Read letter from Richard Sherman to the Editor of The Guardian (emphasis CAEF Ed.) July 7, 2025, in response to an OpEd entitled, " The Destruction of Palestine is Breaking the World."

Dear Letter to the Editor:

Mustafa Bayoumi - born in Switzerland in 1966, raised in Canada with a degree in English from Columbia University might want to chill from his endless Joseph Goebbels like screeds about Jews and study the words of Zaheir Mohsen whose background is much more connected to Mandatory Palestine than his. ("The Destruction of Palestine is Breaking the World")

Born in 1936 in Tulkarm, Mandatory Palestine, Zaheir Mohsen, was member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a military commander of the PLO, who declared "the Palestinian people" to be a propaganda invention.

In a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper "Trouw", Mr.  Mohsen said: 

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

"For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we claim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan".

The Palestinian Delusion", Robert Spencer, 2019, pp 95-96; see also: James Dorsey, Wij Zijn Alleen Palestijn om politieke Redden, TROUW, 3/31/77).

Further since Mr. Bayoumi is the co- editor of the Edward Said Reader, it is worth interjecting here, The TRUTH about Edward Said:

As human rights lawyer and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,  Justus Reid Weiner, wrote in " The False Prophet of Palestine":

"Although Said has defined his own intellectual vocation as one of “tell[ing] the truth against extremely difficult odds”—he has sweepingly declared that the duty of the intellectual is “to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible”—it turns out that, in retailing the facts of his own personal biography over the years, he has spoken anything but the plain, direct, or honest truth. Instead, he has served up, and consciously encouraged others to serve up, a wildly distorted version of the truth, made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations carefully tailored to strengthen his wider ideological agenda—and in particular to promote the claims of Palestinian refugees against Israel....

In fact " he (Said) himself grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward’s birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members."

Said's entire body of "scholarship," is based on ignoring this biographical truth and substituting a " Palestinian" phantasmagoric childhood as its foundation.

See: " 'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications of Edward Said", Justus Reid Weiner, Commentary Magazine, September 1999.

Richard Sherman, Florida