However, on the other hand there is this commentary at the Jewish Telegraph Agency which Laura Rozen linked to at her excellent War and Piece blog and which was highlighted this morning on the TPM front page.

But he called Israel a destructive racist state. Are you saying it's OK for him to say that? How do you defend these comments he made?

I thought this MSNBC Scarborough interview with RK was interesting because he denies making such crazy comments. He says "I don't recognize those quotes".

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1234

But if you read the transcript they point out where you can see on the Net his speeches where he did indeed say these things.

Reminds me when Roger Clemens says that Pettite "mis-remembered" things about his steroid use.

I'm not trying to defend McCain or Obama. My point is that Khalidi doesn't appear as "innocent" as some people are portraying him.

Obama's relationship with Khalidi does seem to be more "direct" - such as Khalidi hosting a dinner party for Obama and Khalidi's kids babysat Obama's children. So you could call them colleagues.

As for McCain, its unclear what Khalidi's role with the CPRS was at the time that IRI made the donation. (If anyone has that info please post it). The IRI says they gave money to CPRS to conduct polling. I don't think McCain ever met Khalidi or interacted with him directly.

Let's not make this an Obama versus McCain discussion. Again - my question to the group is do people support Khalidi after the comments he made about Israel?? Let's forget about what McCain called him. I'm not calling Khalidi a neo-nazi.

I read Astral's pasting of somebody else's thoughts. But I'm trying to get the group to focus on what Khalidi said.

I don't understand why everybody on here agrees with someone saying he's a respectable scholar based on the stuff he's saying.

.

Hmmmm . . .

How's about that economy? Yes sirree ...

Oh wait!

Look over there ...

It's Malcom X ...

Nah ... that's Louis F ...

Reverend Wright's sidekick?

Dang!

~OGD~

*Cafe contributor since June 2005*

Why could you possibly care about this guy, outside of making some weak connection to Obama.

Here's a little more from Ben Smith at Politico.com:

Khalidi is widely disliked in pro-Israeli circles, where he's seen as a defender of violent resistance to Israel in the Palestinian territories. But he's also a professor at Columbia University, with many mainstream defenders. A group he led was funded by the International Republican Institute, which McCain chairs, and he has always denied McCain's charge that he was ever a spokesman for the PLO. At the time of the party, he was a professor at the University of Chicago.

There is further proof that McCain's charge that he was a PLO spokesman is baseless. Do you want that reference as well?

Chris - this is the interview I would read.

http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/01-03-SPR/thecrisis.html

Astral - stop quoting McCain charges. I don't care what McCain said. I can't say that McCain was justified to bring this up in the first place, but now that he has, I am just shocked with how many people are trying to defend Khalidi. I really don't care if Obama had an association with the guy or not. I don't think highly of McCain for bringing it up in the first place.

But it's just really surprising to me that everybody is trying to defend this guy. Here's another interesting read

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID={C2F7B3D1-4236-4E15-9346-5938C91DFC83}

From Wikipedia. Happy witchhunting!

Family, education and career
Khalidi was born in New York. He received a B.A. from Yale University, where he was a member of Wolf's Head Society,[2] in 1970,[3] and a D. Phil. from Oxford University in 1974[4] and spent many years as a professor and director of both the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago before joining the Columbia faculty. He has also taught at Georgetown University, Lebanese University, and the American University of Beirut.

Khalidi is married to Mona Khalidi, Assistant Dean, Student Affairs; Assistant Director of Graduate Studies, School of International and Public Affairs[5] He is a member of the National Advisory Committee of the U.S. Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East, which describes itself as "a national organization of Jews, Christians and Muslims dedicated to dialogue, education and advocacy for peace based on the deepest teachings of the three religious traditions."[6]

He is member of the Board of Sponsors of The Palestine-Israel Journal, a publication founded by Ziad AbuZayyad and Victor Cygielman, prominent Palestinian and Israeli journalists.

He is founding trustee of The Center for Palestine Research and Studies.

Princeton University let it be known that it was considering hiring Khalidi in 2005.[7] However, a controversy developed over Khalidi's political involvements and no job offer was made.[8]

Academic work
Khalidi’s research covers primarily the history of the modern Middle East. He focuses on the countries of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, with an eye to the emergence of various national identities and the role played by external powers in their development. He also researches the impact of the press on forming new senses of community, the role of education in the construction of political identity, and in the way narratives have developed over the past centuries in the region.[4] Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown, describes Khalidi as "preeminent in his field."[9] He served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1994. Khalidi is currently editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Much of Khalidi's scholarly work in the 1990s focused on the historical construction of nationalism in the Arab world. Drawing on the work of theorists Benedict Anderson who described nations as "imagined communities", he does not posit primordial national identities, but clearly argues that these nations have legitimacy and rights. In Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997), he places the emergence of Palestinian national identity in the context of Ottoman and British colonialism as well as the early Zionist effort in the Levant. This book won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize as best book of 1997.[10] His dating of Palestinian national emergence to the early 20th century and his tracing of its contours provide a rejoinder to Israeli nationalist claims that Palestinians either do not exist, or had no collective claims prior to the 1948 creation of Israel. Nevertheless, Khalidi is also careful to focus on the late development, failings and internal divisions within the various elements of the Palestinian nationalist movement as well.

In Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (2004), Khalidi takes readers on a historical tour of Western intervention in the Middle East, and argues that these interventions continue to have a colonialist nature that is both morally unacceptable and likely to backfire.

Public life
Khalidi has written dozens of scholarly articles on Middle East history and politics, as well as op-ed pieces in many U.S. newspapers. He has also been a guest on numerous radio and TV shows including All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, and Nightline, and has appeared on the BBC, the CBC, France Inter and the Voice of America. Khalidi had an advising role at the Madrid Conference of 1991 between the U.S., Israel, Palestinians and Arab states. He served as president of the American Committee on Jerusalem, now known as the American Task Force on Palestine.

Khalidi's statements on the status of Palestinians in Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories have been the most controversial. In an interview on PBS, Khalidi used the term "occupied" in reference to Mandatory Palestine in 1948, saying "about half of it was occupied by Israel (which under UNGA 181 was supposed to obtain roughly 55% of Mandate Palestine, and which by the time of the armistice had taken control of about 78%, including half of what was to have been the Arab state)... the remainder was, as you say, under Egyptian and Jordanian control from 1948-1967."[11]

A New York Sun editorial criticized Khalidi for stating that there is a legal right under international law for Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation.[12] For example, in a speech given to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Khalidi said that “[k]illing civilians is a war crime. It’s a violation of international law. They are not soldiers. They’re civilians, they’re unarmed. The ones who are armed, the ones who are soldiers, the ones who are in occupation, that's different. That's resistance.”[12][13] The Sun editorial argued that by failing to distinguish between Palestinian combatants and noncombatants, Khalidi implies that all Palestinians have this right to resist, which it argued was incorrect under international law.[12] In an interview discussing this editorial, Khalidi objected to this characterization as incorrect and taken out of the context of his statements on international law.[12]

Khalidi has described discussions of Arab restitution for property confiscated from Jewish refugees forced to flee Middle Eastern and North African countries after the creation of Israel as “insidious”, "because the advocates of Jewish refugees are not working to get those legitimate assets back but are in fact trying to cancel out the debt of Israel toward Palestinian refugees."[14]

Khalidi opposes the Iraq War and has said that “we owe reparations to the Iraqi people.”[15]

Views on Israel and Zionism
Khalidi has written that the establishment of the state of Israel resulted in "the uprooting of the world's oldest and most secure Jewish communities, which had found in the Arab lands a tolerance that, albeit imperfect, was nonexistent in the often genocidal, Jew-hating Christian West." Regarding the proposed two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Khalidi has written that "the now universally applauded two-state solution faces the juggernaut of Israel's actions in the occupied territories over more than forty years, actions that have been expressly designed to make its realization in any meaningful form impossible." However, Khalidi also noted that "there are also flaws in the alternatives, grouped under the rubric of the one-state solution.[16]

Regarding American support for Israel, Khalidi stated in an interview that "every other single place on the face of the earth is in support of the Palestinians, yet all of them together aren't a hill of beans compared to the United States and Israel, because the United States and Israel can basically do anything they please. They are the world superpower, they are the regional superpower."[17]

Allegations of PLO connections
Khalidi has been accused of having ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), based on his work for Wafa in the late 1980s, and later serving as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation during the Madrid Conference of 1991.[18][19] Khalidi denied the allegation that he served as a PLO spokesman.[20] Khalidi explained that he often spoke to journalists in Beirut, and was usually cited, without attribution, as a well-informed Palestinian source. He also said that he was unaware of any misidentification as a PLO spokesman.[18] Palestinian sources, speaking to The Jerusalem Post, also denied that Khalidi was a PLO spokesman.[21]

The claim received renewed attention in 2008 when it was raised due to a reported relationship between Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Khalidi's family when Khalidi taught at the University of Chicago. Articles by Aaron Klein and John Bachelor, writers respectively for World Net Daily and Human Events, were referenced by rival political campaigns and reprinted in wider-circulation media.[19][22][23][20]

NYC teacher training program
In 2005 Khalidi's participation in a New York City teacher training program was ended by the city's Schools Chancellor.[24] The Chancellor, Joel I. Klein, issued a statement that “Considering his past statements, Rashid Khalidi should not have been included in a program that provided professional development for [Department of Education] teachers and he won't be participating in the future.”[25] Following the decision, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger spoke out on Khalidi's behalf, writing: "The department's decision to dismiss Professor Khalidi from the program was wrong and violates First Amendment principles... The decision was based solely on his purported political views and was made without any consultation and apparently without any review of the facts."[24]

Criticism of Campus Watch
In 2002, Khalidi sharply criticized Campus Watch, describing it as "a McCarthyite attempt to silence the very few voices that speak out about the Middle East, and to impose by fear a uniformity of view on the campus debate. This monitoring of the classroom is reminiscent of the tactics used by police-state dictatorships." Khalidi also stated that Campus Watch's activities "will be seen for the reprehensible infringement on academic freedom that it is, if it is sufficiently exposed... This noxious campaign is intended to silence such perfectly legitimate criticism, by tarring it with the brush of anti-Semitism and anti- Americanism, truly loathsome charges. They reveal the lengths that these people apparently feel impelled to go to in order to silence a true debate on campus."[26]

Regarding what Khalidi refers to as pressure from pro-Israel groups, such as Campus Watch, Khalidi stated that "this effort has now been folded into a large, well-funded, national effort managed by academic outcasts from the Middle East field, who seem to be driven both by their extreme pro-Israeli views, and their resentment at the fact that they have never managed to obtain the respect of their peers."[26]

Relationships with 2008 Presidential candidates
John McCain served as chairman of the International Republican Institute during the 1990s which provided grants worth $500,000 to the Center for Palestine Research and Studies which Khalidi co-founded.[27][28][29] A copy of the grant was published online.[30]

During the 2008 election race, opponents of Barack Obama suggested the relationship was evidence that Obama would not maintain a pro-Israel foreign policy if elected.[31] Countering by describing Khalidi as "a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel’s policy," Obama has stressed his own support for Israel and his differences with Khalidi, warned against guilt by association, and disputed the significance of the relationship for his own foreign-policy plans.[32]

Works
This abbreviated list includes only books written by Khalidi. For other works, including papers, articles, and chapters in edited volumes, see Rashid Khalidi bibliography.
The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Beacon Press, 2006.
Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, Beacon Press, 2004.
Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1997.
The Origins of Arab Nationalism (Co-editor), Columbia University Press, 1991.
Under Siege: PLO Decision-making during the 1982 War. Columbia University Press, 1986.
Palestine and the Gulf (Co-editor), Institute for Palestine Studies, 1982.
British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914. Ithaca Press for St. Antony's College, 1980.

Here's an article from the New York Sun with the Khalidi "racist" comment. He had been making this comment in many of his public speeches. People have been saying this about him for years, not just since this election season.

http://www.nysun.com/new-york/khalidi-is-tapped-to-teach-teachers-about-middle/9209/

An "Idiot Wind":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103003244.html