DICHOTOMY: David Frum looks at Edward Said:

Said served for many years on the Palestinian National Council – the theoretical government of the Palestinian national movement. As such, he was at least formally implicated in Yasser Arafat’s three-decade-long terrorist crime spree. Nor did Said flinch from his responsibility: He may not have liked Arafat much as a man or leader, but he excused and condoned Arafat’s atrocities. Yet ironically, the same Islamic intolerance that has unsuccessfully sought since 1948 to drive the Jews out of Israel lay at the foundation of the larger campaign to drive Christians like the Said family out of the whole Middle East. The thugs and murderers to whom this embittered exile lent his strength were the same thugs and murderers who had exiled him in the first place. And the only people in the region who championed the humane, liberal, and democratic values that Said praised but did not practice were the very Israelis to whose extermination he sacrificed both his vocation and his integrity.