Sublime

Notwithstanding this historical reality, anti-Israel academics such as Noam Chomsky mislead their students by telling them that Israel and the United States are “rejectionist” states that have always opposed a political compromise, while the Arab states and the PLO have accepted it.9

Wilbert Tatum, the editor and publisher of the Amsterdam News, tried to explain to Kurtz how, in his view, Sharpton had been cast as “a caricature of black leadership”:

Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. “An American,” he wrote, “cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say ‘Gentlemen’ to the person with whom he is conversing.”

For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media.

Said’s book became canonical in many Middle East Studies departments, pressuring students and professors to prove they were not Orientalists. Israel’s history was subjected to withering revisionism.