List of Current Colombian Scientist and Inventors
rrcrumb
....Sure beats getting shot at in the insane druggie war down there.
The drug war has now been brought home to Colombia. The latest Hispanic
nation to sink back into the primordial ooze. Cocky wise ass morons.
Muy typico.
<hehahahahahhahahhah>
Way too many basuco smokers down there.
Basuco (cocaine; coca paste residue sprinkled
on marijuana or regular cigarette)
http://www.ndsn.org/JULY94/COLOMBIA.html
Drug use is high in Colombia, where about 31 percent of the population have
tried marijuana, and about 15 percent have tried basuco (A substance made
from cocaine base before it is refined into cocaine HCL, that can be smoked
like crack but is usually in cigarette form).
http://www.naplesnews.com/today/florida/a55995q.htm
He said drug abuse is fueling intense violence in countries like Colombia
and Brazil, which has suffered because of the increased use of basuco, a
cheap smokable cocaine product.
"We're seeing, throughout the hemisphere, enormous enhanced levels of drug
abuse," McCaffrey said, noting that money laundering is causing havoc in
many economies across the region. "The drug threat has become almost a
universal threat to these societies."
Tavita Manumaleuna
<<All of these Columbians are doing their research outside of Columbia.>>
And they are using tools and research techinniques developed by the Central
Europeans. But they will never give us credit for that.
sau kisi la'u muli
Soccer Hooligan
Tavita Manumaleuna <sam...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:19990924115037...@ng-xb1.aol.com...
I for one didn't know that there were any Columbian scientists and inventors
at all, except perhaps inventing some sort of drug paraphenalia.
David Gleason
> davo says:
> <<Start with Gabriel García Márquez, literature.>>
>
> big deal
To a quasi-illiterate ignoramus, I'm sure it has no importance. You have
just verified your status.
Tavita Manumaleuna
<<I for one didn't know that there were any Columbian scientists and inventors
at all, except perhaps inventing some sort of drug paraphenalia.>>
hehehe!!!!!!!!!
Tavita Manumaleuna
<<Start with Gabriel García Márquez, literature.>>
big deal
rrcrumb
"Hundred Years of Solitude"
His best known book is a fantasy.
This fits in perfectly with the illogical
and fantastical way that many Hispanics
look at the world.
Great for poetry but bad for science/technology.
Bad for stable societies but good for families
with a lot of internal dramas.
For llegal immigration news please visit:
http://americanpatrol.com
http://www.newnation.org/NNN-news-invasion.html
http://www.alamanceind.com/newfol~4/immig.html
BEST CONSERVATIVE WEBSITE:
http://www.freerepublic.com
http://www.dallasnews.com/editorial/columnists/0827edit1estrad.htm
By Richard Estrada
08/27/99
"The argument that a colonia is a colony has its limits, to be sure.
But consider this: One of the most important elements of Mexican
foreign policy is to maximize the emigration of Mexican citizens
to the United States bylobbying on U.S. soil for high levels of
legal immigration and fighting or attenuating U.S. laws and strategies
designed to challenge illegal immigration. Mexican officials concerned
about a labor surplus in their country even have spoken openly about
creating an Israeli-type lobby for Mexico among people of Mexican
origin in the United States.
The liberal penchant for ignoring such infringements on national
sovereignty is well known. But even libertarian conservatives
in the business community are indifferent to the matter. They tend
to be fearful of any rhetoric or action that might impede the mass
influx of inexpensive foreign labor."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Gleason <da...@davidgleason.com> wrote in message
news:oOBH3.778$Vf6....@typhoon01.swbell.net...
>
> Tavita Manumaleuna <sam...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:19990926224116...@ng-cd1.aol.com...
> > davo says:
> > <<Start with Gabriel García Márquez, literature.>>
> >
> > big deal
>
>
David Gleason
rrcrumb <zen...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:V8HH3.9479$E85.1...@news1.mia...
> Gabriel García Márquez....
> "Hundred Years of Solitude"
>
> His best known book is a fantasy.
> This fits in perfectly with the illogical
> and fantastical way that many Hispanics
> look at the world.
Not a "fantasy." Surrealism in the best tradition of the French surrealists
is the school; but I doubt that you've ready any French authors.
Soccer Hooligan
Tavita Manumaleuna <sam...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:19990926224116...@ng-cd1.aol.com...
> davo says:
> <<Start with Gabriel García Márquez, literature.>>
>
> big deal
Yes, and that Nobel prize for literature is well known to be nothing but
political. It is not a reflection of the quality of the work.
Soccer Hooligan
Mike & Risa <laf...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
news:37EEC5C3...@ameritech.net...
> Stereotypes...
>
> ---------------------------
>
> Soccer Hooligan wrote:
>
> >
> > I for one didn't know that there were any Columbian scientists and
inventors
> > at all, except perhaps inventing some sort of drug paraphenalia.
What stereotypes? In all honesty I'd be interested to know who some of
these scientists and inventers are. I'd bet you could count them all on one
hand.
>
rrcrumb
BTW..when will that abject liar/falsifier
Rigoberta Minchu be giving back her Nobel
Prize?
She was the Guatemalan who lied about
her poor, wretched life in the book that earned her
the Nobel literature prize.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Soccer Hooligan <afc...@post.co.uk> wrote in message
news:I_PH3.219$L25....@news4.atl...
rrcrumb
It's surrealistic.
Just like Mexican claims on the South
Western states of the USA
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Gleason <da...@davidgleason.com> wrote in message
news:WuLH3.1164$Vf6....@typhoon01.swbell.net...
Tavita Manumaleuna
<<Just like Mexican claims on the South
Western states of the USA>>
how many years did Mexico have "control" of that land? What constituted their
"control"? Did they have a contract signed by the natives saying they wanted to
be under Mexcian control? Did the natives pay taxes to Mexico? Is there
anything there today that shows the land was under Mexcian "control"?
David Gleason
> Yep!
>
> BTW..when will that abject liar/falsifier
> Rigoberta Minchu be giving back her Nobel
> Prize?
>
> She was the Guatemalan who lied about
> her poor, wretched life in the book that earned her
> the Nobel literature prize.
Allegedly. This seems to be basically a case of sour grapes....
protocol13
women that look like men (like that old fart Elizabeth) and men that
look like women
(Charles who loves to smell tampons).
Soccer Hooligan wrote:
>
> Tavita Manumaleuna <sam...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:19990924115037...@ng-xb1.aol.com...
> > Des says:
> > <<All of these Columbians are doing their research outside of Columbia.>>
> >
> > And they are using tools and research techinniques developed by the
> Central
> > Europeans. But they will never give us credit for that.
> > sau kisi la'u muli
>
protocol13
Tavita Manumaleuna wrote:
>
> davo says:
> <<Start with Gabriel García Márquez, literature.>>
>
> big deal
protocol13
British as
stupid looking with big ears (Prince Tampon Charles) or that ugly
looking queen Elizabeth or the violent soccer hooligans and nothing
else.
Tavita Manumaleuna wrote:
>
> soccer hooligan says:
> <<I for one didn't know that there were any Columbian scientists and inventors
> at all, except perhaps inventing some sort of drug paraphenalia.>>
>
> hehehe!!!!!!!!!
protocol13
rrcrumb wrote:
>
> Gabriel García Márquez....
> "Hundred Years of Solitude"
>
> His best known book is a fantasy.
> This fits in perfectly with the illogical
> and fantastical way that many Hispanics
> look at the world.
>
> Great for poetry but bad for science/technology.
> Bad for stable societies but good for families
> with a lot of internal dramas.
>
> news:oOBH3.778$Vf6....@typhoon01.swbell.net...
> >
> > Tavita Manumaleuna <sam...@aol.com> wrote in message
> > news:19990926224116...@ng-cd1.aol.com...
> > > davo says:
> > > <<Start with Gabriel García Márquez, literature.>>
> > >
> > > big deal
> >
> >
protocol13
fanatical violence and vandalism.
Soccer Hooligan wrote:
>
> Tavita Manumaleuna <sam...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:19990926224116...@ng-cd1.aol.com...
> > davo says:
> > <<Start with Gabriel García Márquez, literature.>>
> >
> > big deal
> > sau kisi la'u muli
>
protocol13
children.
Soccer Hooligan wrote:
>
> Mike & Risa <laf...@ameritech.net> wrote in message
> news:37EEC5C3...@ameritech.net...
> > Stereotypes...
> >
> > ---------------------------
> >
> > Soccer Hooligan wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > I for one didn't know that there were any Columbian scientists and
> inventors
> > > at all, except perhaps inventing some sort of drug paraphenalia.
>
rrcrumb
in Guatemala since typically they are shit upon
by the ruling, racist Spanish oligarchy.
HOWEVER
Rigoberta Menchu = liar.
She is a falsifier and lied about growing
up in very poor, oppressed circumstances.
She is the Tawana Brawley of Guatemala.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/dh/david2-26-99.htm
******(EXCERPT)*****
THE STORY OF RIGOBERTA MENCHU, a Quiche Mayan from Guatemala, whose
autobiography catapulted her to international fame, won her the Nobel Peace
Prize, and made her an international emblem of the dispossessed indigenous
peoples of the Western hemisphere and their attempt to rebel against the
oppression of European conquerors, has now been exposed as a political
fabrication, a tissue of lies, and one of the greatest intellectual and
academic hoaxes of the Twentieth Century.
During the last decade, Rigoberta Menchu had become a leading icon of the
university culture. In one of the more celebrated "breakthroughs" of the
multicultural left, a demonstration
Perhaps the most salient of Stoll's findings is the way in which Rigoberta
has distorted the sociology of her family situation, and that of the Mayans
in the region of Uspantan, to conform to Marxist precepts. The Menchus were
not part of the landless poor, and Rigoberta had no brother who starved to
death, at least none that her own family could remember. The ladinos were
not a ruling caste in Rigoberta's town or district, in which there were no
large estates, or fincas, as she claims. Far from being a dispossessed
peasant, Vicente Menchu had title to 2,753 hectares of land. The 22-year
land dispute described by Rigoberta, which is the central event in her book
leading to the rebellion and the tragedies that followed was, in fact, over
a tiny, but significant, 151 hectare parcel. Most importantly, Vicente
Menchu's "heroic struggle against the landowners who wanted to take our
land" was in fact not a dispute with representatives of a European-descended
conquistador class, but with his own Mayan relatives, the Tum family, headed
by his wife's uncle.
Vicente Menchu did not organize a peasant resistance called the Committee
for Campesino Unity. He was a conservative peasant insofar as he was
political at all. Even more importantly, his consuming passion was not any
social concern, but the family feud with his in-laws, who were small
landowning peasants like himself. It was his involvement in this family feud
that caused him to be caught up in the larger political drama enacted by
students and professional revolutionaries, that was really irrelevant to his
concerns and that ultimately killed him.
===================================
David Gleason <da...@davidgleason.com> wrote in message
news:10gI3.783$IA1....@typhoon01.swbell.net...
rrcrumb
By JULIA PRESTON
© 1999 N.Y. Times News Service
MEXICO CITY, Jan. 24, 1999 -- Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan Indian who
rose from a childhood of want and racist violence to be awarded the 1992
Nobel Peace Prize, dismissed questions Wednesday about a book in which she
described her life history, saying she had "a right to my own memories.''
In meetings she organized with reporters here promising to "lay to rest''
doubts about the 1983 volume, which records her memories of horrific
violence, Ms. Menchu denied that it contained purposeful inaccuracies but
was elusive when pressed to clarify specific points.
Doubts about the veracity of some episodes she recounts in the book, called
"I, Rigoberta Menchu'' ($14.40 from Amazon.Com), were raised in a new study
by David Stoll, an anthropologist at Middlebury College in Vermont. A Dec.
15 report in The New York Times, based on new reporting in Ms. Menchu's home
village, pointed to additional inconsistencies between her version and the
recollections of many neighbors and relatives.
Ms. Menchu said Wednesday that the central reality for her was that her
father, mother and at least two brothers were all murdered by government
security forces during the ferocious violence that descended on Guatemala's
Indian communities in the years before her book was published - all facts
that have not been disputed. "I didn't find anything in these reports that
changes the fact that my people are dead,'' Ms. Menchu said. "And that is my
truth.''
She was dressed in the bright purple embroidered blouse and red headband
that denote her origins in the highlands of central Guatemala.
"I will change my mind and say I'm sorry the day I see my father again full
of youthfulness and health,'' she said. Ms. Menchu's father was burned to
death during a protest in a fire started by government forces at the Spanish
Embassy in Guatemala City in 1980.
She argued that her book remained a faithful representation of the trauma
suffered by Guatemalan Indians during a period of violent military rule. She
said she was reluctant to "enter into little details,'' explaining that she
felt it would be undignified.
In response to reporters' questions, Ms. Menchu said she had not
acknowledged in her book that she had received several years' education at
the Belgian-Guatemalan Institute in Guatemala City. In the opening pages of
the book, which is based on interviews tape-recorded by a Venezuelan
anthropologist, she said she had not learned how to read, write or speak
Spanish until a few years before the text was published. But nuns who ran
the school at the time told The Times that she had been an exceptionally
bright pupil.
On Wednesday, for the first time, Ms. Menchu said she had been at the school
for several years, but as a maid, not a pupil. "It was not work that I was
ashamed of,'' she said.
Stoll said in a telephone interview that his research revealed that the
Nobel laureate had worked at cleaning the school to pay her way while she
studied there. Ms. Menchu acknowledged Wednesday that she had learned
literacy and Spanish as a girl at the Belgium school and while on
scholarship to another school in subsequent years.
In her book Ms. Menchu provided a heart-rending account of the death by
starvation of her youngest brother, who she said was named Nicolas. But
Nicolas Menchu proved to be alive and was interviewed by The Times in
Guatemala. This prompted Ms. Menchu to say Wednesday that she had another,
younger brother who had also been named Nicolas.
But the Nicolas Menchu who was interviewed by the Times said he was a decade
older than his sister and that the only brothers who had died of hunger were
all older than he.
She had said that she witnessed the death of another brother, Patrocinio,
who she said was burned alive by army troops. According to Stoll, in his
book "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans'' ($19.60 from
Amazon.Com), Patrocinio Menchu was kidnapped by soldiers and his body is
believed to have been dumped in a mass grave.
Ms. Menchu, apparently conceding that she was not present when her brother
was killed, said she had only reported what her mother told her of her
brother's death. "Show me where the mass grave is where he is buried,'' she
said. "If someone will give me his body, I will change my view. My truth is
that my brother Patrocinio was burned alive.
She suggested that her testimonial had come under criticism as part of a
racist campaign. "If anyone thinks I'm going to say I'm sorry because I was
born Maya and am an ignorant Indian, they're wrong,'' she said.
Stoll said Wednesday that he had never intended to accuse Ms. Menchu of
lying.
"That would be to dismiss her morally, and that is definitely not my view,''
he said. "You can understand and defend her narrative strategy, of folding
others' experience into her own, making herself into a kind of all-purpose
Maya. She was in an emergency situation. She was trying to bring down
pressure on the government and the army. To do that, you have to make a
complicated situation seem simple.''
==================================================
rrcrumb
Three Political Romancers
September 27, 1999
IT'S BEEN A BAD YEAR for prevaricators of the political left. First Nobel
laureate and Guatemalan terrorist Rigoberta Menchu was unveiled by fellow
leftist David Stoll as a self-fabricating poseur. Then feminist icon and
self-proclaimed suburban housewife Betty Friedan was unmasked (again by a
political comrade) as a longtime propagandist for the Stalinist left and a
political fibber. Now it's Modern Language Association president and PLO
apologist Edward Said's turn to have his inventions uncovered, exposing him
as a cunning purveyor of biographical fiction.
These creative dissemblers did not idly conceive their deceptive
constructions of self, in which case they would have been mere literary
curiosities. Instead, each of them were crafted to serve a radical cause.
They thus form part of an intellectual continuum with what Leon Trotsky once
termed the "Stalin school of falsification," in which historical data are
tortured in the interests of a politically useful "truth."
Rigoberta Menchu presented herself as a poor, uneducated Mayan peasant,
whose family had been deprived of its land by a ladino ruling class, which
was descended from the European conquerors of her people. Rigoberta's story
told how her family was destroyed by their oppressors for peacefully
attempting to regain their land from the ladinos. According to Rigoberta,
hers was not an individual story but "the story of all poor Guatemalans." In
her telling, her autobiography became a political parable with the power to
persuade any morally decent reader of the justice of the cause of the urban
terrorist movement whose spokesperson she had become, and whose strategy was
to foment violent confrontations in the Guatemalan countryside to liberate
peasants like herself.
Every salient element of Rigoberta's parable, however, was based on a
biographical lie. She was not poor and not uneducated. Her family was not
dispossessed by a ladino ruling class (its land dispute was with other
Mayans-in fact, members of the Menchu clan itself) and the violence they
suffered was not unprovoked, but was the consequence of reactions to the
violent confrontations initiated by the terrorists whose pawn she had
become.
Betty Friedan presented herself in The Feminine Mystique-the book that
launched modern feminism-as a suburban housewife who had never given a
thought to "the woman question," until she attended a Smith College reunion
which revealed the dissatisfaction of her well-educated female classmates,
unable to balance traditional roles with modern careers. There were many
views Friedan could have taken of the data she subsequently collected. In
America, an unparalleled technological revolution was unfolding, among whose
consequences were the liberation of women from household chores, from
death-threatening diseases associated with child-birth and sex, and from the
tyranny of their reproductive cycles. All this provided them with options
for entry into workplaces and professions where few women had previously
ventured.
The sheer suddenness of this transformation would have provoked anxiety and
dysfunction in any group. But Friedan chose to view the malaise she
witnessed in political terms-not as the ambiguities of an epic transition,
but as the effects of a male conspiracy to oppress females and confine them
to their traditional roles. In Friedan's radical melodrama, middle-class
marriage became a "comfortable concentration camp," men's protective
attitudes towards women became the oppressive stance of a master race.
Now it has been revealed that Betty Friedan was not very candid about the
facts of her own life and the sources of her radical perspective. She was
hardly a suburban housewife when she wrote those words, but a twenty-five
year veteran of professional journalism in the Communist left, where she had
been thoroughly indoctrinated in the politics of "the woman question" and
specifically the idea that women were "oppressed." The actual facts of Fried
an's life-that she was a professional female ideologue, that her husband
supported her full-time writing and research, that she had a maid and lived
in a Hudson river mansion, attending very little to household duties-were
inconvenient to the persona and the theory she was determined to promote.
Like Rigoberta Menchu and Betty Friedan, Edward Said is a post-modern
Marxist uninterested in the concrete realities of individual lives and what
they actually imply. For thirty years, he has presented himself as a
Palestinian Everyman, in autobiographical writings and published interviews,
and even in a film for the BBC. In all of these he has shaped his personal
story as a holograph of the criminal dispossession that he claimed Jews had
committed against his people. To be sure, Said was a wealthy Everyman, a
member of the monied Palestinian and cultural elite. But that very fact
served to emphasize the dispossessions of home and homeland that the poorest
Palestinians felt. Thus, reviewing one of Said's many books on this subject,
the novelist Salman Rushdie observed that by writing about his "internal
struggle: the anguish of living with displacement, with exile," Said
"enables us to feel the pain of his people."
According to the official biography Said constructed and then retailed for
thirty years until his unmasking, he was born in 1935 in Jerusalem and grew
up in a house located at 10 Brenner Street in the Talbiyeh district until he
and his family were "dispossessed" by the city's Jewish occupiers, when
Israel became a state in 1948. E.g.: "I was born in Jerusalem and spent most
of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became
refugees, in Egypt." ("Between Worlds: Edward Said Makes Sense of His Life,"
London Review of Books, May 7, 1998)
Said's political uses of the memories surrounding the house at 10 Brenner
Street are further reflected in a speech he gave last year at Birzeit
University on the West Bank: "The house from which my family departed in
1948-was displaced-was also the house in which the great Jewish philosopher
Martin Buber lived for a while, and Buber of course was a great apostle of
coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but he didn't mind living in an Arab
house whose inhabitants had been displaced."
In other words, even Martin Buber-the most prominent Jewish critic of a
specifically "Jewish" state; who had proposed instead a bi-national solution
which would create a Palestinian state that was both Jewish and Arab-didn't
mind benefiting from the dispossession of the Arabs. Such hypocrites, these
Jews.
Except that it was Said's aunt and uncle (who actually owned the 10 Brenner
Street house) who evicted Buber, not the other way around. The eviction took
place in 1942. Buber had been living there as a refugee from Nazi Germany,
which he had left with his wife and two teenage granddaughters in 1938. The
fact that the Bubers would have been exterminated had they not been able to
find refuge in Jerusalem apparently meant nothing to the Saids when it came
to terminating their lease, nor to Edward in weighing the Jewish presence in
a country that (as has now been revealed) was never his "home."
This salient fact (along with others) has now been retrieved from Said's
false memory by a Jewish scholar and lawyer named Justus Weiner, who spent
three years researching the historical record. What he discovered speaks
tomes about the veracity of Edward Said and his respect for historical
truth. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration allowed the possibility of a Jewish
"national home" in the British Mandate in Palestine. It is an event that in
Said's telling marks the beginning of the criminal dispossession of his
family and people. In that year, however, the Saids were not residents of
Palestine, but were living halfway across the world, in Boston, where they
had landed in 1911 and where his father had become an American citizen.
This was not untypical of the Palestinian elite itself, which, by most
historical accounts, had no strong sense of national identity let alone
nationalist grievance until thirty years later, after the establishment of
the Jewish state. (In fact, the Palestine Liberation Organization was not
created until 1964, sixteen years after the birth of Israel.) Indeed, when
the Saids left America in 1926, it was not to emigrate to a "homeland" in
Palestine but to Cairo, where they established a prosperous business. Not
once in the ensuing twenty years before the establishment of Israel did the
Saids think to re-settle in the land called Palestine. Egypt was their home.
The myth Said has so artfully fabricated plays well on liberal guilt
strings, but havoc with the historical facts. The UN partitioned Palestine
in 1947, leaving well-defined sectors for both Arabs and Jews. But the
Palestinian Arabs rejected the partition and, led a coalition of the
surrounding Arab states in an attack on the Jews whose objective was to
drive them into the sea.
Edward Said is a die-hard revanchist, who opposes the current Oslo peace
process and final status negotiations. Politically, he is further to the
left of Arafat, than Benjamin Netanyahu is to the right of Peres and Barak.
What his fabrications of self seek to accomplish is the presentation of
Palestinian extremism as moderation-in effect, a simple reflex of
humanitarian conscience.
Having now been caught in his fictional web, Said has taken steps to revise
his newly published autobiography, Out of Place, to make it accord more
closely with the revealed facts. But Out of Place, is itself a form of
deception since the text does not even mention the false version he has
promoted for the last thirty years, or attempt to reconcile one with the
other.
Far from conceding that an apology is in order, Said has retained the pose
of self-righteous victim. When Weiner's article exposing him appeared, Said
replied with a shrill attack in the Arab press under the headline:
"Defamation, Zionist Style." From its opening sentence, Said's reply
reflects the wretchedly low standards of its author's polemical style:
Given the approach of the final status negotiations between Israel and the
Palestinians, it seems worthwhile to record here the lengths to which
right-wing Zionists will go to further their claims on all of Palestine
against those of the country's native Palestinian inhabitants who were
dispossessed as an entire nation in 1948.
The argument could hardly be more disingenuous since Said opposes the
current peace negotiations (which he regards as a "sellout"), while Weiner
does not even mention them. Said's reference to dispossession typically
could not be more loaded, forgetting as it does that the Palestinians were
the aggressors, that their agenda was truly to achieve an ethnic cleansing
(as the Jews' was not), and that the terrible consequences of their
aggression were felt on both sides. For while it is true that hundreds of
thousands of native Palestinians were driven into Arab lands, it is also
true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven out of Arab countries
and eastern Jerusalem and the Old City-the holiest place on earth for
Jews-and the West Bank. Reasonable people might conclude that this fateful
episode encompassed two national tragedies. But not Edward Said.
Nor is he contrite about the personal details he has falsified. Taking the
same tack as Rigoberta Menchu, who claimed that her fabrications were a
Mayan cultural tradition (conflating many people's biographies with her
own), Said tries to hide behind the Arab understanding of "family" as an
extended clan.
[Weiner] does not realize . that the family house was in fact a family house
in the Arab sense, which meant our families were one in ownership..
I have never claimed to have been made a refugee, but rather that my
extended family, all of it-uncles, cousins, aunts, grandparents-in fact was.
By the spring of 1948, not a single relative of mine was left in Palestine,
ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces.
But this is simply false. The names of Said's parents were not on the deed
to the "family house" at 10 Brenner Street. Moreover, just last March, in an
interview with an Arab paper, Said lamented: "I feel even more depressed
when I remember my beautiful old house surrounded by pine and orange trees
in Al-Talbiyeh in east [actually western] Jerusalem which has been turned
into a "Christian embassy." No cultural ambiguity here. Of course, as an
American and a linguist, Said would know very well the meaning his audience
would attribute to the words he has used in 30 years of constructing his
political lie.
We are presented, then, with three major figures of Twentieth Century
left-wing movements caught in the fabrication not only of their personal
histories but history itself. Are their attempted constructions of reality
mere coincidence, or is there a deeper lesson to be learned from these
episodes? Over and over again, the world vision of the left has failed in
this century not because the ideas behind it weren't noble or seductive, but
because in practice they did not work. The vision of the left is by nature a
romance of good and evil, of liberators and oppressors. Is the requirement
of sustaining such a Manichaean vision the flattening of a reality that is
so much more complex, and the reshaping of its narrative truth? Is the
vision itself so at odds with what is, that it necessitates this lying; that
it requires an underpinning of fiction to sustain its romance? More
practical and prosaic minds will conclude that there is.
GLC1173
>IT'S BEEN A BAD YEAR >for >prevaricators of the political left. First >Nobel
>laureate and Guatemalan terrorist >Rigoberta Menchu was unveiled by fellow
>leftist David Stoll as a self-fabricating >poseur. Then feminist icon and
>self-proclaimed suburban
>housewife Betty Friedan was unmasked >(again by a
>political comrade) as a longtime >propagandist for the Stalinist left and a
>political fibber. Now it's Modern Language >Association president and PLO
>apologist Edward Said's turn to have his >inventions uncovered,
>exposing him
>as a cunning purveyor of biographical >fiction.
To the followers of Menchu, Said, and Freidan, it wouldn't matter if they
were caught on store video stealing.
The Left is a religion - not logic.
=======================================================
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