Sara Roy, the intense, anti-Israel director of Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies, was delighted to host Kai Bird recently, author of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 especially after Mr. Bird's controversial op-ed in the New York Times, Who Lives in Sheikh Jarrah? in which he champions the Arab Nakba without ever mentioning that the neighborhood in question comprises Shimon Ha Tzadik, a longstanding Jewish community.

Mr. Bird is the son of Eugene H. Bird, a State Department official who carted around his family from one post to another in the 1950's and '60's ranging from Jerusalem to Cairo to Saudi Arabia and Bombay. Bird the elder runs a group called The Council for the National Interest, founded by the inveterate Israel-hating Congressman, Paul Findley, in 1989.  Among other associations, the CNI has strong ties to one Abdulrahman Alamoudi, a funder of terror groups currently serving a 23 year federal prison sentence.

The apple certainly doesn't fall far from the tree. Kai Bird has produced an incredibly one-sided memoir of his boyhood in Jerusalem in the 50's and 60's purporting to be an evenhanded account of the Jewish-Arab conflict. Evenhanded, of course, until you get to the details. At that point, right out of the gate, the Jews are guilty, guilty, guilty. He even goes so far as to include fabricated quotes (not footnoted, of course) from David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister and to downplay the role of the Grand Mufti as a major player in the Holocaust. The point of all of this is to imbue Palestinian Arabs with an aura of innocence and victimhood.

In the first case, he claims that Ben Gurion, in a letter to his son Amos, in 1936, wrote this:

Long exposed as a forgery, the actual Ben Gurion letter reads:

Quite a difference. The fabrication of Ben Gurion's quote arose from the so-called New Historians until corrected by the London-based scholar, Efraim Karsh.  Karsh has a new book out, perhaps the most authoritative, exhaustively researched work on the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, Palestine Betrayed.

A good deal of Bird's narrative centers around his wife's family's experiences during the Holocaust. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she recounts how her grandfather was murdered in Yugoslavia in 1944. True to his partisanship for Palestinian Arabs, Bird simply describes Haj Amin el Husseini, Jerusalem's Grand Mufti as urging Hitler in preventing the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Scholars have pointed out - for decades - that Husseini and his Arab cohorts were active participants in the Holocaust, helping to establish a Waffen SS Division called Handjar (The "Scimitar") and were directly complicit in preventing the escape of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian, Yugoslavian and Romanian Jews and their subsequent extermination at Auschwitz and at a Croatian SS camp called Jasenovic. Serbs were the majority of those murdered there, but along with them were substantial numbers of Jews and Gypsies.

The irony of Bird's memoir is his failure to associate his wife's family's tragedy with the actions of the Palestinian Arab leadership during the war. Listen to his answers to these questions (and be sure to listen to Sara Roy's attempt to cover for him by trying to cut off the question - apologies for the poor audio):

Then listen to his reply to a question about the futility of dealing with Hamas:

It is entirely possible that Mr. Bird was actually unaware of these serious lapses. To be fair, we should wait until the next edition of his book comes out. Yet, the need to believe - with no questions asked - the Arab narrative - is par for the course on American and European campuses.

We're waiting for Harvard and Ms. Roy to invite Professor Karsh to speak.