Tonight on Larry King, Michael Medved repeats a disturbing trend of "PLO membership" and anti-semitic accusations on Professor Khalidi - despite Khalidis work as one of the "most articulate critics of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority.". Medved is not alone. Aaron Klein, Michael Goldfarb, Andrew McCarthy, and Senator McCain himself repeats these attacks. These smears started during the primaries, based on highly dubious sources. These dubious smears continue, but the charges are often glossed over with equivocations on McCain's connections with Khalidi, rather than dealing with the attacks on Khalidi's character. Horton supposes:
Khalidi is also a Palestinian American. There is no doubt in my mind that it is solely that last fact that informs McCarthy’s ignorant and malicious rants.
Whether Horton is correct or not in his assumption of bias, it is perfectly OK to criticize the PLO, or any of these organizations. It is not ok to make ad hominem attacks on a person's character without a preponderance of evidence. These media outlets should do more to correct this.
Tonight on Larry King, Michael Medved repeats a disturbing trend of "PLO membership" and anti-semitic accusations on Professor Khalidi - despite Khalidis work as one of the "most articulate critics of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority". Medved is not alone. Aaron Klein, Michael Goldfarb, Andrew McCarthy, and Senator McCain himself repeats these attacks. These smears started during the primary race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and were first based on highly dubious sources. Instead of giving pause, the media and the Clinton campaign ran with it. These dubious smears continue, but the charges are often glossed over with equivocations on McCain's connections with Khalidi, rather than dealing with the attacks on Khalidi's character.
These charges on Khalidi's character were first employed in this election during the primary competition between Clinton and Obama.
Another key purveyor of the smear campaign is Aaron Klein, an Orthodox Jew who is Jerusalem correspondent for WorldNetDaily. WND is notoriously disreputable, a sort of National Enquirer for the right (typical headline: "Sleaze Charge: 'I Took Drugs, Had Homo Sex With Obama'"). Klein made a name for himself by getting terrorists to say nice things about Democrats and allying himself with extremist elements of the Israeli right, whom he frequently quotes as sources in his articles - when he bothers to quote anyone at all. Klein originally called Hillary Clinton the "jihadist choice for president," but when Clinton stumbled, he turned his fire to Obama, attempting to expose his so-called "terrorist connections."
Klein penned two stories in late February wildly distorting Obama's links, from his days in Chicago, to pro-Palestinian activists like Rashid Khalidi, a respected professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University who previously taught at the University of Chicago (hardly a bastion of left-wing activism). Klein's story goes something like this: Obama sat on the board of a foundation in Chicago that gave a grant to the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), run by Khalidi's wife, which supposedly rejects Israel's existence; and Khalidi directed the PLO's Beirut press office and is a supporter "for Palestinian terror." (In fact, the AAAN focuses solely on social service work in Chicago and takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Khalidi says he was never employed by the PLO; he has been a harsh critic of Palestinian suicide bombings and a longtime supporter of a two-state solution, and he has never been an adviser to Obama. As for Obama's past statements, at least in Chicago, being pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian is not a contradiction in terms.)
Once again, the facts mattered little, and Klein's stories gained an audience beyond the narrow confines of WND. Christian publicist Maria Sliwa sent Klein's articles to prominent reporters, the Tennessee GOP included his claims in a press release titled "Anti-Semites for Obama" and the Jewish Press, an Orthodox Brooklyn paper, reprinted his story about Khalidi. His latest article alleges that "terrorists worldwide would indeed be emboldened by an Obama election." As evidence, Klein quotes Ramadan Adassi, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank's Askar refugee camp, who says an Obama victory would be an "important success. He won popularity in spite of the Zionists and the conservatives." In previous stories, Klein has quoted Adassi praising Cindy Sheehan, Rosie O'Donnell and Sean Penn. For a suspected terrorist, Adassi follows pop culture and US politics remarkably closely.
Despite Klein's questionable sourcing and scandalous accusations, mainstream reporters now call the Obama campaign to ask about Klein's articles. He also reports for John Batchelor, a right-wing talk-radio host for KFI-AM in Los Angeles who has written a series of outlandish columns about Obama for the conservative magazine Human Events and repeatedly pushed the Obama smears on his radio show. According to an e-mail of Batchelor's obtained by The Nation, Batchelor says that information about Obama and Khalidi came via "oppo research."[1]
Instead of properly dealing with these charges, these smears continued. Here, Michael Goldfarb went on air, in an unsubstantiated invective. The charges were ignored in an equivocation with McCain's connections with Khalidi, rather than dealing with the attacks on Khalidi's character. The charge of Khalidi as antisemitic went unchallenged on this on air exchange.
On Larry King, McCain repeated this charge.
KING: Is this Palestinian [Rashid Khalidi] some sort of terrorist?
MCCAIN: We know that at that time, the PLO was a terrorist organization.
KING: He was PLO?
MCCAIN: Yes, yes -- that's what the allegation is, Larry.[2]
In a charge so dubious, Larry King had to correct the senator.
Harpers Magazine continues:
I’ve followed his career for many years, read his articles and books, listened to his presentations, and engaged him in discussions of politics, the arts, and history. In fact, as McCarthy’s piece ran, I was midway through an advance copy of Khalidi’s new book Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East. (I’ll be reviewing it next month–stay tuned.) Rashid Khalidi is an American academic of extraordinary ability and sharp insights. He is also deeply committed to stemming violence in the Middle East, promoting a culture that embraces human rights as a fundamental notion, and building democratic societies. In a sense, Khalidi’s formula for solving the Middle East crisis has not been radically different from George W. Bush’s: both believe in American values and approaches. However, whereas Bush believes these values can be introduced in the wake of bombs and at the barrel of a gun, Khalidi disagrees. He sees education and civic activism as the path to success, and he argues that pervasive military interventionism has historically undermined the Middle East and will continue to do so. Khalidi has also been one of the most articulate critics of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority—calling them repeatedly on their anti-democratic tendencies and their betrayals of their own principles. Khalidi is also a Palestinian American. There is no doubt in my mind that it is solely that last fact that informs McCarthy’s ignorant and malicious rants.
McCarthy states that Khalidi "founded" the Arab American Action Network (AAAN). In fact, he neither founded it nor has anything to do with it. But AAAN is not, as McCarthy suggests, a political organization. It is a social-services organization, largely funded by the state of Illinois and private foundations, that provides support for English-language training, citizenship classes, after-school and summer programs for schoolchildren, women’s shelters, and child care among Chicago’s sizable Arab community (and for others on the city’s impoverished South Side). Does McCarthy consider this sort of civic activism objectionable? Since it was advocated aggressively by President Bush–this is "compassionate conservativism" in action–such an objection would be interesting. Nor was Khalidi ever a spokesman for the PLO, though that was reported in an erroneous column by the New York Times’s Tom Friedman in 1982. That left me curious about the final and most dramatic accusation laid at Khalidi’s doorstep: that the Khalidis babysat for the Obamas. Was it true? I put the question to Khalidi. "No, it is not true," came the crisp reply. Somehow that was exactly the answer I expected.
Of course, Khalidi has been involved in Palestinian causes. McCarthy ought to ask John McCain about that, because McCain and Khalidi appear to have some joint interests, and that fact speaks very well of both of them. Indeed, the McCain–Khalidi connections are more substantial than the phony Obama–Khalidi connections McCarthy gussies up for his article. The Republican party’s congressionally funded international-networking organization, the International Republican Institute–long and ably chaired by John McCain and headed by McCain’s close friend, the capable Lorne Craner–has taken an interest in West Bank matters. IRI funded an ambitious project, called the Palestine Center, that Khalidi helped to support. Khalidi served on the Center’s board of directors. The goal of that project, shared by Khalidi and McCain, was the promotion of civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank. Of course, McCarthy is not interested in looking too closely into the facts, because they would not serve his shrill partisan objectives.[3]
Whether Horton is correct or not in his assumption of bias, it is perfectly OK to criticize the PLO, the Palestinians, or any of these organizations. It is not ok to make ad hominem attacks on a person's character without a preponderance of evidence. These media outlets should do more to correct this.