There are scarcely enough quotation marks available for this entry.

Edward Said, Palestinian “intellectual”, has published his latest “book”. It is 84 pages long. It costs £13.

I am not suspicious of Said’s status as a Palestinian victim of Zionism*—he seems to be honest—but I become ever more suspicious of his supposed talents—how many ways can one man be wrong?

In his latest work, according to A. C. Grayling, writing in the Financial Times, Said hopes to draw the attention of the Jews to their mongrel heritage that they might better recognise their common humanity with, for example, the Arabs. To do this he openly recycles theories about Jewish history and identity hacked together by Sigmund Freud, founder of “psychology†“. Freud selectively quotes that still-more-reliable source of historical data, the Old Testament.

I threatened a fisking earlier on, but do I begin with the old lies or the new lies, the old fraud or the new fraud? Do I attack the point-missing or the pointlessness? Once again I find myself dealing with something that appears to be so stupid in so many ways that I can scarcely bring myself to engage with it. Grayling shows the typical restraint of an English academic, merely dismissing the writing as “unquestioning”, “obscure” and “tendentious”. At 15p a page he missed out “overpriced”.

[Slap me with a spoon and hurry on down to Amazon! There the book’s £10.87 and 96 pages long. Bargain!]

* A clarification: for me “Zionism” is not a dirty word, but I believe it has been a force for both good and ill.

† Oxford, Cambridge and various other serious universities use the phrase “experimental psychology” mainly to distance their own teaching and research in the sciences of the mind from the comprehensively discredited work of Freud and his acolytes. Whatever psychoanalytical studies are, they are not in any sense scientific.