{"id":5182,"date":"2014-02-28T02:12:31","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T07:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martinkramer.org\/sandbox\/?p=5182"},"modified":"2014-02-28T02:12:31","modified_gmt":"2014-02-28T07:12:31","slug":"new-york-times-soft-spot-for-rashid-khalidi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2014\/02\/new-york-times-soft-spot-for-rashid-khalidi\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Times: soft spot for Rashid Khalidi?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post first\u00a0appeared<\/a>\u00a0on the<\/em>\u00a0Commentary\u00a0blog on February 27.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Rashid<\/p>\n

There’s a brouhaha<\/a> at Ramaz, the private Orthodox Jewish high school on the Upper East Side, around Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor at Columbia and promoter of the Palestinian hard line. Some students invited him to speak, but the head of the school didn’t like the idea and disinvited him. Khalidi has said nothing, but he doesn’t have to. He only benefits from these episodes, and it’s not the first time. In 2005, he was dropped<\/a> from a New York City teacher ed program, with the same predictable result of turning him into a free speech martyr. This tableau seems destined to be repeated over and over again.<\/p>\n

I’m not an officer, donor, trustee, student, teacher, or parent stakeholder at Ramaz, so I don’t care how many pretzels they have to twist over Rashid Khalidi. But I do care how the New York Times<\/i> reported<\/a> one aspect of the story this morning: “Critics have accused the professor of having had ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he has denied.”\u00a0The reference here is to the activities of Khalidi when he resided in Beirut in the 1970s and up until Israel’s 1982 invasion. In those days, the PLO ran an exterritorial gangland, and was neck-deep<\/a> in terrorism planned by Arafat and his mob.<\/p>\n

Note this phrase: “Critics have accused\u2026”\u00a0Today’s article thus repeats a trope that appeared back in 2008, when the Times<\/i> ran a piece<\/a> on Khalidi prompted by his past association with Barack Obama:<\/p>\n

He taught at universities in Lebanon until the mid-’80s, and some critics accuse him of having been a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Mr. Khalidi has denied working for the group, and says he was consulted as an expert by reporters seeking to understand it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, it’s the “critics” who “accuse him.”<\/p>\n

Well, I’m a critic<\/a>, but we critics didn’t just imagine Khalidi’s PLO affiliation. We were alerted to it by a parade of highly regarded journalists, including two from the New York Times<\/i>. So here are the “critics” who first leveled the “accusation” (still more sourcing\u00a0here<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\u2022 Joe Alex Morris Jr., reporting from Beirut for the Los Angeles Times<\/i> on September 5, 1976, quoted Khalidi and described<\/a> him as “a PLO spokesman.”<\/p>\n

\u2022 James M. Markham, reporting from Beirut in the New York Times<\/i> on February 19, 1978, quoted Khalidi and described<\/a> him as “an American-educated Palestinian who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut and also works for the P.L.O.”<\/p>\n

\u2022 A Pacifica Radio documentary<\/a>, reporting in 1979 from Beirut, interviewed Khalidi “at the headquarters of the PLO in Beirut,” and described him as “an official spokesperson for the Palestinian news service Wafa,” “PLO spokesperson,” “official spokesperson for the PLO,” and “the leading spokesperson for the PLO news agency, Wafa.”<\/p>\n

\u2022 Thomas Friedman, reporting from Beirut in the New York Times<\/i> on June 9, 1982, quoted Khalidi and described<\/a> him as “a director of the Palestinian press agency, Wafa.”<\/p>\n

\u2022 Doyle McManus, reporting on rumored American-PLO contacts in the Los Angeles Times<\/i> on February 20, 1984, quoted Khalidi and described<\/a> him as “a former PLO official.”<\/p>\n

\u2022 James Rainey, reporting on Khalidi’s connection to Obama for the Los Angeles Times<\/i> on October 30, 2008, described<\/a> him as “a renowned scholar on the Palestinians who in the 1970s had acted as a spokesman for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.” (As I noted<\/a> at the time, the Los Angeles Times<\/i> thus honorably stood by the 1976 reportage of its legendary, long-dead Beirut correspondent, Joe Alex Morris Jr.)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Thomas W. Lippman, for thirty years a diplomatic, national security, and Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post<\/i>, in a letter<\/a> published in that paper on November 1, 2008, wrote that “Khalidi was indeed \u2018a PLO spokesman.’ In the early years of the Lebanese civil war, Mr. Khalidi was the Beirut-based spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, and his office was a stop on the daily rounds of journalists covering that conflict. As we used to say in the pre-electronic newspaper business: Check the clips.”<\/p>\n

None of these people were or are “critics” of Rashid Khalidi, and two of them were reporting for the New York Times<\/i> itself. So why does the Times<\/i> repeatedly inform us that it is only Khalidi’s “critics” who have “accused” him, when in fact a raft of esteemed journalists who interviewed him in Beirut identified him as a PLO spokesman, as a fact? This is not another he-said she-said (or Jew-says Arab-says) question. As Thomas Lippman said: Check the clips.<\/p>\n

This is another opportunity to urge the New York Times<\/i> to get off its derriere and get to the bottom of the Khalidi story. It is unthinkable that a Brooklyn-born<\/a>, Yale-educated U.S. citizen operated in PLO headquarters in Beirut in the late 1970s, and wasn’t known to the personnel of the U.S. embassy and the CIA station. That was over thirty years ago, so some documents must have been declassified. Can we get some investigative reporting here? Instead all we’ve ever read about Khalidi in the Times<\/i> is the puff piece<\/a>. How boring.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Go\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0to discuss this post via Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times: “Critics have accused Rashid Khalidi of having had ties to the PLO.” No, leading journalists reported it as a fact. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1959,21063],"class_list":["post-5182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-new-york-times","tag-rashid-khalidi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}