Gov. Sarah Palin: "It seems that there is yet another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama," referring to Columbia University professor (formerly at the U of C) Rashid Khalidi.
Look, any politician who spent time in public life is going to have some unsavory associations. For example, I hear John McCain is well acquainted with a pathological liar who is out on the campaign trail building yet another bridge to nowhere. Such is politics.
Anyway, as far as I can see, Prof. Khalidi seems rather tame (although not someone with whom I would necessarily agree with). What he does have is a few superficial signifiers that might make some Jews uneasy -- being part of Columbia University's Middle East Studies program (which is a war zone between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine forces), and the fact that his endowed chair is named after Edward Said. But he was not, as the McCain campaign is saying, a spokesperson for the PLO, and most of his active criticism of Israel has come at the level of policies which are certainly in-bounds to be criticized (even if I disagree with the particulars).
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I was about to email to ask you your opinion on Khalidi. As you say, his signifiers might be enough to scare some folks off, though I don't have that low regard for Columbia's MEALAC. One of my professors, whose judgment I respect, led the committee on bias in the classroom and although they didn't issue a written report, they seemed to think that revising grievance procedures was sufficient -- I don't think they recommended that any professors be censured, for example. Also, Khalidi was not one of the professors accused of teaching falsities or harassing students who disagreed with him. He seems to be a genuinely knowledgeable and competent scholar, even if Obama shouldn't take all of his political advice. Amusingly, while he served as chairman of the International Republican Institute, McCain distributed several grants to the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, co-founded by Khalidi, including one worth half a million dollars.
I like how she called him not just a radical, but a radical PROFESSOR. An intellectual? Minus another 10 points.
Re: Bridge to Nowhere, the original, I read an interesting piece in Newsweek last night written by the mayor of Ketchikan...
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165478
Made me understand their point of view.
A contrary point concerning Khalidi from Martin Kramer.
CC,
Kramer's thesis depends wholly on Khalidi, while in Beirut and in the days before cheap long-distance, much less e-mail, contacting the New York Times to run corrections of his exact affiliation with the PLO. Oddly, Kramer doesn't seem to notice that Khalidi evidently didn't bother to correct anything in the NYTimes, including their misspellings of his name. Misspellings also are one of the things the Times routinely corrects -- if the victim of the misspelling contacts them about it. Khalidy (as they denoted him) evidently had better things to do.
His thesis goes beyond correcting his status in the NY Times as indicated by his status in the Madrid conference.
No, it doesn't, as his second update makes clear: the whole piece relies on two NYTimes articles having correctly identified Khalidi. If they misidentified, Kramer's got nothin'.
Although typically over-the-top and of questionable sympathy to Israel, Christopher Hitchens did make a good point today: how does it sound in the Middle East when John McCain equates a pro-Palestinian group with a "neo-Nazi outfit"?
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