Steve Sailer writes:
Reading “Orientalism” almost four decades later, it’s striking how useless it has been for helping anyone understand the Middle East.
That was Said’s intention. Knowledge is power, he believed, so he wanted Westerners to be more ignorant about his homeland in order that they would have less power over it.
No one ever expended more brainpower to encourage stupidity than Said did in “Orientalism.” He achieved his goal of increasing obliviousness by promoting anti-intellectual ploys, such as castigating pattern recognition as stereotyping the Other, that are now used by even the dimmest social justice jihadi, but which seemed relatively novel in 1978.
What’s more interesting than Said’s means were his motivations…
Motivations which apparently include lifelong animosity towards the old headboy at his school, Omar Sharif.
