It's in your hands : reflecting on the passing of Edward Said

Edward Said, to the last, was an intellectual who believed that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of freedom and justice from world powers. He said that "deliberate violations of these standards" needed to be testified and fought courageously. Edward Said became the most articulate international spokesman for the Palestinian cause. He was a formidable academic; the author of 17 books, published in 19 languages, was on the Board of twenty journals and had lectured at more than two hundred universities. He was Professor of Literature at Columbia University, but had also been a distinguished visiting Professor at Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins and Toronto universities. In my own research on the work of foreign correspondents, Said helped me understand why so much international news was misreported, slanted or otherwise ignored by journalists who thought they were telling the truth. Indeed, Edward Said's arguments in Orientalism, suggested that Western journalists' "truth" about Asia might merely be representations founded in someone else's fact, fiction and ultimately fantasy: Orientalism helped demolish Western mythologies and in doing so, created Said's international reputation as a scholar. His intellectualism was interwoven with his activism.