Correspondence

...He's still worth criticizing...

...22) refers to the "intellectual vulgarity" of a sentence of mine that is said to have blamed the World Trade Center bombings on "religious belief" and "patriotism...

...I'm just not sure it's accurate to ascribe such a high level of influence to him...

...I think the suicide bombers of Sept...

...I also think that acts of terror may be expected from any people who believe themselves sanctified by a cause that has the power to absolve them from evil...

...Moreover, empires of the past had concrete incentives attached to their efforts in the form of raw materials...

...Bush senior's New World Order seems to be manifest in the one power that can make a real difference in resolving human rights issues...

...RONNI GORDON STILLMAN Associate scholar, Middle East Forum Philadelphia, PA ENOUGH SAID I ENJOYED STANLEY KURTZ'S "Edward Said, Imperialist" (Oct...

...government's lack of global support for human rights...

...The six million Coptic Christians of Egypt live in fear of the fundamentalists, who have already declared their property "forfeit" and available to the (Islamic) faithful...

...Professors whose scrupulous studies expressed utmost respect for non-Western societies were equated with the worst exemplars of colonial bigotry, simply because they, like the colonialists, saw differences between Western and nonWestern cultures...

...Most of these lives are those of the innocents caught in the crossfire, indigenous peoples lacking the resources to put up a fight...

...Today, the egalitarian temperament precludes any European nation from confidently administering another ethnic people, whether "for the good of the natives" or not...

...True to the technique of many of his post-colonialist compatriots, Raymond Prucher's preoccupation with his Western foes appears to have left him little of use to say about those he purports to defend...

...If anything, most of the social sciences I studied were moving full force ahead toward empiricism...

...Nationalism, Orwell concluded, is "power hunger tempered by self-deception...

...And although he is heartened by the litany of obscure commanders forced to put down one colonial massacre after another, Boot misses what was the inevitable result of so much sweat and blood: the British, "bled dry" by the First World War, a war in large part the result of the imperial drive, "finally left the Afghans to their own devices...

...Instead of honestly describing their ideology, Said dismissed the terrorists as "pathologically motivat-ed—a tiny band of crazed fanatics...

...The "ground and reason" for their actions is the dream of a fundamentalist theocracy, a goal for which they have proven themselves willing to murder without scruple not only thousands of innocent Americans, but such esteemed Arab intellectuals as writer Farag Foda and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz...

...George Orwell worked out the latter distinction in his essay "Notes on Nationalism," and I agree with his definition of nationalism: "the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests...

...Let us now take up our responsibility to reassess American interests around the world so that we might pass on both prosperity and power to posterity, rather than exhausting both in a vain attempt to police the world...

...But the words I used were "orthodoxy" and "nationalism...

...If The Standard Reader thinks there is a nation or creed whose members are immune to the effects of power hunger tempered by self-deception, would it please say plainly who or what this is...

...It may be consoling to think that deep down nations like Afghanistan and Iraq are really peopled by a liberal bourgeoisie, but such an account ignores the fact that men such as osama bin Laden are not angered because of repressive rulers such as King Fahd...

...It is clear that the American public, the media, and officialdom have a long way to go on the learning curve about Islam and the Muslim world...

...To banish the old guard, the post-colonialists used a technique of guilt-by-association that would have filled Joseph McCarthy with envy...

...Abdul Hadi Palazzi, an Italian Muslim scholar who, like Sheikh Hisham Kab-bani, has been fighting against Islamic fundamentalism and promoting inter-faith dialogue...

...No empire in the world has ever effected the kind of sweeping reform Boot envisages, though many have bled themselves trying...

...A degree of tolerance is compatible with religious belief, but not with orthodoxy...

...DAVID WHELAN Astoria, NY WHILE WHAT STANLEY KURTZ reports of Edward Said's ideologies and self-corrective political meandering may be true, it appears that Kurtz denies the terrorists of Sept...

...11 any ground or reason for their actions...

...Maybe that's why Said himself, writing in the Nation recently, was forced to deny the terrorists the "ground or reason" for their actions...

...Comparisons to fascism are not inapt...

...As Boot notes, generations of British soldiers campaigned through the very regions we must now contest in order to fight this war against terrorism...

...Courageous Muslim clerics like Palazzi and Kabbani should be given the podium whenever possible, to inform and to encourage moderate, free-thinking Muslims to speak out against the fanatic Islamism of Osama bin Laden...

...Subsequently, hundreds and thousands of lives have been and will continue to be taken...

...Again, as Boot notes, confident Englishmen in pith hats considered it both their destiny and duty to preside over the savage peoples of the earth...

...To help them along, I would add to the White House guest list Sheikh Prof...

...This outspoken imam maintains that the Koran supports the Jewish right to the land of Israel, as well as sovereignty over Jerusalem...

...Furthermore, he accuses pro-terror, anti-American Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority of indoctrinating children to become suicide bombers...

...The terrorists are neither socialists nor supporters of universal human rights...

...But is Said's work not a bit dated...

...Wouldn't you say that Said peaked in the 1980s and has been losing relevance since then...

...11 were fanatics of a religious orthodoxy that dreams today of purifying the Arab world...

...they are angered because they want even more oppressive rulers like the ayatollah...

...What wars it has not started to promote its capitalist efforts abroad, it certainly aids with the distribution of arms and monies...

...DAVID BROMWICH North Haven, CT MUSLIM MODERATES STEPHEN SCHWARTZ gets it all right in "The Varieties of Muslim Experience" (Oct...

...The end result is even more dismaying when we consider that the British set out from the very beginning to establish permanent empires...

...Those who cannot flee resist as well as they can...

...Not to conflate all of these things, but postmodernism, deconstruction, post-colonial theory, and their spawn did not seem very original (or even fashionable) to the majority of humanities and social science students...

...With prosperity and power comes responsibility...

...In contrast, we are now to take up the cause of empire for abstractions like freedom, because we have big hearts...

...Indeed, this was always the implicit tradeoff: Bind your sons to exile to exploit the natural resources of the Third World...

...We are in need now of more Calvin Coolidges, not Chinese Gordons...

...policy...

...Correspondence A CASE AGAINST EMPIRE MAX BOOT MARSHALS the history of European colonialism less to prove the case for American empire than out of his own inability to learn from that history ("The Case for American Empire," Oct...

...A willingness to admit that one's country may be wrong is compatible with patriotism, but not with nationalism...

...I graduated in 1999, and I would describe my time on campus as the beginning or middle of a backlash against his brand of polemical scholarship...

...Consider the recent example in South Africa, where the governing body had not only Western ideals at stake, but the safety of their homes and families...

...That comports neither with Said's own strictures about the study of "the Other" nor with the truth of a movement that has captured the imaginations of a substantial section—but thankfully still a minor-ity—of the Muslim world...

...This applies to the admirers of any country or the adherents of any cause that makes exclusive demands on conscience...

...Unfortunately, those who inhabit the intellectual middle-ground between empiricism and postmodernism have been squeezed nearly out of existence...

...Students of world cultures who favor traditional, qualitative approaches to the humanities or social sciences, be they classic liberals or neoconservatives, have been pushed out of the academy by the postmodernists, post-colonialists, decon-structionists, etc...

...Thousands of citizens from around the globe died needlessly on that day as a result of the u.S...

...Does The Standard Reader disagree...

...Pretty powerful stuff...

...Instead, that power continues to be abused in a new kind of imperialism, albeit one so woven into the global economy with its interests and favor-making and taking, that it appears mostly seamless and invisible...

...In the end, America too will find that it must "leave the world to its own devices...

...Boot himself demonstrates the inability to wrestle with the problems of the Muslim world in his analysis of past U.S...

...Sheikh Palazzi is secretary general of the Italian Muslim Association, director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community, and Muslim co-chairman of the Islam-Israel Fellowship of the Root and Branch Association...

...orthodoxy is not the same as belief, and nationalism is not the same as patriotism...

...Any such course will be guilt-ridden and half-hearted, and thus doomed to failure...

...It is time to end the free ride for these radical Islamists and their apologists who claim to be the legitimate voice of Islam...

...RAYMOND PRUCHER Medford, NY STANLEY KURTZ RESPONDS: Edward Said is still an enormously influential figure, although as David Whelan points out, the rise of rational choice theory and other empiricist methodologies provides a refuge of sorts for those disenchanted with postmodernism...

...Thousands flee, as we have seen both in Palestine and most recently in Afghanistan...

...Sheikh Kabbani remarked that the extremists have succeeded in "hijacking the mike...

...KELLY Ann Arbor, MI FANATICISM IN OUR TIME The Standard Reader (Oct...

...In writing "America has earned opprobrium in the Arab world for its realpolitik backing of repressive dictators like Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal family," we see the same blind egalitari-anism that would hamper any attempt at empire...

...F.C...

...While I in no way condone the acts of violence committed against the united States on that day, I have yet to hear anyone in our media pay any respect to the politics that led the terrorists to carry out these acts...

...It's easy to like an article that beats up on Said...

...In lieu of a more thoughtful or accurate account of the societies in question, the post-colonialists offered only a critique of the Western scholarly psyche—of its alleged need to externalize its unacceptable impulses by constructing a lurid image of "the Other...

...After decades of this sort of collective ad hominem attack, a single attempt to examine the motivations of the post-colonialists themselves draws charges of McCarthyism...

...He simply refuses to see that not everyone in the world is, deep down, a bourgeois Westerner to-be...