Famous Columbia Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, Rashid Khalidi, was caught lying earlier this week about the Israel-Gaza war. Khalidi wrote an op-ed for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune in which he quotes former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon as saying:
he Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.
Here is what Ya’alon did say:
I defined it from the beginning of the confrontation: the very deep by the Palestinians that terrorism and violence will not defeat us, will not make us fold. If that deep internalization does not exist at the end of the confrontation, we will have a strategic problem with an existential threat to Israel. If that [lesson] is not burned into the Palestinian and Arab consciousness, there will be no end to their demands of us.
Khalidi is an intellectual. He’s also working for one of the most respected elite universities in America. There’s no excuse for his use of a fake quote; he should have known the quote is fake, and my educated guess is that he does know it.
So why use it nonetheless? Because, one could conclude, Khalidi isn’t very concerned with objective scientific / scholarly research. Instead, his major concern is to spread pro-Palestine propaganda throughout the world. As Hitler’s master of propaganda Joseph Goebbels once said (paraphrasing here); people will believe every lie if you repeat it often enough.