AN UNFORGETTABLE GESTURE

This act of defiance, during a family visit to the Lebanese south in celebration of total Israeli withdrawal from the country, caused an uproar in Zionist circles, leading to the cancellation of a lecture he was to give at the Vienna Freud Society, and calls for his dismissal from Columbia University. Zionist campaigns against him notwithstanding, Said never succumbed to threats. Until his death last Thursday, he remained a Palestinian activist, focussed but always open-minded enough to distinguish between the Zionist enemy and the Jewish or Israeli human being -- and that is what unsettled his enemies most.

Edward Said, Palestinian, remembered.
Al-Ahram 10.2-8.03