Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Ideas Program Will Not Tolerate Criticism of Edward Said

Submitted by Andrew Baldwin (Canada), Oct 27, 2019 at 08:06

The CBC Radio program "Ideas" has been around for years as a liberal (and often Liberal) interview program, which sometimes does good work, for example, in broadcasting the Munk debates. Now it has a new host, Nahlah Ayed, a Palestinian-Canadian from Winnipeg, and it looks like there has also been a Palestinization of the program.

Ideas broadcast an episode called "Forty years on, Edward Said's 'Orientalism' still groundbreaking", on October 23, just two days after Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party won a second term in office. I left the following comment on the Ideas website, which was disabled shortly after posting. You are prominently mentioned in the comment:

"This look at Said and his book 'Orientalism' verged on the hagiographic. It was a highly slanted take on a book that has been strongly criticized by many scholars who don't hesitate to call themselves Orientalists. People should refer to Daniel Pipes's review of 'Orientalism' with links to his later criticisms of Said for a more balanced view. Pipes notes that Orientalism 'has a well-established meaning in English – namely, the scholarly study by Westerners of eastern cultures, languages and peoples, a meaning Edward Said sometimes adopts. ' But, as the paintings by Ingres used to illustrate this Ideas segment suggests, Said's book tended to look at it in a much more restrictive way, as the work of Britishers and Frenchmen relating to the Middle East and more specifically Arab Muslims, with a heavy concentration on the colonial period. Said told many falsehoods about his life, and was rude and insulting to many distinguished Western scholars of the Middle East, including Bernard Lewis, who also gave 'Orientalism' a poor review. It is remarkable though how Said's book on Orientalism seems to have succeeded in damaging if not destroying the original meaning of the word. In the Cambridge online dictionary it is now defined as follows: 'Western ideas about the Middle East and about East and Southeast Asia, especially ideas that are too simple or not accurate about these societies being mysterious, never changing, or not able to develop in a modern way without Western help.'"

I left a strongly worded but unprofane protest against the deletion of my comment, which was also deleted by the CBC Thought Police.

I was unfamiliar with the producer of this episode, Naheed Mustafa, but it seems that she is, like Ms Ayed, a Canadian-born Muslim woman. In 1993, she published an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, "My body is my own business," on why she was so happy to be wearing the hijab. One of the links in the October 23 episode on the Ideas website goes to a 1993 interview by Eleanor Wachtel with Said on his book "Culture and Imperialism". She was and remains the host of the CBC Radio literary program "Writers and Company". While hardly a hostile interviewer, Eleanor is not a Said pom pom girl either, and she pushes back at some of Said's arguments, asking him if where he sees an imperial subtext in a novel, there might not just be synchronicity. The last quarter of a century has definitely seen an Islamization of the CBC, and, as my experience shows, the network, which is supposed to serve the public, is increasingly intolerant of criticism from the taxpayers who pay for it. People whose comments are deleted also have essentially no recourse, as the CBC Ombudsman's mandate does not extend to commenting.

I would really appreciate it if you would leave your own comment on that program, or better yet ask for a right of rebuttal. I don't think the CBC would have the balls to delete a comment from you, although who knows? They get worse and worse every year that passes.

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