Steve Sailer has permlinks now, so I’m linking to this post noting how Edward Said’s anti-Arabist project backfired as those philo-Arabs, for all their colonial mindset, did have a fondness for the desert bedouin, which the necons who have filled their vacuum do not. To be fair, the number #1 Arabist who Said targeted, Bernard Lewis, is generally pro-Israel in orientation (Lewis is actually more properly a Turkicist, but Orientalism was clearly aimed at him).
I have read several of Said’s books related to the Arab issue, and find them a bit overblown, somewhat like Bernard Lewis in fact. Their theses or assertions are not the stuff of hundreds of pages, and they often flub details (at least Lewis is a historian, Said makes some obvious mistakes about Arabo-Islamic history in Orientalism while Lewis tends to make footnote related errors or throw out assertions that no lay reader would be able to look up easily and take a generalization a bit to far). The current print issue of The Atlantic Monthly has a very thorough and balanced article by Said’s friends Chris Hitchens, check it out.
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