We Are At A Point In Our

The Just Response To This Terrible Event Should Be To Go Immediately To The World Community, The United Nations. The Rule Of International Law Should Be Marshaled, But It's Probably Too Late Because The United States Has Never Done That; It's Always Gone It Alone.

Exile Is Strangely Compelling To Think About But Terrible To Experience. It Is The Unhealable Rift Forced Between A Human Being And A Native Place, Between The Self And Its True Home: Its Essential Sadness Can Never Be Surmounted. And While It Is True That Literature And History Contain Heroic, Romantic, Glorious, Even Triumphant Episodes In An Exile’s Life, These Are No More Than Efforts Meant To Overcome The Crippling Sorrow Of Estrangement.

The Central Fact For Me Is, I Think, That The [role Of The] Intellectual... Cannot Be Played Without A Sense Of Being Someone Whose Place It Is Publicly To Raise Embarrassing Questions, To Confront Orthodoxy And Dogma (rather Than To Produce Them), To Be Someone Who Cannot Easily Be Co-opted By Governments Or Corporations, And Whose Raison D'etre Is To Represent All Those People And Issues That Are Routinely Forgotten Or Swept Under The Rug.

Power, After All, Is Not Just Military Strength. It Is The Social Power That Comes From Democracy, The Cultural Power That Comes From Freedom Of Expression And Research, The Personal Power That Entitles Every Arab Citizen To Feel That He Or She Is In Fact A Citizen, And Not Just A Sheep In Some Great Shepherd's Flock.

I Take Criticism So Seriously As To Believe That, Even In The Midst Of A Battle In Which One Is Unmistakably On One Side Against Another, There Should Be Criticism, Because There Must Be Critical Consciousness If There Are To Be Issues, Problems, Values, Even Lives To Be Fought For... Criticism Must Think Of Itself As Life-enhancing And Constitutively Opposed To Every Form Of Tyranny, Domination, And Abuse; Its Social Goals Are Noncoercive Knowledge Produced In The Interests Of Human Freedom.