Hoping to create a shadowy association between Barack Obama and radical Islam, John McCain is slandering a respectable man
In the waning days of the election, the McCain campaign has realised
that its attempts to tie Barack Obama to "unrepentant domestic
terrorist" Bill Ayers aren't having much effect. So it's trying a new
tactic, blasting the candidate for consorting with unrepentant domestic
Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. Now an eminent professor
of Arab studies at Columbia, Khalidi, like Obama, formerly taught at
the University of Chicago, where the two men were friends. Hoping to
instill shadowy associations between Obama and Arabs in the minds of
low-information voters, the McCain team has taken to slandering a
thoughtful and respectable man.
The McCain team is now demanding
that the Los Angeles Times release a tape of Obama's appearance at a
2003 going-away party for Khalidi. The Times is refusing to do so
because, when it was given the video, it agreed not to share it.
Playing the aggrieved victim, McCain said in a radio interview:
"If there was a tape of John McCain in a neo-Nazi outfit, I think the
treatment of the issue would be slightly different." Appearing on CNN
yesterday, McCain flack Michael Goldfarb claimed: "Barack Obama has a
long track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and
anti-American rhetoric." Attempting to challenge Goldfarb,
CNN host Rick Sanchez said: "Can you name one other person besides
Khalidi who he hangs around with who is anti-Semitic?" Goldfarb
couldn't, but the damage had been done – not to Obama, but to Khalidi,
whose anti-Semitism had been presented as a matter of accepted fact.
I don't know Khalidi personally, though I've interviewed him on a number of occasions and have read his recent book, Resurrecting Empire.
I know, however, that there is nothing in his record to justify
smearing him as a bigot. While the McCain campaign has presented him as
a "PLO spokesman" – and it wouldn't be a crime if he were – in fact,
Khalidi was simply an outside adviser to the Palestinian delegation at
negotiations convened by the Republican secretary of state James Baker
during the first Bush administration. Apparently, McCain is now so
hostile to diplomacy that participating in American-sponsored talks is
deemed anti-American.
To be sure, Khalidi is a supporter of
Palestinian rights and a serious critic of Israel and of American
policy in the Middle East, one who is well to the left of Obama. But he
condemns violence, criticised Yasser Arafat's corruption and cronyism
and has consistently acknowledged Jewish suffering. Fair-minded friends
of Israel have praised his writing. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman,
certainly not a notorious Jew-hater, described Under Siege, Khalidi's
book about PLO decision-making during the 1982 Lebanon war, as
"extremely valuable" and "generally objective, lucid and incisive".
Professor Khalidi is on the board of sponsors of the Palestine-Israel Journal,
a publication founded by prominent Palestinian and Israeli journalists
to encourage dialogue between the two sides. The board also includes
famed Israeli writer David Grossman.
By the degraded standards of the McCain-Palin campaign, Grossman could
also be defamed as an enemy of the Jews. Indeed, so could McCain
himself. As has now been widely reported, under McCain's leadership,
the International Republican Institute gave nearly half a million dollars to a Palestinian research centre Khalidi co-founded.
The
McCain campaign's attacks on Khalidi are categorically different than
its attacks on Ayers. Those were unfair to Obama, who was not, by all
accounts, particularly close to the man, and who never gave a hint of
condoning his youthful violence. Ayers, however, has indeed done
shameful things, so his public excoriation was not entirely undeserved.
That's not true of Khalidi. He is guilty of nothing. The dangerous
implications of McCain's assaults on him stretch beyond this election,
suggesting that friendship with prominent Arabs is grounds for
suspicion, and thus dangerous for ambitious politicians. (That is,
unless the Arabs in question belong to the Saudi royal family).
Given
that our leaders' failure to even try and understand Arab grievances
has contributed to catastrophic foreign policy blunders, Obama's
engagement with a prominent, moderate Palestinian intellectual should,
in any rational society, be seen as a point in his favour.
By trying to turn their acquaintance into evidence of subversion,
McCain does more than further disgrace himself. His reckless rhetoric
threatens to push legitimate criticism of Israeli and American policy
even further outside the bounds of acceptable political discussion,
making straight talk on the Middle East ever more elusive.