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The premier's reputation is on the line here. He played a critical part in Canada's housing policy revolution. If he wants to be remembered as a builder rather than a status-quo politician, he must fully commit to reaching his stated objective of building 1.5 million dwellings over a decade. That includes accepting all of the Housing Affordability Taskforce's suggestions and not getting upset if the federal minister wants to perform some of the work for him. It is time to build, not slow down.In the most recent Hub book review, Patrick Luciani revisits Edward W. Said's Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978) and discusses how his important book and activism helped set the intellectual and political groundwork for today's turbulence.Following the first shock of October 7, something snapped on Western colleges around the world. Students who were in elementary school just a decade ago, getting swimming lessons and attending each other's birthday celebrations, are today yelling the most heinous antisemitic cliches. 

Who is to blame? Most students attend to morally ambiguous lecturers 

who can't tell right from wrong. However, the late Columbia University Professor Edward Said and his book Orientalism continue to have an impact.Professor Said, who died in 2003, was revered not only by Palestinians, as an American of Palestinian descent, but also by American and European intellectuals. He built a reputation as a talented polemicist and fervent supporter of Palestinian rights. In 1974, Edward Said wrote Yasser Arafat's memorable speech to the UN's National Assembly, in which Arafat exhibited a rifle and an olive branch, comparing Zionism with racism. He also accused Zionists for beginning the 1948 war following a UN vote that established the State of Israel. Said remained a supporter of Arafat until the Oslo Accords in 1995, when he was outraged that the PLO leader was considering striking a peace agreement with Israel. Hamas disrupted the Accords by a series of suicide bombings in Israel. This is what Said desired: a war that would devastate the State of Israel and forever destroy the concept of a two-state solution. Hamas now seeks to disrupt any reconciliation between Israel and Saudi Arabia or any other Arab country.The release of Orientalism in 1978 propelled Said to new heights of celebrity and power, gaining the hearts and minds of the American left. His argument was that European and American scholars, known as Orientalists, were responsible for the West's misinterpretation and distortion of Arabs and Muslims as uneducated and backward. According to Said, every Westerner who researched the Middle East did so with evil intentions. 

This legend evolved into today's truism—taught in classrooms everywhere

that Europeans were vicious tyrants who exploited "virtuous victims." According to Said, this mindset can also be seen in Western art and literature. Said argues that in the film Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence, played by Peter O'Toole, portrays all Arabs as "a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel." As a comparative literature expert, he discovered imperialism everywhere, including Jane Austen's books. On this point, Said was harsh in his accusation. "Every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, [and] an imperialist." Westerners are to blame for all of the Middle East's ills, even if the majority are self-inflicted. The term "Orientalist" is now considered a pejorative and is essentially out of use.These charges are a ridiculous exaggeration and an atrocious libel against numerous respected professors. Orientalists were not the monsters depicted in Said's imagination or in what he refers to as the European "narrative" of the East. Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis, one of the great Middle Eastern historians and a frequent target of Said's venom, has pointed out that Said deliberately ignores Soviet scholars' racist opinions against the Muslim world. Edward Said had plenty of support in pushing his narrative, much like Sartre and Norman Mailer, who advocated murdering as a means of achieving personal freedom from racism. 

Others on the sidelines joined in, including Noam Chomsky

Gore Vidal, and Michael Moore, all intent to paint the West in the worst possible light. But the real damage occurred in universities beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the idea of the corrupt West gained traction among intellectual guilt-mongers who transformed Said into their hero and champion. Said enthusiastically welcomed the return of theocrat Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran merely because it was non-Western. His argument resonated in the humanities and social sciences, as researchers matured following the violent student protests against the Vietnam War. They saw the world as a dichotomy between victims and perpetrators, shaped by the teachings of French deconstruction thinkers who combined anti-colonialism and "critical thinking." Tenured researchers, raised on postmodernism and postcolonial studies, now control the academia and have quickly instilled this new prejudice in their pupils. If colonialism is a sin, then colonizers must be eliminated. It can only be read in one way. How else to explain the elation expressed by a Cornell University historian who felt "exhilarated" upon hearing of Hamas' butchery, or the jubilation felt by one University of Toronto professor during the deadly rampage? Since the release of Orientalism, Edward Said's "narrative" has been completely dismissed as "malignant charlatanry." But the damage has been done. After 50 years of brainwashing about the sins of the West, Said's work led to the unavoidable conclusion that violence is the only solution for Palestinians, a message not missed on youthful protestors across North America, Britain, and Australia.