Talk:Edward Said/in Lebanon/discuss this page

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article seems to be misleading at best, and I can't find corroboration for many of its "facts". I think it should be removed until there's some additional corroboration about all of this -- especially as the man has just died, and many people will be looking for information on him.

This seems to be copied almost verbatim from this page: http://www.basicclassics.com/people/people.php?aid=893 which has this notice at the bottom: "It is believed that all material on this web site is in the public domain. This web site Copyright © 2003 By Steven J. Hayes. All rights reserved. Basic Classics is part of the Basics 4 Life family of sites."

There seems to be no "London Daily Post" (at least since 1738, as someone noted on the Edward Said talk page).

Apparently, a NY Times article described the situation thus: "'To my knowledge, the stone was directed at no one; no law was broken; no indictment was made; no criminal or civil action has been taken against Professor Said,' Jonathan R. Cole, the provost and dean of faculties, wrote in an open letter to Columbia's student government and the student newspaper, The Columbia Daily Spectator." This can be found here [1] and this is the only reference I found to the student newspaper.

I found a small photo at this page : Vigilance at the Border and Beyond. I also can't find muchelse about the photo, other than this: "Except for an Agence France-Presse credit, the shooter remains anonymous. AFP confirms that it was not one of their photographers and the name of the photographer is not available." (At this page:PhotoDistrict Newswire - 11.01.00). While this certainly doesn't refute the story, it doesn't add much credibility either.

Most of the rest of the criticism seems to be based on a Sept. 2000 article by columnist Jeff Jacoby which can be found at THE TRUTH AND EDWARD SAID By Jeff Jacoby, which was also debunked on the Talk page. Jacoby is well known here in Boston as a conservative writer who was suspended in 2000 for "serious journalistic misconduct" by the Boston Globe.

I can find no evidence of any of this outside of website with a clear and strong ideological bias.

Also, here is a link to what the Beirut Daily Star is currently saying about Said: Edward Said, 1935-2003: respected by many but let down by most

Bcorr 17:48, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for doing all that research, Bcorr. It looks like some sort of incident is indeed alleged to have occurred. I suppose Jacoby and other writers want to make some sort of point about Said's "integrity" by (a) accusing him of playing up his "poor unfortunate refugee" statas; and (b) by accusing him of hypocrisy or something for his "violence" at the Lebanon-Israeli border. What this has to do with the reliability of his scholarship, I'm not sure. Whether it has any bearing on the validity of his views, I'm even less sure.
So where do we go from here? We're all interested because he died yesterday, I suppose. Too bad we didn't have an obituary on file, like newspapers usually do for well-known people. I just hope we can (1) not fight amoungst ourselves here at Wikipedia and (2) work together to make a neutral article. --Uncle Ed 18:30, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Thank you, Uncle Ed. Well, I don't rightly know -- I still feel pretty new (despite my strong opinions on contect, I'm still iffy what to do about conflicts, etc.) I do think that having the separate page is a great improvement over having it in the body of the article on Said. If I can ever find something definitive about what the Beirut Daily News said at the time (if it said anything), I may go back and change the lead-in sentence in the article about "Arab criticism" of Said to just "criticism". Other than that, I don't know... Bcorr 22:01, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

As far as I know, the only primary evidence consists of Said himself and Agence France Presse. Everyone else just drew their own conclusions from those two and it spread in the usual fashion with details getting added or subtracted along the way. Probably Agence France Presse produced a story and not only a photo, or at least an explanation of the photo, and tracking that down would be the correct next step. AFP's obituary for Said does not even mention the incident.

As for Said's own version, here is the complete stone-throwing portion of his interview by Ari Shavit in Ha'aretz (18 Aug 2000). Italics is Said.

Prof. Said, many Israelis - and not only Israelis - were astonished to learn that you, a distinguished scholar, threw stones at an Israeli army post on the Lebanese border earlier this summer. What led you to take such extraordinary action, after Israel pulled out of Southern Lebanon?
I was in Lebanon for a summer visit. I gave two lectures and stayed with family and friends. Then I had a meeting with [Hezbollah spiritual leader] Sheikh [Hassan] Nasrallah, whom I found to be a remarkably impressive man. A very simple man, quite young, absolutely no bullshit. A man who adopted a strategy toward Israel quite similar to that of the Vietnamese against the Americans: We cannot fight them because they have an army, a navy and a nuclear option, so the only way we can do it is to make them feel it in body bags. And that's exactly what he did. In the one conversation that we had, I was impressed by the fact that among all the political leaders I met in the Middle East, he alone was precisely on time, and there were no people around him waving Kalashnikovs. We agreed that as far as reclaiming Palestinian rights, the Oslo accord was a total mess. And then he told me that I must go down south, and so I did, a few days later.
There were nine of us. My son and his fiancee, my daughter and her friend, myself and a few others, and a guide from the Lebanese resistance. First we went to Khiam prison, which made a very strong impression on us. I've seen a lot of unpleasant sights in my life, but this was probably the worst. The solitary confinement cells, the torture chambers. The instruments of torture were still there, the electrical probes they used. And the place just reeked of human excrement and abuse. Words cannot express the horror, so much so that my daughter started crying, sobbing.
From there we went straight to the border, to a place called Bab-el-Fatma, Fatma's Gate, where hundreds of tourists faced an enormous amount of barbed wire. About 200 meters further down stands a watchtower, also surrounded by barbed wire and concrete. Presumably, inside the tower were Israeli soldiers, but I didn't see them. It was quite far.
What I regret in all this is that the comic quality of the situation did not come out. The assumption was that I was throwing stones at someone. But there was nobody there. And in fact what happened was that my son and some of the other young men were trying to see who could throw stones furthest. And since my son is a rather big fellow - he is an American who plays baseball - he threw furthest. My daughter said to me, 'Daddy can you throw a stone as far as [son] Wadia?' and that of course stirred the usual kind of oedipal competition. So I picked up a stone and threw it.
Throwing stones at Fatma Gate when Israel had just ended its occupation of southern Lebanon seems to be not only a celebration of liberation, but a very basic rejection of something. Of what?
A rejection of Israelis. The feeling is that after 22 years of occupying our land, they left. And there is also a sense of dismissal. Not only are you leaving, but good riddance to you. We don't want you to come back. So the atmosphere is rather 'carnivalesque,' a sense of healthy anarchy, a triumphant feeling. For the first time in my life, and in the lives of the people gathering at Fatma Gate, we won. We won one.

Hi all, beyond the intrinsic worthiness of the arguments, I oppose including this material simply because it is totally out of proportion to the rest of the information in the article. Said was an immensely influential academic and activist. We devote one skinny paragraph to his work on Orientalism, which in no way does it justice, and a slight fatter paragraph on his Palestinian activism, which is likewise superficial. To then include three or four paragraphs on the stone-throwing incident is ludicrous; it is terrible editorial judgement. RK suggested once on the Said Talk page that the solution is to expand the other sections, but I propose the opposite. When we've adequately done justice to the major aspects of his life, then MAYBE there is place for coverage of this incident.-- Viajero 11:42, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I won't complain, I just have the concern noted on the VfD page. --zero 11:59, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
I have responded there as well. -- Viajero

[edit] From VfD

  • Said in Lebanon. The title itself is nonsense, and the article doesn't deserve to stand by itself. RickK 06:51, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • If my interpretation of the situation is correct, this article was excerpted out of Edward Said by Uncle Ed in order to avoid an edit war on the main article. I have treated it like a /temp page, which is to say, I moved into the Talk namespace. It's now at Talk:Edward Said/in Lebanon. -- Cyan 07:18, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • I would also like it to go, but I'll explain why I'm hesitant. Someone created the page in an attempt to save the Edward Said article from a large section of very low quality vitriole that someone (the usual suspect) wanted to insert there. That stuff included a "quote" from a non-existent newspaper, abuse from a student newspaper, and claims for which there is no known evidence. Said was accused twice of being a liar, once on behalf of the eyewitness mentioned by the non-existent British newspaper and once with no qualification at all. The whole section wasn't within a mile of Wikipedia standards. The present version of Edward Said now has a single sentence:
      In July 2000, he created a minor controversy through his involvement in an incident where he threw some rocks at or over the Lebanon-Israeli border, some say in the direction of an Israeli guard-tower (see Said in Lebanon).
      which is the most that the issue deserves. What I'm afraid of is that deleting Said in Lebanon would restart the edit war and destroy the main article. However the title could be better, how about Edward Said rock-throwing incident? Btw, the new article has a lot more than the bits deleted from Edward Said and could become a reasonable article in the right hands. --zero 07:33, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • At first sight, zero's proposal seems eminently reasonable, and I would be inclined to agree. However, upon reflection, I have my doubts. For one, I believe that just because Wikipedia has no (immediate) physical limits that doesn't mean that we should simply include everything. Good encyclopedia buildings will always mean, I think, carefully deciding what to include and what to leave out (I realize not everyone here agrees with this). Second, I think that one needs to choose one's battles carefully. Undoubtably, through the efforts of some and watchful eyes of others, a Edward Said rock-throwing incident piece could evolve into a balanced article. But is it really worth the trouble? Zero, aren't things higher up on your to-do list? RickK? Cyan?... Let's not tie up our limited respective energies refuting highly volatile, politicized slander. I vote to delete and move on to bigger and better things. -- Viajero 12:17, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
    • All thoughtful commentary and ideas. I generally agree that Said in Lebanon should be deleted, and the link to it in Edward Said removed -- the only reason to keep it would be if other people feel that this incident is known to enough people in general (as opposed to those who already dislike Edward Said) that it is an importnat clarification. Personally, I don't think so -- I had never heard of this whole thing until it was reinserted into the page after his death. I know there is the potential for an edit war, but this is all an awful lot of effort to keep one contributor from reacting. Bcorr 20:09, 27 Sep 2003 (UTC)
  • I, having written much of that article as an explanation of the incident-- *do have an opinion. Consider the Noam Chomsky article-- which contained (originally) the charge of his "anti-semitism", which developed into a treatment of his critics, and the political hassles he faces--perfectly encyclopedic.
The same here-- Said did something-- it was used politically against him-- theres no reason not to report it as history-- addressing both points of view-- some tried to claim that his gesture was "violence"-- he denied this, saying it was blown out of proportion. Thats pretty much the entire story-- the accusation of violence should normally not be worthy of treatment, but in this case, given the polical arena- its impossible to say its irrelevant. Theres plenty of space in the Edward Said article-- it should be in the article. 戴&#30505sv 16:01, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)
By all means, let's address Said's critics and his political hassles, but let's first make sure his ideas on Orientalism and his influence as a Palestine activist are well documented before we tackle this affair. -- Viajero 19:32, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Vfd?

I would like to say that I think this page shoud remain if possible, it is an incident I was not aware of and it was a contorversy I was happy to hear of. I agree that it is a good example of how political controverseys start. 131.172.4.44 03:41, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC) James Perkins