He Said, She Said

Glossary: taqiyya = lying in order to protect Islam.

In my previous long essay on Obama, I listed 17 worrisome associations Obama has had with Muslims and pro-Islam bedfellows. For more on this, see this article by Daniel Pipes.

A column today by Cinnamon Stillwell reveals yet another: Edward Said, a professor in comparative literature at Columbia university who is more famously remembered (he died in 2003) for his 1978 book Orientalism, which crystallized emblematically all the deleterious strands of politically correct multi-culturalism and has helped enormously in ensuing years to further the academic and pop culture propagation—and propaganda—of politically correct multi-culturalism.

One of Obama’s worrisome associations I did list was with Rashid Khalidi, a virulently anti-Israel pro-Palestinian Muslim who now holds, at the same university at which Said taught, the—guess what—Edward Said Chair, an academic position whose dubious donors have donated four million dollars to create. A casual Googling of one of the Middle Eastern names on that list of donors yields the following:

Yusef Abu Khadra, who is on record expressing this blandly insidious taqiyya:

“Islam is a capitalist religion. it believes in free enterprise,” maintains Yusef Abu Khadra of Investcorp, the Bahrain investment bank that purchased New York retailer Saks Fifth Avenue. But the religion of the Prophet is also imbued with a strong sense of social justice. “You can make money but you must give some of it to the poor,” he explains. “Zakat the Islamic tithe] must be given to beneficiaries who are not relatives. Rich Muslims have an obligation to help other Muslims-across borders, across cultures, across languages.”

I invite the reader to do the same for other names on that list.

A photo (the very one I have put at the top of this essay) has been circulating the Internet, of a dinner for the Arab-American community in Chicago in 1998. In that photo we see Obama and his wife Michelle seated at a table, and the man with whom Obama is conversing in rapt attention is Edward Said, seated next to his wife, Mariam Said.

For more on Edward Said, see this article by Hugh Fitzgerald. I quote two particularly illuminating paragraphs from that article:

Fitzgerald mentions Ibn Warraq’s book Defending the West: A Response to Edward Said.

That book deals with how Edward Said, and his acolytes and worshippers and epigones, have so crudely misconceived and misrepresented the nature of the Western world and its art, its literature, its scholarship, its openness to what Said and friends like to call “the Other” and to then claim for that “Other” a long history of victimisation.

Then Fitzgerald more broadly discusses Said's pseudo-scholarship of the West and the Middle East:

Said was dismembered in feline fashion by Bernard Lewis in “The Question of 'Orientalism'.” Last year Robert Irwin’s “For Lust of Knowledge,” a refutation of Said, essentially a book-length footnote to Lewis’ article, appeared. Irwin demonstrates conclusively what many (but not Christopher Hitchens) knew: that Said’s misrepresentations of several centuries of distinguished Orientalists was comical in the things he got wrong, the things he left out, his inability to comprehend disinterested curiosity or disinterested scholarship, so foreign were they to the mind and even imagination of Edward Said. Everything that he could get wrong, Edward Said got wrong.

Given what we know about Obama and all his associations with Muslims and pro-Islam apologists who themselves also get everything wrong, it is likely that whatever Obama learned from Edward Said was uncritically swallowed whole. In the years since 1998, what was uncritically swallowed whole by Obama has been digested, and if tomorrow he wins the election, will be in the following years under his Presidency excreted in powerfully toxic doses into the bloodstream of the Body Politic; though it is also likely that Obama, a master at smooth dissembling, will be able to make such excrement seem sweet and nutritious—to those millions of Americans, that is, who themselves have been sufficiently deformed by PC MC.

A pro-Palestinian Muslim blogger, one Ali Abunimah (who was part of the Arab-American dinner in 1998 discussed above), recounts a meeting he had with Obama in 2004 that might shed light on a little taqiyya Obama himself is adept at practicing:

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, “Hey, I'm sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, “Keep up the good work!”