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1. Said's cousin Yusuf (the nephew of his father) confirms that the house on Brenner Street in Jerusalem was the home of an extended family, and that the name of the family member on the title deed -- the legal owner was Edward's aunt -- is irrelevant. Not only Edward but also his sister Jean were born in the house, occurrences unlikely to have taken place on random visits.

Yusuf Said lives in Toronto but was never contacted by Weiner, who anyway has a difficulty with kinship ties. He describes Boulos Said, cousin of Edward's father, as his brother, for instance. As to the expulsion, Edward Said has never claimed to have suffered in person, but only to have been withdrawn from school and sent to Egypt, to be followed by every single adult member of his extended family, who were indeed ethnically cleansed and deprived of large holdings in land and business.

2. I know myself, from speaking to former teachers and pupils, that Said was -- like his father before him -- indeed a student at St. George's School in Jerusalem. An Armenian classmate named Haig Boyagian and a former instructor, Michel Marmoura, are both in North America and easily located. Weiner makes the cretinous error of citing another schoolmate, David Ezra, who while mentioned in Said's recollections does not recall things as Edward recalls them.

Maybe so: But misremembering a boy from the school is not quite the same as inventing him.

3. I quote from the concluding interview of "Edward Said: A Critical Reader," published by Blackwell in 1992, in which Said says: "To go back to the early years of my awareness of Cairo: I grew up there, spending a large part of my youth in the place, but strangely not as an Egyptian."

Elsewhere, and within easy reach of any reader, he has written of "the Cairo-Jerusalem-Beirut axis, which is the one I grew up in." Nor has he ever concealed the fact that his haute bourgeois family was well-enough cushioned from the disasters that overtook the evicted Palestinian peasantry.

It seems to me a bit much that Weiner, whose "Center" in Jerusalem is underwritten by Michael Milken of the junk-bond fortune, should dwell so enviously on this acknowledged fact. Having spent much time in both Lebanon and Egypt, Said chooses to describe the period he spent in Palestine as a youth as "formative." That seems like a matter for him -- born of two Palestinian parents -- to decide.

4. From a wealth of material about the family's long and bitter struggle for compensation I select the fact that cousin Yusuf, only three years ago, took his title deeds to Israel and reregistered his claim, while yet another family property was being torn down to make way for the new Jerusalem Hilton.

All of the above, and much besides, is spelled out with almost painful honesty in Said's forthcoming memoir "Out of Place." He deals with numerous anomalies, such as the fact that his mother, born in Nazareth, finally got a passport which gave her place of birth as Cairo. (Is it too much to ask that those with family histories extending to Riga and Vilnius be aware of discrepant documents and tangled records?)

Aware of Said's book's disclosures, Weiner now says that its veracity should be credited to him. In other words, he contends that an exhaustive book commissioned in 1989, begun in 1994 (after Edward had learned that leukemia had set a term to his life) and completed in 1998, was undertaken to rebut a half-baked article in Commentary that had not yet been written. Such conceit -- and such elegance, too.

Weiner's emulators, like the New York Post editorialist who referred to Said as "the Palestinian Tawana Brawley," manifest the same distraught vulgarity. By defaming and vilifying him -- without going to the effort of contacting one of the most-interviewed men on the planet -- they of course hope to heap insult on the injuries already suffered by the Palestinians, and to negate the work done by the Jewish and Israeli peace camp.

No magazine I know of would have published such an article without trying to confront its subject. Commentary is evidently immune to such scruples. It ought to be taught, as G.K. Chesterton said in another context, that when a man decides that any stick will do, he picks up a boomerang.
salon.com | Sept. 7, 1999

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