Orientalism and The Question of Palestine - Assignment Example

1)Orientalism tries to answer the question of why when we think of middle east for example, we have a preconceive notion of what kind of people live there, what they believe, how they act, even though we have never been there or met anyone from there. More generally, orientalism asks how do we come to understand people, strangers, who look different to us by virtue of the color of their skin. The central argument of orientalism is that the way we acquire this knowledge is not innocent or objective, but the end result of a process that reflects certain interests, that is highly motivated. 2) Said argues that the way of west Europe and US look at the countries and peoples of the middle east is through a lens that distort the actual reality of those places and those people. He calls this lens though which we view this part of world orientalism- a framework we use to understand the unfamiliar and strange to make the peoples of the middle east appear different and threatening. At the heart of how this orientalism operates is the threatening and demonized figure of the Islamic terrorists that is emphasized by the journalists and Hollywood . Said: “There is no investigative reporting, there is only repeating the lines of the government”, “ To turn away the attention from the problems in our own society” as the result, the human side of the Arabic word is rarely to be found. The situation in the popular media is basically that Muslims are villains and fanatics and many films end up with huge numbers of bodies of the Muslims all over the place killed by Arnold Schwarcenegger or Chuck Noris , lots of films where gorillas kill the Muslim terrorists, so the idea of Islam is something to be stamped out. Said recognizes that terrorism exists as a result of violent political situation on the middle east but he argues that there is a lot more going on there that is misunderstood or not seen by the peoples of the west. The result of the media’s focus on one negative aspect alone means that all the peoples of Islamic world come to be understood in the same negative way, that is, as a threat. When we think of people who look like that in that part of the world we think- fanatic, extreme, violent. Said argues that understanding them in this narrow way takes away from humanity and diversity of millions of ordinary people living decent lives there. “How do we accept difference without violence and hostility, and is that attitude I think that we need?” 3)The differences between another kinds of orientalism are the different kinds of experiences of what is called the orient. Ht difference between Britain and France on the one hand and the US on the other, is tt Britain and France had colonies in the orient, they had a long standing relationship and imperial role in a place like India, so there is a kind of a archive of actual experiences of being in India, of ruling the country for several hundred years. The same with the French and North Africa, Algeria and Indo-China direct colonial experience. In the case of the Americans, the experience is much less direct (there has never been an American occupation of the middle east. The difference between British and French orientalism on the one hand and the American experience of the orientalism on the other is that the American is much more indirect, much more based on abstractions. The second big thing Said thinks that differs the American experience from the British and the French of orientalism is that American orientalism is very politicized by the presence of Israel for which America is the main ally. What you have is a creation of a jewish state in the middle of Islamic oriental world. There is a greater coincidence between American interests there that there has been in for example Iran which is important because of oil. Said thinks that the presence of this other factor which is very anti Islamic where Israel regards the whole outer world as its enemy is imported into American orientalism. You get the impression that the only problem is that Israeli security is threatened by suicide bombs and the rest of it and nothing is said about hundreds of thousands of people who were dispossessed and are living miserable lives as the direct result of what Israel has done and is doing. So there is a sense in which the arab struggle for national independence is looked at with the great hostility as upsetting the stability of the status quo. And that makes it virtually impossible, for an American to see on television, to read books, to see films about the middle east that are not color politically by this conflict in which the arabs always play the roles of terrorists and violent people etc. 4) After Said wrote Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, he wrote a third book, Covering Islam ,which was an account of the coverage of Islam in the popular media immediately occasioned by the Iranian revolution( the Islamic revolution)and what Said has discovered was a huge arsenal of images employed by the media, large masses of people waving their fists, black banners, all of them giving the impression of the negative, evil emanation. So, the impression you got of Islam was that it was frightening, mysterious, above all, threatening as if the main business of Muslims was to threaten and try to kill Americans. Almost 16 years after he wrote Covering Islam , he wrote an update of the book and he wrote a new introduction and he found that during those 16 years with a large number of events in Islamic world taking place which you would think would allow for more familiarity with a more sense of what was taking place , as reflected in television, in fact was the opposite. The situation got worse and that what you had instead now was a much more threatening picture of Islam. But never the same generalizations were made about the Oklahoma city bombing, and the teachings of Islam became the synonym for terror and the demonization of Islam allowed for very little distinction between piety and violence. The so called independent media and a liberal society like this are so lazy and controlled by interests that are commercial and political at the same time, that there is no investigative report it is all basically repeating the lines of the government. So, as the result, the human side of the Islamic world is rarely to be found, and the result is an automatic image of violence and terror. 5)Is the world full of terrorists? All you have to do is break down the question into common sense. There are terrorists, as there are everywhere, but there is a lot more going on there, and one of the biggest problems with orientalism to begin with is this vast generalization about Islam and the nature of Islam and there is very little in common that you could talk about as Islam between Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. They are both Muslim countries, but the difference is in history and language, traditions... Said argued that the predominant mood of the Arab world is very secular. It’s easy to attract media’s attention for some of the political reasons that are obvious, to discredit the Arabs to make them seem like a threat to the west to keep the idea around at the end of the cold war that they are the foreign devils. Islam is considered to be the enemy of Christianity and there is a history to that. The Arabs have allowed themselves to be represented as orientals in this orientalist way. There is no information policy of the 22 Arab countries to try to give a different picture of what their worlds are like, because most of them are dictatorships. All of them are dictatorships, without democracy who are in desperate need of US government patronage to support them, so they are not about to criticize the US, not about to engage in a real dialogue which in some way proves their inferiority to the west. 6) The most interesting human task is interpretation, according to Said, a task of giving history some shape and sense. For particular reason, to understand his history in terms of other people’s history, to generalize, to move beyond one’s own experience to the experience of the others. Said thinks that the great goal is to become someone else, to transform itself from the unitary identity to an identity that includes the other without suppressing the difference. That would be the notion of writing and historical inventory, to not only understand oneself, but to understand oneself in relation to others and to understand the others as if you would understand yourself. Palestine is important because its local complexity- Arabs and Jews , Arab Muslims and Arab Christians and Israeli Jews mixed- it’s a complex mosaic, finally finding a way to live together, three world major religions on the lad that is drenched with significance on the world scale, unlike any other country. 2) Watching the movie of Edward Said, I found myself agreeing with his every word and his talk has awaken many emotions and feelings of justice( or should I say injustice?). In my opinion, people often tend to generalize a lot and in 99 percent of cases are possessed by prejudice. That means that if a number of Muslims are terrorists and violent, they all must be like that. There is no chance considered that there might be people who live normally, in peace and are not concerned about throwing bombs, torturing people or enslaving them . Some of the Muslims actually don’t care about America or any other place than the one they live in. The fact that the Muslims in general are described as they are shows how the government and the media don’t care about who they might hurt on their way to achieving their goals or whose reputation they are going to destroy, as long as they get what they need, but mostly only selfishly want. And by ruining the reputation of the Muslims, they maintain their own, and they mask the flaws of America by making the Muslims look bad. I am not saying that all the Muslims are good people and willing to live their lives as peacefully as they can, but I can’t say they all are not. That kind of generalization is simply not right. As if we would say that all the people on earth are just good or just bad. There has to be balance, and it has to exist everywhere, because, if it didn’t exist there wouldn’t be for the world either. Our prejudice are often created by the speeches and performances of the important people, whose opinion is almost always respected and taken as our own, rarely challenged. People driven by the thoughts of the others become narrow minded and in the end they are not able to think for themselves anymore. 6) Edward Said thought that we should become someone else to be able to understand that someone, and, in process, get to understand ourselves better. Of course, Said didn’t mean literarily become someone else, but put ourselves in the position of another. If we would all do so, there would be much more understanding, sympathy and fellowships in the world. The problem is that people almost always use their angle only and because of that there are many problems in the world. When people find a way to live together in peace and harmony, despite all the differences on the bases of religion, politics or color of the skin, without any discriminations on any level, the world becomes a little better. The appropriate example for that is the mixture of three main religions in Palestine. Being tolerant is a really important thing, because if we don’t practice tolerance on others, we nor our actions will not be tolerated either, and step by step, misunderstanding by misunderstanding, fight by fight , and there comes another meaningless war. Orientalism by Edward Said is the movie everyone should, at one point, watch with full attention . I can’t find any remarks. It has a lot of information, so you maybe should watch it when you are really in a mood for some intelligent thoughts . I admire the mind of Edward Said, and I would certainly watch it again, without question. Read More