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- [00:00]
Eli Lake
Hello, Breaking history listeners. We have some really exciting news. Starting this month, we have new columnists joining our team at the Free Press, to name a Tyler Cowan, Coleman Hughes, Matthew Continetti, Martin Gorey, Bhatya Ungar Sargon, Jed Rubenfeld. And that's in addition to the regular columnists you've already come to love, like Nellie Bowles, myself, Eli Lake, Peter Savodnik, Jay Solomon, and so many others. Why are we bringing more people in? Well, right now we are navigating a media landscape that's filled with rage, bait, TikTok clips, and newsrooms that seem to only create echo chambers. While we're doing something different, we are expanding our team of people who can bring you a nuanced and balanced perspective so you can think for yourself. We couldn't do this without the support of our paid subscribers. If you believe in this mission, go to the fp.com and subscribe today. One year on from the massive pro Palestinian demonstrations and occupation of Colombia's 128-year-old campus, one protester's placard sticks in my head. It reads, columbia, why require me to read Professor Edward Said if you don't want me to use it? This placard is referring to one of the most famous and influential academics in the last 50 years, and the question it asks gets to the very heart of the Columbia protests and the wave of anti Israel enmity that has consumed colleges for the last year and a half. Edward Said's most important book, Oranalysm, has irrevocably changed universities since it was published nearly a half century ago. After the break, how that book was the intellectual kindling for the Tentifada that burns today. Hi, I'm Eli Lake. I want to tell you about a great podcast that I think you'll appreciate, Unpacking Israeli History, hosted by Noam Weissman. If you read the headlines about Israel, you're only getting a tiny slice of a long and complicated story without depth, context, or sometimes even the basic facts. Much like breaking history, Unpacking Israeli History uncovers the history behind the headlines. Diving into the fascinating and sometimes controversial events and figures that have shaped Israel's past and present, Noem examines each subject from a variety of perspectives, leaning into the complexities and layers around topics like how the state of Israel was founded and debates around the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So if you're looking for a nuanced, thought provoking take on Israel, one that avoids the oversimplifications and political spin, you'll love this show. Find Unpacking Israeli history wherever you listen to your podcasts or watch it on YouTube. Looking for your next binge? Meet Chaiflix your go to streaming platform for incredible award winning series and movies from Israel and across the diaspora. Their latest series is called Family Therapy and it's a delightfully quirky Jewish comedy from Argentina about two married therapists who decide to split up but still work together. From groundbreaking stories to unforgettable performances, Chi Flix has it all. Use promo code lake for a 50% discount on your annual subscription when you sign up@highflix.com that's C H A I F L I c k s.com Almost exactly a year ago in April 2024, Columbia University became a battlegr. A huge mob of masked rioters broke into an academic building and rebranded the iconic Alexander Hamilton hall by draping its walls with a giant flag calling for Intifada. It was now Hindhall, named for Hind Rajub, a five year old girl whose lifeless body was found in Gaza's rubble. The scene inspired the mid Wall rapper Macklemore to record a song, yeah, the people, they won't leave. What is threatening about divesting a wanted peace? The problem isn't the protest, it's what they're protesting. It goes against what our country is funding. Block the barricade until Palestine is free. Block the barricade until Palestine is free. It all felt a bit Les Mis. Metal barricades were erected, strengthened with chairs and tables to block authorities from entering. A video showed one hammer wielding demonstrator smashing through a glass panel door and locking it with a bike lock. We later learned that an unlucky janitor was taken hostage by a 40 year old trust fund kid who wasn't even a Columbia student. Every conflict has its side. Every war has its protesters. But these were not peace demonstrations, nor were the students arguing for a two state solution. The mobs were calling for the negation of Israel. The slogans chanted echo the language of Hamas, the author of the October 7th atrocities.
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Unknown Speaker
The River Tennessee Palestine will be free. Palestine will be free.
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Eli Lake
This campus tension has continued, even escalated under the Trump administration. First there was the attempted deportation of one of the protest leaders. Developing story on the campus of Columbia University, a student connected to pro Palestinian protests last year has been detained by ice. And then in March this year, Trump gave an ultimatum to Columbia make my reforms or lose your funding. The Ivy League school was given a month to comply or risk losing around $400 million from the federal government. A lot of developments. There were nine demands from the federal government, the Trump administration giving the university an ultimatum. The reforms demanded were far reaching. Face masks must be banned. Protesters will be required to identify themselves, security officers with special powers to arrest students are to be appointed, and departments offering courses on the Middle east are to be reviewed and overseen by a new senior provost. That last one felt particularly unusual. Specifically, the Justice Department is demanding that Columbia place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department into academic receivership for five years. This is the academic equivalent of martial law, effectively removing intellectual authority from the faculty and placing it in the hands of a cherry picked outsider. Columbia told the government it would comply. But as the Free Press's Maya Sulkin first reported, the university's president has also promised the faculty that nothing would change. And how did the students respond? How do you think? A mass group once again stormed the gates of the campus.
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Unknown Speaker
The Student Workers of Columbia, a union.
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Eli Lake
For teaching assistants and researchers, protested outside the school's main entrance Monday. Among the demands they want Columbia to.
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Unknown Speaker
Become a sanctuary campus.
- [07:31]
Eli Lake
Is it at all strange that a conflict in the Middle east is defining our political moment? Because, well, it is. How has the Palestinian cause become as central to students today as the Vietnam War was in the 1960s? Well, it didn't happen overnight. The roots of this revolution at Columbia and throughout the elite universities can be traced back to the publication in 1978 of a volume called Orientalism. Its author was Edward Said, one of the first activist scholars of his era, to show how much it has remained important. By the way, my producers went to the Columbia campus armed with a copy of the book to speak to students. I like Said a lot. I mean, that's like pretty foundational the way that I think about history, for sure. It's a really, really important read. Orientalism is a book about how the west views the east, specifically how European historians, thinkers and artists portray Arab and Muslim peoples and cultures. Like their mentor Said, they are following the tradition of the activist intellectual. It all brings things back to that famous if you're going to teach Said, why can't I use it? Said argues that the stories told in the west about the east are intertwined with imperialism and presume a Western superiority. The east is painted in an exotic light considered primitive and scary, reducing ancient complex civilizations to dehumanizing caricatures that help justify the colonial theft and exploitation of their lands. Even great artist and novelist were infected by this prejudice.
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Unknown Speaker
Good afternoon, Dr. Jones.
- [09:11]
Eli Lake
I ought to kill you right now. It can be hard to understand without an example. So for Argument's sake. Let's take Indiana Jones, a hat wearing, whip cracking Orientalist of the highest order. Indy is cool. The Nazis are scary. But what about the people from North Africa or Shanghai? The cultures and individuals who provide the backdrop for Indy's thrilling battles with the Third Reich? Well, Arab characters are largely monstrous and they can be murdered as the punchline to a joke. Indian royalty aren't much better serving live snakes, beetles and other delicacies for dinner.
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Unknown Speaker
Chilled a monkey brains.
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Eli Lake
In Raiders of the Lost Ark there's even a one eyed Egyptian who can talk to monkeys. Look, I love these movies but if you're looking for Orientalism, this is Orientalism.
- [10:19]
Unknown Speaker
The British worry so about their empire. Makes us all feel like well cared for children.
- [10:27]
Eli Lake
But Said wasn't writing about Hollywood adventure movies. He was interested in academia at universities like Columbia. His books claim that the Orientalist perspective was so deeply buried in academic culture that in order to cleanse universities of colonial racism, it was necessary for Said and his followers to kick out the old guard and rewrite the rulebook on the very way that cultures and histories are studied. Orientalism was a hand grenade tossed into the academy, the effects of which are still felt to this day. Here is the man himself explaining how the story the west tells about Arabs is a way to dehumanize them.
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Unknown Speaker
It's a tragedy virtually impossible for an American to see on television, to read books, to see films about the Middle east that are not colored politically by this conflict in which the Arabs almost always play the role of terrorists. Violent people.
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Eli Lake
I'm Eli Lake and you are listening to Breaking History. After the break, how a literary critic raised in Cairo and Jerusalem radicalized America's elite universities and inspired the campus Intifada.
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Unknown Speaker
All the opportunity at our university we are not impressed. Consider us our friends the 10th of father on the quad from river to the sea we pledge allegiance to jihad so Palestine is free to read for gold we read Said tell us to resist we you hate the state of Israel and every Zionist. Do what we say, we won't go away. Do what we say, we won't go away.
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Eli Lake
Edward Said was born into a Christian family in western Jerusalem when it was still part of British Mandate Palestine. His father, Wadi Said, had become an American citizen after fighting for the U.S. army in World War I. By the time Edward was born, Wadi had built a successful stationery business in Cairo. The family was wealthy. They owned homes in Jerusalem, in Cairo and would often spend their summers in the hills of Lebanon. Said was sent to Victoria College, a British academy modeled On Eton. One of the older boys during his time at Victoria was the actor Omar Sharif, famous for starring in the brilliant but frankly orientalist Lawrence of Arabia.
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Unknown Speaker
Is it that you think we are something you can play with because we are little people, silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel?
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Eli Lake
He bullied young Edward and flogged him in front of his classmates. Floggings aside, Edward led a life of privilege, becoming a prodigious pianist. His favorite composer was chopin. Said was 13 years old during what Palestinians would call the Nakba and what Israelis called the War of independence in 1948. But his parents refused to engage in politics. His mother never spoke about the catastrophe of five Arab states, not to mention Palestinian militias losing a war to a scrappy underdog army of Jews. Edward Said was a US citizen by dint of his patronage for the last two years of high school. His family sent him to Mount Hermon Academy in Western Massachusetts. He excelled, attending Princeton and then later Harvard where he earned his PhD. He then landed a teaching position at Columbia in its English department. In 1967, as American students around him protested the war in Vietnam, Said's attention was elsewhere. Said was discovering that he wanted to be a Palestinian. From the us he watched the Six Day War for the third time since.
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Unknown Speaker
Its birth as an independent state, Israel is embroiled in a war with the Arab nations that surround her. Her forces are outnumbered two to one. So to allow every able bodied Israeli to meet the challenge, Jews from overseas have come to give their support in work and in blood.
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Eli Lake
This is how Edward Said describes it in his 1999 memoir, out of Place. Place.
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Unknown Speaker
I was no longer the same person after 1967. The shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine. I subsequently entered the newly transformed Middle Eastern landscape as a part of the Palestinian movement that emerged in Amman and then in Beirut in the late 60s through the 70s. This was an experience that drew on the agitated, largely hidden side of my prior life. The anti authoritarianism, the need to break through an imposed and enforced silence. Above all, the need to draw back to a sort of original state of what was irreconcilable, thereby shattering and dispelling an unjust establishment order.
- [15:24]
Eli Lake
Now we should say Said wrote this in the twilight of his life. At age 64, he would die four years later of leukemia. But in this passage he's telling on himself. The 1967 war was the beginning of what many today would call Israel's occupation. But that would be a very long fuse. It In 1967, the war was a miraculous story of survival. Israel had fended off three Arab armies. Indeed, Egypt's strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser threatened to drive the Jews into the sea. And yet it's this failure to extinguish the Jewish state that curiously awakens Said's anti authoritarianism. Said was no longer satisfied with a safe career as a quiet academic interpreting text and giving lectures. He wanted to be part of a wider cause, and that cause would be the liberation of Palestine. We are listening now to Yasser Arafat's famous 1974 speech before the United Nations General Assembly. It's the one where he pleaded, today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. Said helped to translate that speech into English and provided ideas for the team of Arafat advisors who wrote it. He emerged in this period of the 1970s as one of those trusted advisors to Arafat and his inner circle. Eventually, he would be elected as an independent member of Arafat's Palestinian National Council, which served as a quasi legislature for his regime in exile. His role was unique. He did not conform to the type. Rather than the checkered headdress known as the kaffiyeh chosen by Arafat, Said dressed in the uniform of a British aristocrat with his tailored sports coats, silk ties and custom French shirts, Said believed that the people of the Middle east should build their own image, write their own histories and tell their own stories and not accept the roles assigned to them by the West. This was the central insight in his groundbreaking book, Orientalism. He wrote that book between 1973, the year that Israel again fended off Arab armies that nearly succeeded in driving the Jews into the Sea, and 1977, a dark period for the professor when he felt that the world had largely abandoned the Palestinian cause. He was becoming an activist intellectual. Here is the man himself again, reflecting on his process of writing the book in a 1998 interview.
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Unknown Speaker
Well, my interest in Orientalism began for two reasons. One was an immediate thing, that is to say, the Arab Israeli War of 1973, which had been preceded by a lot of images and discussions in the media and the popular press about how the Arabs are cowardly and they don't know how to fight and they're always going to be beaten because they're not modern. And then everybody was very surprised when the Egyptian army crossed the canal in early October of 1973 and demonstrated that, you know, like anybody else, they could fight. So that was one immediate Impulse. And the second one, which has a much longer history in my own life, was the constant sort of disparity I felt between what my experience of being an Arab was and the representations of that that one saw in art. I mean, I'm talking about very great artists, you know, like Delacroix and Ingres and Jerome and people like that, novelists who wrote about the Orient, you know, like Disraeli or Flaubert, and, you know, the fact that those representations of the Orient had very little to do with what I knew about my own background in life. So I decided to write the history of that.
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Eli Lake
Now, to 21st century ears, this doesn't seem particularly profound. He sounds like he's observing what many minorities have felt at various times. The stereotypes about my group are all wrong. If you want to understand the Jews or the blacks or the gays or whoever, why not ask them to write about themselves? Don't let the oppressor define the people he is oppressing. But Orientalism was also making a deeper point. And Said here applied the insights a French theorist, Michel Foucault. It was a spectacularly influential book. But the fundamental idea in Orientalism, which Edward got from Foucault, this is Said's on again, off again friend Leon Wieseltier, who spoke to me about Orientalism and Said's legacy. The fundamental idea, of course, was that knowledge is power and that objectivity is really not possible. That knowledge, your representation of a part of the world or of any subject, is a reflection, directly or indirectly, latently or manifestly, of your interests. And that's the way literary text should be read, which is to say they should be ready in terms of the relations of power that they reveal or conceal. Now, this is all a bit complex, so let me try to explain. Foucault's influence on Said was the idea that objective truth is a delusion. Any writer of history or journalism or fiction writes from their own perspective, coloring it with what today is known as unconscious bias. The only thing the writer is really doing is, is revealing the writer's perspective. And that perspective is a manifestation of the power dynamics that define the limits of what can and cannot be knowable. Basically, if you write a history of me, Eli Lake, what you're really writing is a history of your ideas about Eli Lake. It has little to do with the real me, the real Eli Lake. Said's book, Orientalism took these ideas and pointed them at the historians of the Middle east from the United Kingdom, France and America. These were mainly non Arab and Non Muslims explaining and characterizing people that their nation states, Said would say, were in the process of dominating. The histories they wrote, therefore were an extension of this conquest. Said would argue that the only thing you could gain from studying the work of Western historians of the Middle east, who he would call the Orientalists, was how the west saw the Middle East. For most people, Foucault's theories are interesting, but not very useful. We usually read books to read what the author has to say. A literary critic like Said, though, seeks to uncover the hidden meaning of an author's work. This was a fairly radical idea in 1978. Today, it's how most of the humanities conducts its scholarship. One of my favorite explanations of this postmodern approach to reading is from Whit Stillman's brilliant 1992 film Barcelona.
- [22:40]
Unknown Speaker
Maybe you can clarify something for me.
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Eli Lake
Since I've been, you know, waiting for.
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Unknown Speaker
The fleet to show up.
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Eli Lake
I've read a lot, really. And one of the things that keeps cropping up is this about subtext.
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Unknown Speaker
Plays, novel, songs, they all have a subtext, which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind.
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Eli Lake
So, subtext we know, but what do you call the message or meaning that's.
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Unknown Speaker
Right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what's above the subtext? The text. Okay, that's right, but they never talk about that.
- [23:16]
Eli Lake
Edward Said was a subtext guy. Edward famously wrote about Mansfield park, about Jane Austen's novel, again, this is Leon Weaseltier, that it was really all about the plantation holdings in the West Indies of the Eminence in the story. Unfortunately, none of the story takes place in West Indies, and they're not mentioned. I don't believe once so he Said, that it's really about what's not there, which is one way to read texts, a paranoid way to read texts. This may sound all very intellectual to you, very dry, highbrow, but at the same time, it was big news. Orientalism made Said a star. Based in the world capital of media, New York City, Said became a go to guest for news chat shows. This was the era of television. Intellectual celebrities, William F. Buckley, Christopher Hitchens, Noam Chomsky, Said fit into this constellation. Naturally, back then, as now, the Middle east was in eternal turmoil, an endless font of breaking news that needed to be explained to an American audience. And Said became one of the key voices of explanation. And in this context, Orientalism became a part of the new canon. This changed the very nature of Middle east studies.
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Unknown Speaker
The idea would be that Middle Eastern studies, which until then had been conceived of as an area studies field, that is a study of a certain region, should now be understood as an area of ethnic studies.
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Eli Lake
This is Middle east historian and professor at Tel Aviv University, Martin Kramer.
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Unknown Speaker
And now Orientalism. One of the main arguments of Orientalism is that all Westerners approach the east with prejudice, that is it's ingrained in their culture. And just as some had argued that anti Semitism was intrinsic to Europe and the Christian West. So he basically took that idea and in a way, academically weaponized it. Because it could then be said that if you wanted to appoint someone to the faculty who you were sure was not tainted by this prejudice, the way to do it was to appoint someone who was either an Arab or a Muslim a victim of this prejudice, then you knew you weren't getting an Orientalist. Also, following on what you the point you just made, it created a logic, a rationale for preferential treatment, affirmative action, if you will, for Arab and Muslim scholars in Middle Eastern studies, something which had not existed up to that point.
- [26:00]
Eli Lake
Yes, Orientalism basically made the argument against universities hiring Western experts on the Middle east full stop. Edward Said was writing with a hammer. He was shattering the old consensus and discrediting the thinkers who preceded him. He was bound to make enemies. But there was one enemy who stood apart. In the penultimate chapter of Orientalism, Said found and labeled a villain, his contemporary, Bernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis wrote groundbreaking histories of the Ottoman Empire and the expansion of the first caliphates into Europe. He served at MI6 in Istanbul during World War II. And he was at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, where Albert Einstein once hung his hat. Bernard Lewis was the last great Orientalist. Said and Lewis hated each other. In the 1994 afterward to Orientalism, Said described Lewis as a, quote, politically motivated and hostile witness, end quote, to the subject of his scholarship, Islamic and Middle Eastern history. Lewis, who spoke 15 languages, was an institution. He had little time for fancy postmodern intellectuals. He was a historian. He grappled with interpreting and understanding the past on its own terms. When Orientalism came out in 1978, Bernard Lewis dismissed it. Here is Martin Kramer again.
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Unknown Speaker
I was Lewis's student at the time, and when Orientalism first appeared, his attitude was that this will just blow over. The book is so bad that there's no way that it can gain any traction.
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Eli Lake
Well, it didn't blow over. And so in 1982, Lewis published a review of Orientalism in the New York Review of Books. In it, he picks apart Said's book, pointing out inaccuracies, poor translations and a tendency to cherry pick sources in one of the most trenchant lines. Lewis, a historian of science, is not expected to be a scientist, but he is expected to have some basic knowledge of the scientific Alphabet. Similarly, a historian of Orientalism, that is to say, the work of historians and philologists should have at least some acquaintance with the history and philology with which they were concerned. Mr. Said shows astonishing blind spots. Said would not take this lying down, so he responded to Lewis two months later in the New York Review of Books with a review of the Lewis Review, as it were. It was scathing.
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Unknown Speaker
Lewis's verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong.
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Eli Lake
Again, Lewis responded publicly and ended up with a last word. He started his response with, it is difficult to argue with a scream of rage. These two men represented the past and the future of Middle Eastern studies, and they were on a collision course after the break. Edward Said meets Bernard Lewis face to face in Boston. It's very rare in academic history that an important debate is actually captured on film. Most of the time, the disputes between scholars are conducted in the driest possible prose and journals only a few dozen people read. But on November 22, 1986, Tufts University hosted a significant debate which would underline the power of Orientalism. At stake was the credibility of the establishments in Middle Eastern history that had dominated universities in Europe and America for nearly 200 years. In one corner, looking to bury those traditions was Edward Said, and by his side was a ringer, the great intellectual journalist Christopher Hitchens. Their opponents that morning were the literary editor of the New Republic, Leon Weaselteer, and Bernard Lewis, the great rival of Said's life. This debate is an encapsulation of a changing of the guard. Louis, for years had rightly enjoyed his reputation as the best and most respected of the Middle east scholars. But Said's critique was becoming the new conventional wisdom in this world. Bernard Lewis, an old fashioned white English Jew, had no place explaining Arab history in the audience. That day was the cutting edge of their field. And at least to this crowd, Bernard Lewis was looking like yesterday's man. Unfortunately, he didn't do his side any favors. The debate was a disaster for the old master. As he stumbled, so did the centuries of history that he represented. Even Lewis's proteges acknowledge this. Here is Ruel Marc Gorecht, who studied with Lewis at Princeton and maintained a friendship with him until he died at the age of 102, certainly cosmologically, he thought he lost the debate. I mean, we never discussed his debate performance. He could be a little bit animated about that day, but he certainly understood that it had not gone brilliantly. This is a snippet of Lewis opening remarks.
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Unknown Speaker
In the course of the centuries long confrontation, certain traditional attitudes have evolved on.
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Eli Lake
Both sides among Western visitors to the.
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Unknown Speaker
Middle east for many, many centuries now. Two stereotypes predominate. The one political, that of arbitrary despotism, the other, shall we say, personal, that.
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Eli Lake
Of unbridled sexual power.
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Unknown Speaker
The one relating to the sultan's palace, the other to the women's quarters of that palace.
- [31:33]
Eli Lake
Arbitrary despotism, unbridled sexual power. Ugh. For a minute he sounded a little bit like this.
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Unknown Speaker
Good afternoon, Dr. Jones. I ought to kill you right now.
- [31:44]
Eli Lake
He was there to argue that Middle Eastern identity was safe in the hands of outsider historians. But he was doing a good job for a bit of looking exactly like the kind of condescending Orientalist who Edward Said argued had distorted the field. Even Lewis's debate partner, Leon Wieseltier, thought the great man had flubbed it. And Bernard, I have to say, let down the side because some minutes into his presentation, he said something. This is not an exact quote, but he said something like he talked, mentioned something about, I don't know, nefarious Arab men and salacious Arab women or something. And I said, I thought. I looked at him and I thought, whose side are you on? I mean, really, you don't have to come here as one of Edwards 19th century orientalists. Now, in fairness, Lewis was trying to describe a stereotype that he rejects. As anyone who has spent time with his books knows, Lewis is a careful and sensitive observer, but he did a bad job. And by the time he closed his argument, he'd veered into a kind of surrealism.
- [32:49]
Unknown Speaker
You will probably say, yes, that's apple pie. To which I would answer, maybe. But don't forget we are living in a time when apple pie is under attack, when we are told that since perfect apple pie is impossible, we should eat raw dough and crab apples, arm.
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Eli Lake
The bakers, hide the custard. Apple pie is under attack. He didn't even get to finish.
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Unknown Speaker
I apologize for interrupting before you finish, Professor Lewis, but if I'm to observe the rules, this is the necessity.
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Eli Lake
Professor Said, Edward Said rose to the podium and got straight to the point.
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Unknown Speaker
There is no abstract knowledge. All of it is situated relative to other scholarship, to the realities of distribution and circulation, to the social institutions, rhetorical traditions, methodological procedures of the field, as well as to the political interests and the facts of power and dominance in a given society at given periods.
- [33:45]
Eli Lake
What was happening here was very significant. Said was erecting the tombstone for the rights of certain historians to cover certain histories. In its place he was building the academic space we live in today. This was the fuse that led to Columbia's explosion in 2024. Said succinctly listed what he considered to be the false tropes presented by the American media.
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Unknown Speaker
Roughly speaking, there are a small handful of essential thematic clusters in today's media coverage of the Middle East. 1 the pervasive presence of generally Middle Eastern, more particularly Arab or Islamic terrorists, Arab or Islamic terrorist states and groups, as well as a terrorist network comprising Arab and Islamic groups and states backed by the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua. Terrorism here is most often characterized as congenital, not as having any foundation in grievances, prior violence, or continuing conflicts.
- [34:38]
Eli Lake
He continues with a long list of slanders the Western press has leveled about Arabs and Muslims. And then he says this but that.
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Unknown Speaker
The picture of the contemporary and even the historical Middle east is misrepresented tendentiously I shall not leave to your charity. I shall say it myself. It is a deeply flawed, deeply antagonistic, deeply uninformed and uninforming view that regulates what is covered and what is not covered. But to a considerable degree it has worked, and this is the shameful part because of the active collaboration of a whole Kadravsky scholars, experts and abettors drawn from the ranks of the Orientalist and special interest lobbies, among whom one the Zionist lobby, has garnered a vastly disproportionate strength, given that Israel in the Middle east contains only 4 million inhabitants.
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Eli Lake
Remember, this is 1986. Nearly 40 years later, one hears the same tired arguments from elite professors about the collusion between the media and what Said calls the Zionist lobby. Said was building the future. There were, of course, two other people in that debate, and we should look at them as well, mostly because it's illustrative of the changes that ended up forging the current academic establishment. When Christopher Hitchens rose to the podium, he drew blood from Leon Wieseltier and attacked his publication the New Republic directly.
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Unknown Speaker
Where did the following appearance description of a play at the American Repertory Theatre in this town, even less of the universalist prejudices of our culture prepared us for this play's Arab. A crazed Arab, to be sure, but crazed in the distinctive ways of his culture. He is intoxicated by language, cannot discern between fantasy and reality, abhors compromise, always blames others for his predicament, and in the end lances the painful boil of his frustrations in a pointless though momentarily gratifying act of bloodlust. That is a signed comment by the owner and editor of the New Republic. I disagree with you, Leon. I'm sorry, I don't believe that could appear about an Indian or an African in any other magazine in this country. I don't think it would be tolerated.
- [36:44]
Eli Lake
For an instant, Leon was not happy. Christopher did something that I didn't forgive him for a long time. He reached into a briefcase at one point and pulled out the most egregiously anti Arab sentences that had appeared in the New Republic. And there had been some. God knows I had authored none of them and I had published none of them in my pages because being a Zionist does not mean that I have to despise Arabs. And he started reading these things and I was just livid. In some ways, that debate in which Said and Hitchens prevailed only confirms what the world already knew that the Bernard Lewis school of Middle Eastern scholarship in the west was on its way out. By the end of 1986. Said's case that the conventional scholarship of Islam and the Arab world was hopelessly racist had already won the day inside the academy. Nonetheless, it was an important milestone, a confirmation that at least inside the ivory tower, the Western gays would now be interrogated and attacked, to borrow the language of these now ascendant postmoderns. But this is only half the story, because while Said won the debate inside the faculty lounge, the real world was not complying with his elaborate theories. And here I must acknowledge I am biased on this matter. I began reading Bernard Lewis After 911 as a young national security reporter. I met him a few times and I think his work is essential to understanding Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle east in general. If you want to understand why a thinker like Lewis is still very much worth reading today, just consider the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Today's fighting was equally fierce, with equivalent results here. Tehran pro government riot police defending their own headquarters had superior firepower to their pro revolution attackers. Less than a year after Said released Orientalism, Shia fanatics took over Iran. The American Embassy was taken hostage and their leader, Ayatollah Khomeini claimed power. He replaced a Western backed despot with an Islamic tyranny so vicious that even dog walking was banned. Now readers of Bernard Lewis at the time would have known that political Islam was on the rise. In January 1976 he wrote an essay called the Return of Islam that posed the prescient question whether a resurgent Islam would tolerate a Jewish or Christian enclave in the Middle East. Well, the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran shows that of course it would not just consider the regime's support for the terrorists and militias that keep attacking Israel and have driven so many of Lebanon's Christians into exile or hiding. Said, however, did not concern himself with the actual events in Iran so much as the discourse that emerged around them. He was unprepared to explain the revolution that year, in 1979 on its own terms. His writings on it focus on what he deems to be the biased Western media coverage of a revolution that was more an expression, in his view, of anti imperialism than an embrace of violent theocracy. In reality it was both. But in Said's mind there was no space for the idea that perhaps the coverage of the Iranian revolution made it seem like the revolutionaries were a bunch of violent fanatics because, well, frankly a lot of them were a bunch of violent fanatics. Said's obsession with the discourse of the west blinded him to the realities of the East. And Said's failure to explain the rise of political Islam and its role in the Islamic revolution in Iran is a failure that has been emulated over and over again by his many programs proteges. After 9 11, for example, when Muslim fanatics steered hijacked planes into the World Trade center and the Pentagon, the academy was largely caught flat footed. It was Lewis and the other intellectual journalists that were outside of the universities that provided the critical understanding to the public of the history of Islamic fundamentalism. At the same time, though, Said's impact was stronger than ever inside the universities. Take for example, the concept of Islamophobia. Said did not use the term himself, but orientalism and his 1981 book covering Islam were really the important intellectual contributions to this idea that's prevalent today in most news organizations and for a while at least dictated the parameters of the debates even after 9 11. And to prove this point, just consider George W. Bush's remarks after Al Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Six days after that catastrophe, the American president appeared at a mosque in Washington D.C. with Muslim leaders and said this.
- [41:36]
Unknown Speaker
The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Quran itself. In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that, they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule. The face of terror is not the true face of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.
- [42:07]
Eli Lake
Now, it's bizarre to claim that the American president who invaded Iraq and Afghanistan was influenced by Said, but the message of Orientalism had clearly filtered into Israel, the talking points of the president. He was not going to be seen to judge Islam itself. To be seen to do so was unacceptable for a president at the time. 23 years after the publication of Orientalism. Now, here is the greatest irony of this story. In the years since that debate at Tufts, Said's former wingman Christopher Hitchens underwent his own dramatic transformation in the other direction.
- [42:48]
Unknown Speaker
You can't complain because you're Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture as if it was an accusation of race hatred, for example, or bigotry. Whereas it's only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion. Resist it while you can.
- [43:08]
Eli Lake
That was the Hitchens of 2009, arguing a position the Hitchens of 1986 would have skewered at that debate at Tufts University. Over time, Hitch would say his bag had shifted. The spark was the fatwa on his friend Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. That bounty enraged Hitchens, who would allow his friend to stay at his Washington apartment as he tried to hide from the Ayatollah's assassins. It was 9 11, though. That was the final straw. Like Bernard Lewis, Christopher Hitchens would become a proponent of the Iraq war, and he was scorned by his old comrades on the left for taking that position. However, as much as the Middle east has changed since the publication of Orientalism, the universities, and in particular Columbia, remain frozen in Amber. In 2025, the faculty is still a reflection of Said's vision of the colonized people talking back to empire, so to speak. Jess perused the offering of its Middle east studies department. One of its professors, Joseph Massad, published an op ed for the website Electronic Intifada the day after the October 7th pogrom that read, quote, perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and and its ability to protect them. End quote. He is teaching a course on the history of Zionism this semester. Well, of course he is in any institution.
- [44:40]
Unknown Speaker
The faculty set the agenda and set the tone.
- [44:43]
Eli Lake
This is Martin Kramer again, and we.
- [44:45]
Unknown Speaker
Were to some extent misled during the encampments because we saw the students up front, See the faculty, they were behind the lines. They weren't there. This was a student Protestant. The student mobilization. Those students would have been at Columbia if it weren't for the faculty that Edward Said empowered at Columbia. And those faculty had been advocating for those students to create a wall of protection around them in the inner sanctums of Columbia's administration from the get go.
- [45:15]
Eli Lake
Like their mentor Said, they are following in the tradition of the activist intellectual. It all brings things back to that famous placard. So if you're going to teach Said.
- [45:26]
Unknown Speaker
Then Said is all about the activist.
- [45:29]
Eli Lake
Intellectual, not scholar, an activist intellectual. This is Ruel Marc Garrecht again. And so, and it's actually a fair point, I have to say that if you become a devotee of Said, it's.
- [45:45]
Unknown Speaker
Bad manners when it comes to student behavior. It becomes almost obligatory, I think.
- [45:51]
Eli Lake
But as the Middle east continues to change, it raises an uncomfortable question for Said's followers, so many of whom were in lockstep solidarity with Hamas after October 7, 2023. Just last week, we began to see the first real protest against Hamas rule in Gaza. Out, Hamas, out.
- [46:14]
Unknown Speaker
They're chanting.
- [46:16]
Eli Lake
For a second day in a row, crowds in Gaza shout slogans against the.
- [46:20]
Unknown Speaker
Group and call for an end to the war.
- [46:27]
Eli Lake
The fact that Palestinians are taking to the streets to demand the end of the regime in Gaza makes the last year and a half of Hamas solidarity look suspect. Yes, the building occupiers and slogan shouters on campus claim they oppose oppression. But do they even consider that many Gazans consider themselves oppressed by Hamas? The barbaric violence of October 7th is not an expression of popular resistance, as the activists and professors would have you believe. No, it was a brutal and cowardly provocation designed to immiserate the very people that Hamas purports to govern. The Palestinians, in this sense, were not only the victims of Israeli bombs, but also Hamas war plans. Edward Said's claims about the original Orientalist were always dubious. He cherry picked his sources. He applied postmodern word magic to uncover meanings these authors did not intend. He conducted his scholarship with an activist focus. But for all its flaws, Edward Said tried his best to humanize the peoples and cultures he was writing about. What does it say, though, about his scholarship that his intellectual proteges so casually conflate the terror of Hamas with the will of the Gazan people? That a gang of Islamic fascists who kidnap babies and grandparents and shoot young people at a music festival are presented as the voice of Palestinian resistance? We have come full circle. Today it is the anti imperialists in the west who turn the Palestinians into props in their own drama about an American empire. I believe Edward Said had a word for that kind of thing.
- [48:05]
Unknown Speaker
Mother yeah, yeah, I'm begging for peace. All they are asking is for freedom of speech. Our friends in Hammers are begging for peace.
- [48:31]
Eli Lake
Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you like this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And remember, if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five star rating and a nice comment too. Also, if you love this episode, there's more great content@thefp.com please become a subscriber today and until then, I'll see you next time.