Khalidi’s Fear

Columbia University historian and former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi has received more media attention in recent months than any Middle East studies specialist in recent memory. His friendship with Barack Obama when both lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood received significant attention during last year’s presidential campaign, including from CW West Coast Representative Cinnamon Stillwell.

Our latest critique of Khalidi appears today at FrontPage Magazine. Mary Madigan reports on a recent conference held at Columbia Law School that forced Khalidi to confront George Fletcher, a law professor whose invitation to debate Khalidi has ignored. Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:

I expected Columbia’s “Understanding the War on Gaza” conference on January 29 to be similar to UCLA’s recent “Gaza and Human Rights” symposium: a one-sided lesson on how to spread anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism. However, it was surprisingly balanced, perhaps because it was sponsored by Columbia’s Law School. Most of the panelists focused on the legal aspects of the recent conflict and acknowledged that we should not make any judgments until evidence was accumulated.

The principal exception to this reasoned approach was propagandist and former spokesman for the PLO, Rashid Khalidi.

Khalidi is a study in contrasts. He blurted out his belief that “the law is an ass” during a discussion with students, yet he condemned Israel’s lack of respect for the law and presented a sympathetic view of (illegal) terrorism as a tactic. He used facts and numbers that, in his own words, “may or may not be correct” to convince his audience that everything we thought we knew about the situation in Gaza is wrong. He published known fabrications in the New York Times Op-Ed, lied about the terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and made the hand-waving claim in front of a crowd of legal experts that according to some laws, somewhere, “there is a right of resistance to occupation.” (He later admitted that no legal system recognized that right.)

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Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.
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