Perhaps Robert Irwin can come fully to his senses, and start re-thinking a whole series of things, including the wisdom, of assigning books on Islam and the Middle East to a small group of the same apologists, including Francis Robinson, Okkidental Dalrymple (sweet singer of heaving passions amid the luxe et volupte of Mughal courts), Tim Winter (who should be properly identified as Abdul Hakim Murad if he is going to continue to appear in the TLS), and the incredible variety of votaries of "Palestianianism" who get in their meretricious licks at Israel in every conceivable, and many scarcely conceivable, ways, no matter what the book under review may seem to be about.

On the other hand, perhaps he can see his way clear to see through Said, but can't undo what decades of drip-drip-drip misinformation about "Palestine" and Israel have done, to him and to so many others, in Great Britain.

And what a pity it is that Varisco's close attention to the rhetorical dishontesties of Said nonetheless ends, apparently, with some display of quite uncalled-for bile against Martin Kramer's original slow-depth-charge aimed at Middle Eastern Studies as conducted by apologists for Islam (Muslim and non-Muslim) in this country. And there is even a bit about so-called "neocons." Apparently Varisco can go so far -- but not farther.

Ibn Warraq is another matter.  He was born and raised within Islam. He's not Western man. He needn't apologize for, or feel embarrassed by, the West. Like Wafa Sultan or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he knows what is good about the West and he knows what Islam is all about. He doesn't feel a need, after dissecting Said, to declare that he is still on the side of the soi-disant angels of "Palestinianism." He can, in other words, see clearly, all the way to the end.

Would that others, who may see through Said but can't see through what Said stood for and promoted, could.