The False Prophet of Palestine: The Edward Said Revelations
(Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints, No. 422, January 2000)
by Justus Weiner
Professor Edward Said (1935-2003) of Columbia University was the Western world’s foremost spokesman for the Palestinian cause. For years, the eminent intellectual told his life story as an allegory of the Palestinian people, presenting himself as a dispossessed Palestinian refugee deserving of “reparations” for what he claimed was his house in Jerusalem, from where he said his “entire” family was “ethnically cleansed.”
In 1999, Commentary Magazine published my expose “‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,” which exposed how Said had reinvented his life story. The house in Jerusalem was in fact the home of relatives whom Said occasionally visited.
Edward Said actually grew up in Cairo, the scion of a wealthy Cairene family. His father had moved to Cairo from Jerusalem a decade before Edward was born. Until his departure to attend prep school in America in 1951, Edward Said resided with his family in exclusive Zamalek neighborhood and attended private English and American schools.
The “best-known Palestinian intellectual in the world” (as described on BBC) weaved an elaborate myth of expulsion from paradise. Edward Said was never a refugee from Palestine, but he is certainly a refugee from the truth.
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