Several other people covered this while I was buried in essay-writing and housing issues last week, but I can’t leave it unmentioned. In its last-ditch desperate efforts to whip up racist and Islamophobic hysteria, the McCain campaign has come up with the ludicrous charge that 1. Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi is a dangerous, antisemitic radical, and 2. Obama’s acquaintance with him in Chicago is another instance of palling around with terrarists, being suspiciously friendly with Muslims, etc etc etc. Charmingly, in the smears (and in some of the astonishingly sloppy media coverage) Khalidi is inevitably identified as Palestinian, although anyone who’s bothered to look up his wiki entry (or heard him talk) would know he’s a native New Yorker.
I don’t even want to get into refuting insinuations that are essentially nothing more than a pretext to say a name like “Rashid Khalidi” over and over again from the podium at a Sarah Palin rally (at some, I’ve heard, the booing starts for the name alone, before it’s even explained who he supposedly is.) Manan, who’s studied with Khalidi, can tell you all about how dangerous these Hyde Park Professor types are. But although I haven’t taken a class with Khalidi (yet), I’ve met the man, heard him speak several times, and own a number of his books, one of which I frequently recommend and lend out to anyone who wants to better understand the tangled history of European and American imperialism in the Middle East. And we have a couple of academic institutions in common–St Antony’s College and the Middle East Centre at Oxford, and our current base. Just so you know you’re reading the blog of a subversive terrarist-sympathizer and all, here.
Juan Cole, Scott Horton, and Barney Rubin have responded at length to the slander of their friend and colleague. Rubin hits it home:
But all this is beside the point. I actually find it demeaning, insulting, and depressing to have to defend Rashid. I could say, I know him, he has been a guest in my home in New York and in my rented house in Provence, he bears absolutely no resemblance to the image these despicable people are trying to project of him, and lot’s more. I could point out that I am Jewish and have VISIBLE JEWISH ARTIFACTS IN MY HOME, which did not appear to alarm Rashid, if he even noticed them, but it is all just so ridiculous I don’t know what to say.
I don’t want to treat these charges with the respect of a refutation. I just want to express my disgust with those who uttered them and my solidarity with my friend, Rashid Khalidi.
Word. Even Marty Peretz (Marty Peretz, people!) thinks this is some ludicrous bullshit.
I don’t have anything very smart to say here, except that I am even more motivated to get the vote out here and win and beat the craven bastards who think nothing of whipping up racist hysteria and trashing the reputation of a thoughtful historian who’s devoted much of his career to trying to help his fellow Americans better understand the Middle East. But I do want to point out that what we’re seeing here isn’t an isolated attempt to drag a scholar through the muck. It’s the sudden insertion into presidential politics of an long and ugly sustained attack on an entire academic field, the product of a decade or more of claims that Middle East Studies* scholars, departments, and students are almost uniformly anti-American, anti-Israel, and dangerous. I’ve written briefly about this here before, but you can connect the dots: the anti-Title VI campaign, the David Project/”Columbia Unbecoming” affair, the attacks on the tenure cases of Nadia Abu El-Haj and Joseph Massad, the politicized torpedoing of job offers for Cole and Khalidi himself at Yale and Princeton, respectively. Unsuprisingly, the usual suspects are piling on for this round.
Muzzlewatch is an excellent source for tracking the campaign to stifle debate on Israel/Palestine in particular, and the contributions to Beshara Doumani’s edited volume Academic Freedom after September 11 provide a broader overview of the issues at stake in the American academy (IHE has a good Q&A about the book). It’s also worth noting that suspicion about the supposedly traitorous sympathies of area studies scholars–and the contention that scholarship should be judged according to whether it furthers the ‘national interest’–is nothing new. In the past, it’s been depressing to watch some supposedly progressive (Democratic or otherwise) commentators take a fairly credulous approach to the charges levelled against the field; maybe seeing them pop up as part of the array of anti-Obama smears will prompt them to reconsider. I won’t get my hopes up, though, especially since (as CM notes) the response from the Obama campaign itself has been pretty disappointing. I’m aware of the practical political limitations of public discourse re: Israel/Palestine in the US, and the fact that Obama in particular is perhaps understandably more cautious that some white dude named Joe would be in taking on those limitations. But if anybody from the campaign is reading, let me just point out that some of us are more inclined to vote for Barack Obama because he’s listened to what Rashid Khalidi has to say, or was once photographed sitting at a table conversing with Edward Said.
Anyway, Khalidi himself says it best: “I am not speaking to the media at this time, and certainly not until this idiot wind passes.” I hope tomorrow brings the kind of storm that clears the air.
update: Beth also had a very good post on this, which I somehow missed at first.
*I’m using the term lazily to refer generally to those of us who study MENA, the Islamicate world, etc., and of course South/Southeast Asian studies folks are targeted too. Usual caveats re: area studies and its discontents apply; it’s just easier than spelling out all the disciplinary affiliations involved.
