Edward Said - Intellectual Criticism - Personal Criticism

Personal Criticism

Character assassination

To undermine Edward Saïd as a public intellectual qualified to speak of and about the Palestinian dispossession by Israel, Justus Weiner, an American lawyer and resident scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs think-tank, said that Saïd was dishonest about his childhood biography. In the Commentary magazine article “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Saïd” (1999), Weiner impugned Saïd’s intellectual honesty and personal integrity when he said that Saïd lied when he said: “I was born in Jerusalem, and spent most of my formative years there; and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt.” Despite having acknowledged that Edward Saïd was born in Jerusalem (Palestine), Weiner reported that Saïd’s birth certificate lists a Cairo (Egypt) residential address for the Saïd family; that the boy Edward Saïd did not live his formative, boyhood years in Jerusalem with his family, but in Cairo; and that the boy Edward had not been a full-time student at the St. George's School, Jerusalem, because the school’s register of students had no record of his matriculation to the school. Moreover, when the journalist Christopher Hitchens questioned Justus Weiner about impugning Edward Saïd’s personal integrity and intellectual honesty — about minor matters of childhood biography — Weiner acknowledged that he did not interview Edward Saïd, and defended his claim that Saïd was a liar, by saying that three years of research into Saïd’s early life had made it unnecessary to interview the adult about his childhood in British Palestine, and about his school days in the Middle East:

The evidence became so overwhelming. It was no longer an issue of discrepancies. It was a chasm. There was no point in calling him up and saying, “You’re a liar, you’re a fraud”.

To Saïd’s defense arose three journalists and an historian, who said that the claims of Justus Weiner were false. In the Counterpunch newsletter article “Commentary ‘Scholar’ Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Saïd” (1999), Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair reported that Weiner had deliberately falsified the biographic record to attack Saïd. In evidence, they presented an interview of Haig Boyadjian, who said that he had explicitly told Justus Weiner that he had been a classmate of Edward Saïd at the St. George's School, Jerusalem, which fact Weiner omitted from his biographic reportage of Saïd. In The Nation magazine article “The ‘Commentary’ School of Falsification” (1999), Christopher Hitchens described Weiner’s article as a work of “extraordinary spite and mendacity”; and reported that schoolmates and instructors confirmed that Edward Saïd had been a student at the St. George Academy; they quoted Saïd, from 1992, that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo. In The New York Review of Books, the historian Amos Elon described Justus Weiner’s article “Exile’s Return”, as a “diatribe”, and accused him of waging a “personal smear campaign” against Edward Saïd, and that Weiner failed to disprove that, in the winter of 1947–1948, when the Arab League declared the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Saïd family moved from the Talbiya neighbourhood of Jerusalem, and returned to Cairo:

and his family sought refuge from the war outside Palestine, as did hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians at the time. The fact remains, that shortly afterward, the family’s property in Jerusalem was confiscated. Saïd and his family became political refugees as the result of the Israeli government’s refusal to allow them to return to the country of their birth.

In retort, Justus Weiner accused the historian Amos Elon of intellectual dishonesty, and accused the journalist Christopher Hitchens of having made himself “a poster boy for Palestine”. About such biographic controversy, Edward Saïd said that the publishers of the politically conservative Commentary magazine had attacked him in three, long articles; that the third article was the character-assassination article by Justus Weiner; and that, as a biographic article about his childhood and student days, its credibility was “undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact”.