And the impact is the ongoing violation of Human Rights in Arab and Muslim countries. Turns the K.

With this brilliant defense of Arab face, of dealing with kalam an-nas, Said's Orientalism flipped the vectors of the paralyzing negative judgment. On the one hand, it shielded Arabs from public criticism, on the other, it made the "imperialist" West (and its supposed outpost, "colonial Israel"), the object of relentless criticism. His success in this regard, gave rise to a generation of Middle East specialists, including academics, who described the Arab and Muslim worlds as "thriving civil societies," imminently "democracies," even as they berated the democratic West as a racist, imperialist culture badly in need of deconstruction, theoretically and practically. Such a move may have flattered Arab and Western (progressive) self-images, but it came at the cost of ignoring the darker realities on the ground.And yet, to many, that ignorance seemed like a small price to pay. After all, Said's framework offered conflict-averse progressives a way to avoid a clash of civilizations. Give Arabs and Muslims the benefit of the doubt, treat them with honor rather than gratuitously incensing them with criticism. That is the way to solve conflicts and bring peace. Educated Western adopters of Said's discourse saw it as a kind of therapeutic narrative, which, by accentuating the positive and glossing over the negative, encouraged, rather than alienated, the "other." It meant, among other things, treating Arabs and Muslims as if their political culture had already reached modern levels of societal commitment to universal human rights, to peace through toleration, to egalitarianism, to favoring positive-sum relations—when in reality, such an assessment was not only not objective (as in the post-modern world it cannot be), but also very far from any accurate assessment (which presumably it claims to be).