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Thursday, October 30, 2008

Martin Kramer, whose been writing about Rashid Khalidi for years, has two important posts up.

Was Khalidi a spokesperson for the PLO? By any rational definition, it appears the answer is yes: Khalidi of the PLO:

...It is worth explaining what it meant to be "deeply involved in politics in Beirut" during the civil war in Lebanon. It was not at all like community organizing in Chicago. The Lebanese state had ceased to function; the political actors were all armed militias, Lebanese and Palestinian. Every individual needed to be affiliated with such an organization, if not for bread then at least for protection. Khalidi was known to be affiliated with, and protected by, Arafat's Fatah. A 1979 New York Times report (by Youssef Ibrahim) described Khalidi as "a professor of political science who is close to Al Fatah." In Beirut, to be "close" to an organization meant you enjoyed its protection in return for loyalty and services rendered. Khalidi's wife also worked as an English translator for the PLO's press agency, Wafa. So savvy journalists knew that if they wanted the Fatah spin, they could get it from Khalidi...

And this, on how Obama and Khalidi may relate to each other: Khalidi and Obama: kindred spirits

...it seem far-fetched that the sense of "kindred spirit" felt by Khalidi toward Obama was mutual. One particularly striking parallel deserves mention. Obama, it will be recalled, was born to a nominally Muslim father (a Kenyan bureaucat) and an American Christian mother, which has created some confusion as to the religious tradition in which he was raised. Khalidi's father, a nominally Muslim Palestinian (and a bureaucrat who worked for the United Nations) married his mother, a Lebanese Christian, in a Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, where Khalidi would later attend Sunday school. For such people caught between traditions, Third Worldist sympathies often serve as ecumenical substitutes for religion. (Obama himself allows that as an undergraduate, "in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy." One wonders how Israel fared in those conversations.)

Were we to see the videotape, it might give us some sense of how far down the road Obama went in that direction -- and not all that long ago...

Finally, the GOP has a fact sheet available: OBAMA/KHALIDI RELATIONSHIP RUNDOWN - Despite Obama Campaign Denials, Long-Standing Relationship Exists [PDF]

1 Comment

The comments in Kramer's Khalidi item have more documentation:

There is an earlier NYT citation for Khalidi working for the PLO, in a 1978 article. Most people missed this because the name was spelled Khalidy:

http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=FB0617F83A5A11728DDDA00994DA405B888BF1D3

If the Israelis had any brains they could neutralize Palestinian irredentism just by giving back the West Bank," asserted Rashid Khalidy, an American-educated Palestinian who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut and also works for the P.L.O. "It would split us."

This is clearly the same guy, as detailed at http://www.iris.org.il/blog/archives/722-Princeton-Censors-Ex-PLO-Speakers;-Likely-to-Hire-PLO-Professor.html

The quote was on Wikipedia for a few days, but then removed on 27 October with the bizarre justification "undo use of primary source to support a thesis; secondary sources needed". The Khalidy Wikipedia article is now locked for a week.

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