The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has described as "scurrilous" an article in a Jewish magazine accusing the distinguished Palestinian intellectual, Dr Edward Said, of misrepresenting details of his early life for political purposes.
The ADC says that the article on Mr Said in Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, is the latest example of the magazine's "long history of intense hostility to Palestinian rights". The magazine has "for years maintained a vendetta against Said," the ADC says in a statement.
Mr Hussein Ibish of the ADC who is a personal friend of Mr Said, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, told The Irish Times that Commentary in 1989 published an article denouncing Mr Said as "The Professor of Terror" and "numerous other articles trashing him". The nine-page article in the latest issue of Commentary, written by Justus Reid Weiner, is entitled "`My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said".
Mr Wiener says he spent three years researching Mr Said's early life in archives in five countries on four continents and that he conducted 85 interviews. "Virtually everything I learned . . . contradicts the story of Said's early life as Said has told it," Mr Wiener writes.
He accuses Mr Said of serving up in his recollections of his childhood "a wildly distorted version of the truth, made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations carefully tailored to strengthen his wider ideological agenda - and in particular to promote the claims of Palestinian refugees against Israel". Mr Wiener says that soon after he finished his article he learned that Mr Said will soon be publishing a new book of memoirs called Out of Place. This new book, which Mr Wiener has apparently been able to read, "thoroughly revises the personal tale Said has been reciting all these years bringing it into greater conformity with the truth while at the same time ignoring his 30 years of carefully crafted deception". Mr Wiener's main points are that Mr Said and his immediate family were not "refugees" forced to flee Jerusalem for Cairo just before the 1947-1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Instead, Mr Said's father Wadie, who was a US citizen, had settled in Cairo in the 1920s and had built up a successful stationery company. Mr Said used to visit his brother in Jerusalem and it was during a visit in 1935 that Edward was born there.
Mr Wiener casts doubt on whether Edward, who was baptised an Anglican, attended St George's School in Jerusalem as he has claimed. He says that Edward as a child attended Gezira Preparatory School in Cairo where the family lived in the city's "best neighbourhood". Mr Wiener also accuses Mr Said of glossing over the fact that the house in Jerusalem he calls his family home was owned by his aunt and never by his father. Mr Wiener also says that Mr Said has recalled that the famous Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, also lived in a rented apartment in the Jerusalem house but omits to say that the Bubers were later "evicted" by Mr Said's aunt.
Mr Wiener writes that while Mr Said has frequently complained at how the Israelis seized the Jerusalem house he did not reveal that "a revolutionary mob" burned down his father's stores in Cairo in 1952 and that the rebuilt stores were nationalised under president Nasser several years later. These events will now be acknowledged by Mr Said in his forthcoming book, according to Mr Wiener.
The ADA in its statement says that "although Said was not and has never claimed to have been a destitute inhabitant of a refugee camp, every single member of his family was expelled by Israel in 1948. Commentary even questions whether Said attended St George's School in Jerusalem, which he did".
ADC says that the magazine never directly contacted Mr Said about details of his childhood and that he had spoken about his life in Cairo in a published interview.
But Mr Wiener says in a footnote to his article that his attempts to verify the record with Mr Said himself were unsuccessful and requests for an interview "met with no response".