Remember Professor Rashid Khalidi? He is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and director of its Middle East Institute. He is a big part of Columbia’s anti-Israel problem, having infamously said, among other hateful utterances, that "the tragedy of September 11 was a godsend" to "American Likudniks and their Israeli counterparts" because it "enabled them to draft the United States to help fight Israel’s enemies."[1] Now a serious charge of plagiarism has been leveled against Khalidi. This gives rise to a challenge not only to Columbia, but also to his triumvirate of anti-Israel supporters who commonly use the nuclear charge of "plagiarism" against their ideological enemies.

For more than 20 years the terrible triumvirate of Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Alexander Cockburn have been falsely accusing pro-Israel writers of plagiarism and related academic offenses.[2] I have been the most recent target of the selective vitriol. They have accused me of plagiarism for quoting Mark Twain and other well-known figures­whose quotes appear in my book within quotation marks and properly cited to their original source. Their absurd accusation is that I should have cited these quotes not to their original source but rather to the secondary source in which ­they erroneously claim ­I first came across them. No one but anti-Israel zealots takes these biased charges seriously, as evidenced by the fact that not only was I cleared of all such charges by Harvard (after I brought them to the attention of the dean and president), but recently the dean awarded me a prize for "exceptional scholarship" for my current book Rights from Wrongs.

Now, a serious charge of real plagiarism has been leveled at one of the triumvirate’s favorite anti-Israel professors­ Rashid Khalidi. According to Solomonia, a website,[3] the offending article is an online essay entitled, "Jerusalem, A Concise History," by Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi’s essay was copied from a nearly identical essay by K.J. Asali without attribution or quotation marks. For example, here is what Khalidi purported to author...