Ten years ago, Barack Obama went to a lecture by Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian intellectual. Should that be page one news now? The LA Times thinks so they ran a story on their front page on Thursday on the event, headlined “Campaign ’08: Allies of Palestinians see a friend on Obama.”
Obama’s attendance at that speech is news today, of course, because of the Jewish vote. The Times made that clear when it quoted Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who expressed “concern” about Obama’s “presence at an Arab American event with a Said.”
Said, who was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University before his death in 2003, is identified by Times reporter Peter Wallsten as “a leading intellectual in the Palestinian movement.” It would be more accurate to call him “a Palestinian and a leading American intellectual.” The author of more than a dozen books, his 1978 book “Orientalism” became the founding work of the new field of cultural studies, and is now assigned at hundreds of colleges and universities and has been translated into more than 30 languages.
. . . continued at TheNation.com