I think this is a great suggestion. I haven’t read any work by Khalidi, except this bilious, anti-Semitic, incitement to violence, even-handed assessment of the prospects for peace in Israel which was published in the Nation last May. But I am outraged and disturbed by the way Obama’s association with Khalidi has been used by the McCain campaign:
Despite the fact that a foreign policy organization chaired by Mr. McCain gave more than $850,000 to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies. Despite the fact that Khalidi is himself a semite, born in NY, with a “moral commitment to peace and justice in the Middle East.” Despite all this, the McCain campaign seems intent on pursuing this new McCarthyism.
For this reason I am endorsing supporting an idea I read about on Crooked Timber: that academics should show their support of Khalidi by buying his book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. As Henry Farrell says:
It doesn’t take much in the way of prophetic insight to predict that we are going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of innuendo from disgusting slime-purveyors like Daniel Pipes if Obama wins – one of the lessons of the Clinton years is that when the nastier elements of the right are losing elections, they start trying to turn the culture war back up to 11. It would be nice to get a head start on the pushback.
Now if only I can get Mike Goldfarb to call me an anti-semite to sell my book! (Hmmm, I guess I need to write a book first …)
Thanks for that, Kerim, it’s a brilliant little video excerpt. The inane smugness of Goldfarb, who can’t muster any sort of sensible response to the news reader’s admirably focused prodding, says a great deal about the traction of this particular charge against Obama, and even more about the integrity of the McCain campaign. But you’re right, that even if it doesn’t stick to Obama — and it might — the problem is that the bigger charge of Khalidi’s alleged anti-Semitism does seem to stick. This is the really ugly side of American politics: that the candidates work so hard to look middle of the road that everything else looks like extremism. I’m off to Amazon to buy a copy of the Iron Cage, and also a copy of Passionate Uprisings — I can’t resist after Jay mused about the methodology section of a book that describes a sex orgy.
Goldfarb’s response I thought was disturbing, but not quite a melt down. A lot of people think that Goldfarb was revealed as a boob in this video — but I think he follows the (McCain) script perfectly: which is simply to plant suspicion or a seed of doubt in the mind of the viewer. ‘We all know who we are talking about’ (smirk).
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