Edward Said, the mendacious scholar of Islam, just died. His much older rival Bernard Lewis, who I've heard made Said's career by providing him with a good target, has outsurvived him. David Frum has a good comment on Said, who like Arafat actually grew up in Egypt, not Palestine.

For fifty years, Said put his passion and his intellect at the service of his grievances. And yet, when you look again at the details, you see something very strange: By far the greatest catastrophe to afflict the Said family was not the loss of a single house in Jerusalem, but the destruction of their family fortune in Egypt --- first by mob attacks against their store in 1952, then the following year by outright confiscation by the Nasser government. Said was indeed the victim of dispossession by a tyrannical and bigoted state. Only, the state that dispossessed him was not Israel, but Egypt; and the grounds for his dispossession was not his Arab ethnicity, but his Christian religion.

Yet in all Said�s long life thereafter, he could never (as far as I am aware) bring himself to address this core truth. I used to read Said's column in the online edition of Al-Ahram, the state-controlled newspaper of the government that ruined his family. Somehow, the normally vituperative Said never quite found occasion to mention what Egypt had done to him. All his fury was concentrated on one target: the Jews.

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