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Edward Said Ushers in the New Year with Democracy Now! in Exile

StoryJanuary 01, 2002
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We turn to a recent speech by Edward Said, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and author of numerous books, articles and essays. He has been an eloquent voice for justice throughout the Palestinian struggle.

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This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Resistance Radio. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to professor Edward Said. He teaches comparative literature at Columbia University and gave this speech just a few weeks ago.

EDWARD SAID: I’d like to speak about the general situation in which we find ourselves after September the 11th, and then I want to focus specifically on the Middle East. As somebody from West Asia, I’m pleased to be addressing a forum organized by South Asians. And since I don’t believe in artificial divisions of that sort, nevertheless, perhaps geographical identifications are not useless all the times.

But as a child of war myself, I’ve been born into — having, you know, been born into a war contest, being an adolescent in one, and then maturing in others, I’ve always seemed to — I’ve always felt that wars are never a solution. They seem to often beget other wars, as was the case with World War II, which produced colonial wars elsewhere. And certainly in my part of the world, we’ve had our share of those, plus, of course, civil wars, insurgencies and so on.

So I think the general situation of belligerency — can you hear me well, or not? No, sorry about that. Yeah. Yes, louder. Is this better? Right. I was simply saying that wars have always seemed to me to produce other wars. And they really are deeply unsatisfactory solutions to problems and issues that arise and seem inevitably to lead to war, such as September the 11th. I don’t think this is an exception, the war that we’re in now and other wars that we may be heading towards.

A few days ago, I received a letter from an admired friend of mine, a retired professor of history, who is certainly one of the greatest scholars produced in this country. In his letter, he wrote me the following: “In the current madness of our nation and the world it seems determined to conquer, it seems to me that never in the many political crises that I’ve experienced, beginning with the Wallace campaign, have I felt so pessimistic about the country and so impotent. There seems to be no stirring of a movement, no social and cultural base from which an opposition could grow. The way in which Sharon is imitating Bush to eliminate the Palestinian government and consolidate Israeli domination, with nothing but anti-colonial men of desperation left to express the aspirations of the Palestinians, it is too horrendous. I wait for the U.S. to invade Iraq next.”

Now, these are certainly sentiments that I share in many ways, that many of us who are Americans from the Islamic and Arab world also share. There’s no point here in stressing what everybody in the world has already stressed endless times, that the dreadful September 11th terrorist attacks have had a profound effect not only on the city where we all live and which so many of us have found to be a refuge from an old world of war and misery, as well as a superb place to work and study and teach and bring up children, but also has had terrible effects on the world not at all in finally salutary ways. There’s no need at all now for me to try to compete patriotically with all the uncounted zillions of words that have been uttered or written expressing shock, outrage, anger, sorrow at the events of September the 11th.

But there is a need, I think, to go beyond and think reflectively and critically — something which, alas, the present environment hasn’t been so hospitable to. As a nation, we risk, I think, entering into an anti-democratic, triumphalist phase. And this, which is huge power unopposed or unchallenged on grounds of fear or of angering the majority or of seeming unpatriotic, this would be a national and moral catastrophe of great proportions. We need always to be asking ourselves what events mean, what they represent, and who and what any particular speaker represents, who and what constituency, and for what purpose and interests they speak for. That is the type of debate which is the real health of democracy to which we all must remain committed.

Now, as a deeply secular intellectual who has always suspected and made clear my disagreement and discomfort with religious politics, I find that the current war, not just against terrorism, which must always be critically analyzed and distinguished into types and kinds, but against what has been characterized vaguely as a kind of metaphysical evil, has been an extremely problematic one, first of all because, as Americans, we have taken on the role of righteous avengers, which, with the enormous military and political and economic power wielded by the U.S., has made for scenes of awful destruction and unforeseen circumstances all over the world, as well, of course, as creating vast new abstractions both to be for and to be against.

Now, as a deeply secular intellectual who has always suspected and made clear my disagreement and discomfort with religious politics, I find that the current war, not just against terrorism, which must always be critically analyzed and distinguished into types and kinds, but against what has been characterized vaguely as a kind of metaphysical evil, has been an extremely problematic one, first of all because, as Americans, we have taken on the role of righteous avengers, which, with the enormous military and political and economic power wielded by the U.S., has made for scenes of awful destruction and unforeseen circumstances all over the world, as well, of course, as creating vast new abstractions both to be for and to be against.

Islam and the West, or America, I’ve said repeatedly, are generalizations I find difficult to follow blindly. I’m not one of the people, though, who ever had any time for Islamists or fundamentalists or the religious right anywhere that they have fought. They have brought nothing but deception, disappointment, tragedy and waste, wherever they’ve preached their gospel of indiscriminate war, in the case of the Islamists, against the kuffar. And I have no regret in seeing the demise of the Taliban regime and the Qaeda. But I think it’s incumbent on us to have equally critical assessments of all so-called faith-based politics, whether in the Muslim world or elsewhere. Bombing abortion clinics and preventing the teaching of evolution on religious grounds are as reprehensible here as imprisoning or abusing women at home there, and, for that matter, discriminating against non-majority religions in places whether in like — whether like Saudi Arabia or Israel, where I think such practices have to be opposed.

The trouble with the present time, though, is that majority opinion seems to be represented not only by the government, which, in its search for unity, must appear to speak with one voice, I suppose, but also all or most of the other voices, those of the media, in particular. I have found that this idea of unity, the political image of the government and the media — which has acted mostly without independence from the government — is what is being projected now. There really is a feeling being manufactured by the media and the government that a collective “we” exists and that we all act and feel together, as witnessed perhaps by such unimportant surface phenomena as flag flying and the use of the collective “we” by journalists in describing events all over the world in which the U.S. is involved — “We bombed,” “We said,” “We decided,” “We acted,” “We feel,” “We believe,” etc., etc.

Of course, this is only marginally to do with the reality, which is far more complicated and far less reassuring. There’s plenty of unrecorded or unregistered uncertainty and skepticism, I think, lots of questioning, even outspoken dissent here and there, but it seems hidden by overt patriotism. So, American unity is being projected with such force as to allow very little questioning of U.S. policy, which in many ways is heading towards a series of more complex events after Afghanistan, the meaning of which many people will not realize until far too late.

In the meantime, American unity needs to state to the world that what America does and has done cannot brook serious disagreement or discussion. Just like bin Laden, Bush tells the world, “You are either with us or you are with terrorism, and hence against us.” So, on the one hand, America is not at war with Islam, but only with terrorism, and, on the other hand, in complete contradiction with that, since only America decides who or what Islam and terrorism are, we are against Muslim terrorism and Islamic rage as we define them.

I’ve been astonished at how much cant and zeal and phony expertise there has been on the media, with a few exceptions. I mean, I’ve never seen a situation quite like this one. Leaving aside all the military experts, or, as The Economist has called them, all the justly retired military analysts, the experts on Islam, people like the ever so arrogant and vulgar Thomas Friedman, with his dreadful letters — I’m going to come back to him in a minute — as well as the ponderously vindictive and shallow Fouad Ajami and Daniel Pipes and the extraordinarily falsehood-mongering Bernard Lewis — I wish I had time to go over some of the stuff he says in that article he did a couple months ago in The New Yorker, which I don’t read anymore — all of them have been unanimous in their shallow generalizations, their gratuitous, uncritical repetition of clichés, their unhelpful and uninformed denunciations of a world that they have willfully turned into essentially a satellite of Osama bin Laden’s crazed mind.

There are — we need to remind ourselves, there are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. There are many, many languages, many traditions, many peoples, many histories, all of them claiming to be Muslim. But none of them is collapsible into things like rage or militancy or extremism.

Then there’s the — to go back to Friedman for a second, and I don’t really want to waste too much time on him, but, I mean, he keeps repeating this ridiculous thing about how Islam needs a reformation. Well, how many reformations were there? There was one. Spain never had a reformation. Why doesn’t Spain get preached at for having produced the ETA terrorists? And besides, you know, Friedman is so ignorant, I don’t think he would recognize a reformation if he saw one walking down the street. He just keeps saying, “What Islam needs is a reformation. What this needs, what Islam needs is more people” — and he quotes some letters from some Pakistani or some Saudi Arabia writing about how unhappy he or she happens to feel. But, you know, the funny part of it is he never seems to turn his critical — well, I guess you can call it critical — critical vulgarity and arrogance on himself or on the United States. What about a reformation here for a change? I mean, it’s always somewhere else. And he keeps saying — I saw him once on television saying, “These people have to be reminded” — I guess he’s referring to Kuwait, perhaps. I don’t know. He says, “They have to be reminded that we liberated them.” I’m not quite sure what follows from that, but perhaps gratitude. But the idea of criticism is always extended out from pundits like Friedman, who seem to be speaking for and representing some larger humanity than anybody’s aware of.

Then we have the pundits like Samuel Huntington, Fukuyama and Fareed Zakaria, another recently found oracle to which people turn. I was given, as a kind of malicious present by my wife, a special issue of Newsweek entitled “The Davos Issue,” which is a kind of heavyweight punditry-laden issue of the magazine with articles by people like the ones I mentioned — Fukuyama, Huntington and the others. And what was interesting about it to me was not that everything in it was expected — you could predict line after line what they were saying — but how respectable professors like Huntington and RAND or CIA analysts like Fukuyama, who’s, I guess, now a professor also, were making vast generalizations without — about Islam and about the world we live, without any proof, as if it didn’t — you know, the normal canons of rational argument, in which you state a proposition and then give examples of what you mean and prove it, all that was thrown out. You didn’t need to. Islam was demented, or Islam was angry at modernity, or Islam is the only religion that isn’t tolerant, as if — I mean, show me a tolerant religion, and I’ll happily join it. So, all of these people are all the time on the media. And, as I say, there’s never much thoughtfulness or self-criticalness. At the same time, it’s quite apparent to me that the journalists, as well as these experts, have been adjuncts of the military.

Now, with the successful defeat, it seems, of the Taliban, most of whom, as the journalistic expression has it, seem to have faded away — just as they faded into existence, they faded out of existence, no doubt to join the Northern Alliance — there is now the menacing prospect, according to Bruce Anderson of The Independent on December the 10th — I quote him — of a “confident America” which is now “choosing its next targets.” Despite great, indeed unparalleled, power as Americans, we need to aware, I think, of other people in the world besides ourselves. And I cite a statistic which is often cited, that we constitute about 5 or 6% of the world, and we consume — in population, and we consume 30% of the world’s oil, which seems to be our god-given right.

Despite the badgering and the flag waving and Lynne Cheney’s list of 117 un-Americans, it strikes me as very American, on the other hand, to be asking critical questions about war, peace and U.S. involvement in the world. One of the things to be remembered is that the U.S. has played a very considerable role during the '70s and the ’80s, and even in the ’60s and even in the ’50s, that I can recall, of aiding and arming Islamic movements. I don't mean this as a way of excusing the terrorism of September the 11th, but rather as a way of wisely preventing a recurrence, of knowing history for its own sake.

I think one ought not to take one’s eye away, as the media soon will, from Afghanistan, where desperation, enormous numbers of refugees, poverty and the ruins of a society capped after 20 years of war, you know, will be feeling the brunt of the disasters of the last three months that have been heaped on the — two, three months, heaped on the place. And I don’t think that it’s a good model to follow, that, in other words, you encourage an insurgency, as we did in the 1980s against the Soviet Union, and then you leave it alone, and then it comes back, then you go back and bomb it. And it can’t be assuaged or taken care of with free market economics, which have failed in places like Egypt and Pakistan. I think one has to recall that people can be — and this you never see a reference to, I think, anywhere. But I think you have to remember that people can be moved and mobilized by a sense of injustice when people lose their land or their livelihood or to be dispossessed, and that it’s not — all these things don’t necessarily lead to a whole bunch of fundamentalist extremists. I think people can be and are moved and mobilized by injustice and a hope of justice.

And I think it’s also important to remember that Islam is not unlike Judaism and Christianity in producing militants who do violent action on behalf of their cause. There are plenty of examples in this country, in Israel, in other parts of the world, to show what I mean. So I think there’s a tremendous need for critical understanding and a certain kind of compassion, as well. I think it’s never — it’s never the wrong time to understand the narratives of sufferings — of suffering that produced desperation and violence. And this kind of understanding is not, as it’s frequently referred to with a great sort of dismissal and contempt, is it’s not victimology but human reality in the most profound sense of that phrase.

I want to turn now from the general situation to one specific situation, namely the Middle East, which during the course of the war against terrorism, since September the 11th, both the U.S. government, in the persons of the president and Colin Powell, secretary of state, and the British government, in the person of — persons, rather, of Blair and Jack Straw, the foreign minister, have made specific reference to the need for a Palestinian state. In the meantime — as something important to keep the coalition together. In the meantime, the situation on the ground, partly as a result of September the 11th, but, you know, going back in time way before it, has gotten worse. And what I’d like now to spend the rest of the time doing is talking about the situation in Palestine, as a quite different situation from that of Afghanistan.

I wanted to remind you that there was a wonderful poem written in 1982, which — by the leading Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. It’s a poem that begins, “The world” — and he wrote it, I should mention, in September of 1982. “The world is closing in on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.” Then he says, “Where shall we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky?” I use that line, “after the last sky,” as the title of a book I wrote in 1986 with the photographer Jean Mohr.

It’s now 19 years later, 2001. The Palestinian situation is much the same as it was in 1982, although it’s worse because it’s happening in Palestine, not Lebanon. Once again, Ariel Sharon and his military have surrounded an overwhelmingly civilian population of Palestinians. This time they are besieged and imprisoned inside the West Bank and Gaza, which was occupied by Israel since 1967, of which 28% of the West Bank and 60% of Gaza have been allowed Palestinians since the Oslo process. The rest of the land has been taken over by 400,000 Israeli settlers in 145 settlements, including those on Palestinian land around Jerusalem.

Since the Intifada began last September, Palestinians have been shut up by the Israeli military in villages, towns, cities and farms into no less than 220 discontinuous little ghettoes, blockaded, imprisoned for 15 straight months, in addition to curfews inside the towns from time to time, often for weeks at a stretch. No one, young or old, sick or well, dying or pregnant, student or doctor, can move without going through hours at the barricades, manned by rude and purposely humiliating Israeli military searches. At this moment, 200 Palestinians are unable to receive kidney dialysis just because the Israeli military won’t allow them to go to medical centers because of “security reasons.” There must be thousands and thousands of young Israeli conscripts who are abusing an entire population like this for months on end, with only a few refusing this demeaning and sadistic service.

And one question that comes to mind is: Have any of the legions of foreign media personnel who cover the conflict, which is about as one-sided as any in history — have any of them done a story about these brutalized young Israelis trained chiefly to punish Palestinian civilians collectively as the main part of their military duty in the name of the Jewish people on the land of Israel? Compare this, please, with the enormously well-covered sins of the fundamentalist Taliban.

As the Islamic Conference foreign ministers’ emergency meeting opened on December the 10th in Qatar, Yasser Arafat was not allowed by Israel to leave his office in Ramallah. His speech was read by an aide. Fifteen miles away from Ramallah, in Gaza, the airport and the two aging Palestinian helicopters were destroyed a week earlier by Israeli planes and bulldozers with — this is very important — with no one and no force to check, much less prevent, the daily tank incursions by Israel of which this particular feat of military daring was a part. Gaza airport is the only airport — is the only, rather, port of entry directly into Palestinian territory, and the only civilian airport in the world destroyed wantonly since World War II.

Periodically, Israeli F-16s, generously supplied by the United States, have bombed and strafed, Guernica style, Palestinian towns and villages. These, by the way, jets were never used by South African apartheid to bomb the townships in South Africa under apartheid. They’re used regularly by Israel against the Palestinians in their towns and villages, during which, of course, vast amounts of property are destroyed and lost, many civilians and police officials killed. There is no Palestinian army or navy or air force, and certainly no air or any other kind of defense to protect the people, and all of this is done at will.

Apache attack helicopters, again supplied by the U.S., have missile murdered 77 Palestinian leaders, allegedly for terrorist offenses, past or future, with a group of unknown Israeli intelligence operatives holding decision-making powers for these assassinations, presumably also approved by the Cabinet and, of course, by the U.S., which has tacitly approved of the practice of self-defense. The helicopters have also done an efficient job of bombing Palestinian Authority installations, police as well as civilian.

During the night of December 5th, the Israeli army entered the five-story offices of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in Ramallah, carried off the computers, every file and every report, then destroyed the building in an act of theft and vandalism designed to efface as many of the significant traces of collective Palestinian life as possible. In 1982, the same army, under the same commander, entered West Beirut, carted off documents and files from the Palestinian Research Center, then flattened the structure. A few days later came the massacres of Sabra and Shatila.

The suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have, of course, been at work, as Sharon knew perfectly well that they would, since after a 10-day lull in the fighting in late November, Sharon suddenly ordered the murder of a Hamas leader, a man called [Mahmoud] Abu Hanoud — an act designed quite consciously to provoke Hamas into retaliation and then enable his army to resume their butchery of Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Edward Said, giving a speech in the midst of the bombing of Afghanistan. He teaches comparative literature at Columbia University. If you would like to get a copy of the speech — we’re going to go back to it in just a minute — you can call 1-800-926-3921. It’s a videotape that includes Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, as well as John Ross talking about the Zapatistas. We’re going to go to a break and then back to professor Said.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to The War and Peace, as we return to professor Edward Said.

EDWARD SAID: But I think one has to look at the Sharonian view of the world, which has no place in it at all for Palestinians or for Arafat, whom he has been calling all sorts of terrible names for the past several years, partly, I think, because Sharon has no ideas as such, and partly because of his immense bulk. He finds it, therefore, natural to do what he has always done: kill Palestinians, either by the bullet or by stifling them, the way the large pachyderm does to nasty little animals that happen to be there.

Sharon has always held — this is very important, I think, also to understand, that Sharon has always held the notion that by dispensing with Arafat, he could then make a series of independent agreements with local warlords, rather the way the British in 19th century Africa came to understandings with docile chiefs. He tried it in 1982 in Lebanon. The idea was to invade Lebanon, destroy the PLO and put in place a president, a Lebanese president, Bachir Gemayel, who would then be an ally — who was an ally — of the Israelis. The trouble with that was, of course, that nobody else wanted to play with him. And the day after he was made president, Bachir Gemayel was assassinated, after which the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, and the whole place fell apart. And, you know, 18 years later, the Israelis were driven from Lebanon. But by doing what they’ve been doing and dividing about 40% of the West Bank and most of Gaza into several noncontiguous cantons whose borders are controlled by the Israeli army, Sharon dreams thus to have subdued the Palestinian and satisfied his supposed constituency. How this is supposed to gain Israel a sense of safety and security eludes me, but not, alas, the ones with the relevant power.

I think, in conclusion, what I want to say is that this kind of cycle, as it’s been referred to very often in the press, is going absolutely no place, but the people who are paying the price are the Palestinians, the weaker ones. And none of this would happen — and this is the final point I want to make, and we can then open the ground to the floor, to questions and discussion — is that none of this would be possible without the backing of the United States. That is to say, Israel has been the recipient of the largest amount of foreign aid of any country in the history of foreign aid: since '67, over $95 billion. And it's a matter of honor that every politician has to celebrate Israel and the security of Israel and the correctness of everything Israel does, to survive in American politics. The same applies to the media, with the solid exception and the sole exception of a magazine like The Nation. It’s virtually impossible to be critical of Israel in the major press, in the major media. All you have to do is look at the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, to take two very simple cases, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

And the tragedy of it is that the suffering of Palestinians has never even gained recognition in the public discourse of this country. And now I fear — and with this, I want to conclude — and now I fear, with the obsession with eradicating terrorism, with the near unanimity of discourse that exists in the media, with the danger of the war in Afghanistan spreading to other parts of, obviously, the Middle East — certainly Somalia, certainly Iraq are candidates for American invasion and bombing and the likes, and certainly there has been a great deal of pressure placed on the Palestinians to keep suppressing resistance in the name of fighting terrorism — the tragedy is likely to deepen, and the fate of the Palestinians is likely to get worse and worse.

I think it’s important to mention that the other Arabs and other Muslims have a vested interest in Arafat, despite their visible exasperation with him. But he’s simply cleverer and more persistent than they are and well knows the hold he has on the popular mind in their countries. As a devout and even pious Muslim, Arafat has had the foresight to cultivate two separate constituencies: the Islamists and the secular nationalists that exist throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. Both exist. Both constituencies exist. Both feel under attack, even though the second one, the nationalist one, has been paid little attention to by the vast number of Western experts and Orientalists who have assumed that bin Laden is the paradigm-defining Muslim, and not the much larger number of Muslim and non-Muslim secular Arabs who detest what bin Laden does and what he stands for.

In Palestine, for example, the recent polls have found that Arafat and Hamas are now about equal in popularity. Both hover between 20 and 25%, interestingly, with a majority of citizens favoring neither one nor the other. The same division, with the same significant plague-on-both-your-houses majority, exists in the Arab countries, where the reductiveness and unacceptable, and sometimes very violent, Islam of the religious groups, most of whom are more interested in the regulation of personal behavior than they are in matters like globalization, producing electricity and more jobs — and people are also disgusted with the corruption, brutality, independence of the regime that have turned most of the people off.

I think what one learns from this is that one can be religious without being an Islamist, and, conversely, one can be secular without being a Spinozist atheist. Most analyses today scant such distinctions, but they are, I think, valid ones. In such a volatile atmosphere, therefore, Arabs and Muslims might very well turn against their own rulers in all sorts of unwelcome ways, where Arafat’s seen as being literally choked to death by Israeli violence and Arab indifference. So, Arafat is necessary to the present landscape. Although I’m also convinced that were a new, collective Palestinian leadership to emerge from the mess of today, especially if it were of a younger generation than Arafat, Arafat’s departure would seem more like a natural inevitability than either a betrayal or an Israeli murder. When that might happen is impossible to tell, but that it will happen is, I think, a certainty.

As for the Europeans and the Americans, well, to put it bluntly, I don’t think they really know what they’re doing. Most of them would gladly be rid of Palestine as a problem and, in the spirit of Bush and Powell, would not be happy if the vision of a Palestinian state were somehow realized, so long as someone else did it. Besides, they would find it very hard to function with the Middle East — in the Middle East if they didn’t have Arafat to blame, snub, insult, prod and pressure to. To me, the mission, and a senseless mission, of both the EU and General Zinni, who looked completely out of place in Gaza, will of course have no effect at all on Sharon and his people, who have concluded, correctly, that the Westerners are on their side, basically, and they can go on doing what they do best — Arafat and his peoples begging to please come and negotiate notwithstanding. Nobody much listens to Arafat these days.

The slowly emerging groups of Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora, that I mentioned earlier, or the secular nationalists, is beginning to learn and use tactics that solidly place a moral onus on the West and Israel to come to terms with the issue of Palestinian rights, not just of the Palestinian presence. In Israel, for example, an audacious Knesset member, a man called Azmi Bishara, has been stripped of his parliamentary immunity and is on trial — and will be soon on trial for incitement to violence. Why? Because the Islam stood for the Palestinian right of resistance to occupation, and at the same time, he’s argued that Israel should be the state of all of its citizens, like every other state in the world, not just of the Jewish people. For the first time, a major Palestinian challenge on the basis of rights to citizenship and struggle for those rights is being mounted inside Israel, not on the West Bank, with all eyes on the proceedings. At the same time, an important case against Sharon’s war crimes has been suggested for trial in a Belgian court by the state attorney’s office. And this, plus the certain failure of his policies, will bring him down, as it always has in the past. In my opinion, Sharon is a born loser.

A painstaking mobilization of secular Palestinian opinion is also taking place as we gather here this evening. And this, I think, will slowly overtake the Palestinian Authority and its remnants, despite continued Israeli attacks and widespread Palestinian disarray. The moral high ground is, in the end, I think, inevitably, going to seized back from Israel as the focus on occupation becomes central and as more and more Israelis realize that there’s no way, in the end, to keep even a 35-year-old occupation going on and on indefinitely. Besides, as the U.S. war against terrorism begins to spread, there’s almost certainly more unrest about to appear throughout the region. So, far from closing things down, U.S. power is likely, I think, to be stirring them up in ways that can’t always be contained. It’s no mean irony that the renewed focus on Palestine was a link made by the U.S. and the Europeans as a way of keeping the anti-Afghanistan coalition together. Watch for more of this as the months roll on in Palestine and elsewhere. And I’ll stop here. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was professor Edward Said, university professor at Columbia in New York. He teaches comparative literature, has written many books, speaking recently in the midst of the bombing of Afghanistan. Before that, we brought you Noam Chomsky. He’s author of the book 9-11. Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If you’d like to get a videotape of the two speeches, as well as the speech that we did in our first hour of John Ross, author of The War Against Oblivion, which is about the Zapatistas, you can get all three speeches on one videotape, our New Year’s videotape, if you call 1-800-926-3921. That’s 1-800-926-3921. You can also get information about the program at our website, democracynow.org. In all sorts of ways, you can be a part of this listener-sponsored experiment.

And as we move into this new year, just again I want to thank everyone who has been there for us and made it possible for us to broadcast this largest public media collaboration in the country in the last months, thanks to KPFA and KFCF, despite a ban by Pacifica Foundation, which has been lifted this past weekend, and it looks like we’ll be back on all five Pacifica stations, as well as all of the affiliates. The affiliates like yours have been so loyal in running us. We have been broadcasting on public access TV stations around the country. Thanks especially to Manhattan Neighborhood Network in New York. We’ve been broadcasting on channels 34 and 56 every day. We want to thank WFMU, that really stepped up to the plate. And in a time when we weren’t able to broadcast at our home station, WBAI, WFMU has been there — every night, 7:00, you can hear us, and we hope we’ll continue to be able to hear us at 91.1 FM in New York, easy to remember: It is 911. We’ve also been broadcasting on shortwave radio, Radio for Peace International. I have friends in Honduras who have been saying they’ve been listening every day. On the internet, thanks to Errol Maitland and Ryme Katkhouda at WBIX.org, which is WBAI in exile, twice a day. Also at our website, democracynow.org. And thanks to Free Speech TV, that broadcasts us on their 24-hour channel on DISH Network. That’s channel 9415 of the DISH Network.

And we hope whatever way you listen to us or watch us, that you will let us know by emailing us at mail@democracynow.org. We’re looking for all sorts of ways to keep our communications system going, if you can help out. Perhaps your office is upgrading. We’re looking for Sony PD150 video cameras. We go out now not only with tape recorders but with video cameras. That’s Sony PD150 video cameras. Looking again for Mac laptops, as well, the latest G4 Titaniums, where we can also edit video. Just go to our website, and you’ll see all the information. You can also help us out by going to PayPal on our website. That’s mail@democracynow.org.

So many people to thank: Aaron Glantz and Amy Pomerlow at KPFA, Jim Bennett at KPFA, all the staff there, KFCF; Edwin Starr, who’s been bringing us our music every day; our amazing staff, Kris Abrams and Lizzy Ratner, Miranda Kennedy and Brad Simpson. Jeremy Scahill is back, has once again joined us. Anthony Sloan, our engineer and music maestro. And that’s it. Welcome to the new year. It is a thrill to be with you all. We hope to be back on so many stations in the coming days. But we are still in exile from the embattled studios of WBAI and hope the banned and fired will be returned to those studios. We’re in exile from the studios of our listeners and hope to be soon back there. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening to another edition of Democracy Now! in Exile. Happy New Year!

Also, a special thanks to our holiday crew of Chase Pierson, Jacquie Soohen, our webmeister, Rachel Jones and so many, the video crew, DeeDee Halleck and Karen Ranucci, Orlando Richards and Molly Snyder-Fink, Emily Kunstler and Angela Alston, who have contributed every day to this program. Again, thank you.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

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