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 newly 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 30 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, out of eastern Jerusalem, out of the Old City - the holiest place on earth for Jews - and out of 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."

This, too, 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 20th century left-wing movements caught in the fabrication not only of their personal histories but of 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 and the creation of myth to sustain its romance? More practical and prosaic minds will conclude that it does.

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