all these cases, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movements, the democracy and secular movements, we must honestly say that the U.S. either did nothing or opposed these movements. The U.S., for example, has always opposed the fight for Palestinian democracy, and, indeed, encourages Palestinian autocracy. Officially, the United States has done not one whit for the women’s movement, the movement for religious and minority freedom, the movement for freedom of expression. And, to add one more dreadful item to the list, the U.S. said nothing, before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, at the time the Saddam Hussein regime was in the process of genocidally murdering thousands of Kurds. And if we look at the wider Islamic world around the Arabs, we’ll look and we’ll see, for example, the Turkish government, which is an important ally of the United States, which illegally invaded and partitioned Cyprus 16 years before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, is actually now slaughtering Kurds with U.S. assistance, with important political and economic help from the United States. And the United States has had only the most muted criticism of Israeli occupation practices.

To repeat again, the absence of democracy and the culture of violence that now prevail in the Arab world are Arab responsibilities to rectify, but because the United States has important, even massive interests in the Arab world — obviously, oil being the central one — and has regularly intervened to protect these interests, a certain responsibility for what has taken place and continues to occur in the Arab world must also be borne by our country. I don’t pretend to have a neat, arithmetical formula for assigning responsibility — say, 65% here, 35% there — but I do know that intellectual responsibilities requires taking account of and criticizing the power of one’s own society, if, as a member of it, one knows what that society has been doing abroad as a superpower. The point, of course, is that one has a better chance of affecting U.S. policy as an American, since U.S. power, in the final analysis, is accountable to its citizens and not to foreign rulers and intellectuals. Given the situation obtaining here, however, it’s much easier, and perhaps profitable, to trash and criticize the Arabs than it is to say something critical about U.S. policy. And this is even more true after September the 11th.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Edward Said, speaking in California a few weeks ago. We’re going to go back to him. If you want to order a copy of this cassette, you can call 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. Back in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: And you’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to Columbia University professor Edward Said.

EDWARD SAID: The Arabs in the United States are not equal partners. And I believe I speak with reasonable accuracy: They are not well represented to and by each other. For those of us Arabs who live in the West, it’s a source of the most acute frustration that no achievements of our tradition and our culture are known or recognized or admitted, that there are no cultural institutions of consequences — of consequence that are dedicated to advancing appreciation and knowledge of the Arabs in the United States, for instance, that, on the whole, given official policy in the United States, now the leading power in the world, there’s an unremitting cultural war against the Arabs, who are principally, if not exclusively, known as camel jockeys, desert warriors or murderous terrorists. A whole library, constantly expanding — as I say, all of this was there well before 9/11. There’s a whole library, constantly expanding, of learned and popular works, consolidates these images with unseeking — unceasing assiduity.

I don’t know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility, for despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about the current situation argues the exact opposite. And I’ve been living here for 50 years, and I’ve never felt quite as alienated. Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI because of their ethnic profile. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behavior against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arab document in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention. As I said, if you go back to the period of 1980, it was already there, you know, that comment about Arabic as a controversial language.

And, of course, the media have run far too many experts and commentators on terrorism, Islam and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the media itself has become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be the case with the projected attack to “end Iraq,” as Paul Wolfowitz has put it. There are U.S. forces already in several countries with important Muslim populations, like the Philippines, Georgia and Somalia. The buildup against Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its collective punishment of the Palestinian people, all with what seems like great public approval in the United States.

In such a setting, therefore, it’s not surprising that there exists no available cultural narrative of the Arabs as a people, whereas this blocked human presence is in fact represented by a whole arsenal of negative, anti-human and anti-narrative stereotype which associates the Arabs with unpleasant and unpalatable things. With the sole exception of Albert Hourani’s excellent History of the Arab Peoples, the Arabs are not known as the authors of their own cultural works, and, indeed, it’s considered a dangerous thing to get an Arab man or woman to write in his or her own voice. When the occasional novel or poem is translated, it’s either relegated to immediate marginality as minor ethnic literature, or, much more likely, it’s simply ignored.

My main point is that in as peculiarly skewed and unequal a relationship as that now obtained between the Arabs and the U.S., no one can long entertain the illusion that there’s such a thing as free and open criticism or the right to say anything is available for Arabs in the U.S. It is much more, much, much more difficult to say anything positive about the Arabs than it is to attack them or to say something that dovetails with the prevailing views.

One very important contribution — and I conclude with this — to this skewed relationship between the Arab people and the people of the United States, or at least the official United States — a very important contribution to this skewed relationship is Israel, which, given its size and its not on the whole very positive contribution to the Arab world, has held an extremely, some would say inordinately, important place in bilateral relationships between the West and the Arabs, and especially the United States. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the political culture of the Arab world for at least 75 years has been structurally informed by a combination of Arab — sorry, of anger, surprise, outrage and sorrow at the fate of Arab Palestine, which fell in 1948. After 1948, that same political culture, the Arab culture, became obsessed not so much with dealing with Israel but, rather, with avoiding it, leading to myths, fantasies and highly dubious theories the work of countering its inroads against Palestinians and, in time, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians, Iraqis and Tunisians.

In the process, a large number of barbaric practices by Arab governments were endured by Arab societies, all on the grounds that they were part of the Arab fight against Zionist expansionism. These practices included a system of rule that abrogated the influence of civil society completely and, in the name of Arab nationalism, excluded, banished or deported the Jewish minorities native to the Arab world. When I went to school in the '40s as a child in Palestine and in Egypt, Jews were considered Arabs with a different religion. I mean, I come from a minority anyway. I belong to the Christian minority. But Arab Jews and Arab Christians coexisted quite naturally with Arab Muslims before 1948, until the native communities of Jews were removed. Worst of all — and I'm just recounting the sad history of what happened inside the Arab world — a cult of the army gradually overrode the once-thriving and secular culture, civil and secular culture, of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, countries who were the very core of modern Arab culture, and turned that culture into a cult of the ruler, into a system of, here and there, collective self-deception, and into a setting where extremism, fanaticism were believed to have the only chance to make a big different. This is a very big subject, of course, but it’s not my main concern here.

What I want to draw attention to is, however, that beneath this most unappealing surface of life in the Arab countries after 1948, the cause of Palestine was also a positive factor in modern Arab culture. For Arabs of my generation, Palestine was, in its loss, principally the symbolism — the symbol of a belated imperialism, and the idea of its liberation was neither an intended holocaust nor an attempt to install fascism in the Arab world, Hitler style, but, rather, it was a positive commitment to human liberation of a kind considered normal and acceptable everywhere else in the world.

I’ve always found it perplexing as to why the U.S. should consider what has euphemistically been called the Zionist experiment in Israel an instance of human idealism, a story of courage, survival and resourcefulness, even though that experiment, along the way, resulted in the destruction of an entire society, that of Palestine, Arab Palestine, and the complete dispossession of its inhabitants in 1948. By the same token, it’s just as perplexing to me that when common people struggle against invaders from across the seas who have claimed the right to settle in a land that God was said to have promised them 2,000 years ago, these natives, the Arab Palestinians, and their cause has been given so relatively paltry and uninterested a hearing in the West.

The fact is that, since 1948, the presence of Israel in the mind of the U.S. has resulted in a horrendous abnormality and distortion in Arab-American relations. Consider briefly some of the main features of this abnormality, which has lasted until this very moment. Not only did Israel dispossess the Palestinians in 1948 and destroy their society, but, since 1967, has been an occupation of Palestinian territories, where it has carried out occupation policies universally condemned and resisted outside the U.S. The sole exception to this condemnation has been in the U.S., which has continued to subsidize Israel’s vast appetite for financial aid, military and political support, without important restriction. And I should tell you that, as of this year, Israel is now the longest military occupation in modern history, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and, of course, of the Golan Heights. So disproportionate has U.S. support been for this that even a hint, even the most pusillanimous suggestion of balance or evenhandedness on the part of governments and individuals results in a storm of pro-Israeli complaint and abuse, ever ready to suggest that Israel is about to be exterminated, even as, it has been stated, U.S. policy is to maintain Israel militarily as stronger than all the Arabs combined, to the tune of $5 billion a year, by far the largest contribution in U.S. foreign aid in the history of foreign aid, plus the fact that Israel has — is a nuclear power, with anywhere, it’s estimated, between 200 and 500 nuclear warheads, plus the most advanced air force anywhere outside of the United States, and a navy and an army of redoubtable force.

It’s been bad enough for Palestinians to lose their land and to be treated as third-class aliens in what little remain of it for them to live on. What has been worse is the criminalization of Palestinian resistance to Israel in the United States and, along with that, the extraordinary and flourishing idea that Arab attitudes to Israel, especially Palestinian attitudes to Israel in resisting the occupation, are radically antisemitic and terroristic. So that one of the great problems, which Israel, since September 11th, has been exploiting — for the Palestinians, the problem has been that Israel has identified its collective punishment of the Palestinians with the U.S. campaign against Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, both of them wars against terrorism, completely effacing the fact that Palestinian resistance to military occupation is a right guaranteed under the United Nations Charter, and it’s very different from the terrorism of bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

So, as a result, this disproportionate relationship between the Arabs and the United States, because of this tremendous concern with Israel — some would say exaggerated concern — it’s not only poisoned relationships between the Arabs and the United States, but it’s also fostered the rather maddening habits of ignoring, indeed sweeping aside, reality, common sense and fact almost entirely. Like many of you here, I was, until recently, a watcher of television, for years and years. I’ve now stopped. How many times — how many times have you seen a reporter on the U.S. media asking a Palestinian a question either about Palestinian terrorism or about Arab unwillingness to accept Israel or Arab inability to satisfy Israel’s security fears or Arab unwillingness to deal with Israeli psychological fear? Too many times to count. That’s all they ever ask. And this despite pictures on the very same screen of Israeli soldiers beating and killing Palestinian women and children or bombing refugee camps, which happened today — 11 Palestinians were killed today — or rounding up huge numbers of Palestinians like so many sheep. The evidence simply carries no weight. Nobody pays any attention to it. Let us grant that Yasser Arafat is a terrorist and that he’s responsible for many deaths, gratuitously and enjoyably. Let’s assume that that’s true. Even if you grant that, it passes understanding that no Israeli military or political leaders — even Sharon — is ever asked questions like, “When are you going to give up terrorism?” or “Why do you feel that Arabs should be killed?” or “Why,” in the words of Rafael Eitan, the ex-head of the army, “why should you compare Palestinians to drugged cockroaches in a bottle?” Israeli reporters often ask questions like that of their own politicians, but not American media stars, who sit before an Israeli personality as if he or she were some Olympian, extrahuman creature in whose mouth snow would not melt, despite all the evidence, despite the very information.

It’s very important not to be misunderstood here. I’m not saying that Arabs are innocent or that shouldn’t be used in political or cultural discourse, nor am I saying that the fault is entirely the United States. I only reject these — I not only reject these notions, but I consider them stupid and mindless. There is no monolithic U.S., just as there is no monolithic Arab world or Islam, which has now been compressed into one rather narrow and unforgiving all-purpose formula, signifying terrorism, fundamentalism and fanaticism. I would simply quote Hamlet when he tells Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by your philosophy.” I would say the Arab world and America are much more than the battle over terrorism. Everything I’ve said here — and I conclude — points to precisely the unfortunate triumph of all these idiotic, superreal and atrophied labels in which, in the Arab world, the U.S. has become shorthand for all our ills, and in the United States the Arabs have become a universal symbol of violence, intransigence and anti-Americanism. The result promises to be unending conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: Columbia University professor Edward Said, speaking recently in California. If you’d like to order a cassette copy of today’s show, you call 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. Our website is www.democracynow.org. Democracy Now! produced by Kris Abrams, Miranda Kennedy and Lizzy Ratner. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.