Martin Kramer writes about the Middle East Studies Association of North America, which is commemorating September 11 by giving an award to Edward Said, the anti-Israel, anti-American professor who is also an expert in ballistics.

Here’s a novel way to mark one year since the tragedy of September 11, 2001: honor Edward Said.

This is the choice of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), and its companion associations in Europe. On the evening of September 11, the First World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) will confer upon Said the “WOCMES Award for Outstanding Contributions to Middle Eastern Studies.” Said will go to Mainz, Germany, to accept it. The congress is an initiative of MESA (where Said is already one of ten “honorary fellows,” for having “made major contributions to Middle East studies”). Could there be any more telling evidence for the total alienation of this field from the changing realities of the world around it?

Said is the Columbia University celebrity professor who has made a career of accusing all and sundry of misrepresenting Islam. In the process, he has committed not a few acts of misrepresentation himself. For example, in introducing the latest (pre-9/11) edition of his book Covering Islam, Said ridiculed “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies.” Such talk is based on “highly exaggerated stereotypes.”

On 9/11 and immediately after, Said refused to take media calls. It’s his standard operating procedure after any atrocity that might be traced to Arabs or Muslims. Said ducks the media, then resurfaces when people begin to ponder whether it might really be “our fault.” (His stock answer: of course it is.) But since 9/11, self-recrimination is a hard sell in this country and his city, so Said has been spending more time in Europe, where he finds many more admirers prepared to believe that America had it coming. Two months after the attacks, Said visited London, where a couple of thousand people packed the Apollo Theatre to hear him. There he announced that New York no longer felt like home. “New York is the most interesting city in the world,” he said. But “it’s difficult to be in that atmosphere. I really feel I belong in the old world, not the aggressively new one. Europe attracts me, and the Middle East.”

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