Thank you for your words and writing Sandy Tolan Edward Said died ten years ago tomorrow – September 25, 2003, after a twelve-year battle with leukemia. One of the 20th Century’s great intellectuals, Said, author of the masterworks Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, was also a beloved professor to generations of students at Columbia University, a gifted amateur pianist and an opera critic for The Nation magazine. He was perhaps best known for his fierce defense of the rights of his people, the Palestinians, in numerous books and hundreds of essays and articles published worldwide. September also marks another fateful anniversary – the 20th, of the now-infamous Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn which sealed the Oslo accords. The legacies of Oslo and its greatest critic, Edward Said, stand as polar opposites. Indeed, it was Said who was among the first to sharply criticize the accords, in part because, unlike many satisfied pundits of the day, he had actually read them. For this reason, his widow Mariam told me, he had declined a White House invitation to attend the ceremony in September 1993. Today his words on Oslo are the soundings of a prophet.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 23:59:40 +0000
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