i keep meaning to write about the mccain campaign's latest guilt-by-association attempt, its attacks on obama for consorting with rashid khalidi.
as it happens, by the ridiculous standards of the mccain people, i am also "associated" with khalidi. he also was a "guy in my neighborhood" in the 1990s (as was obama and bill ayers). i'm not sure where exactly he lived, but hyde park isn't all that big. it must have been a short walk from my home in some direction.
i even met him once. i wasn't living in chicago then. the meeting was in philadelphia. he was still a professor at the university of chicago in those days. mrs. noz got her phd there and so we're on the alumni mailing list. khalidi is pretty famous in his field, so i was excited that the annual visit by a U of C prof to the alumni would be by a guy that i had actually heard of. the talk was pretty well attended, but not huge. not to out the other terrorist associates who read this blog, but i believe both hydromuse and ciarán were there too.
his talk was interesting, completely reasonable in my mind. there was nothing even remotely resembling an endorsement of terrorism in his talk. and he was hardly a shill for the PLO. as i recall it, he was just as critical of fatah (and hamas) as he was the israeli government. at the end of the talk, i think i may have shook his hands. no doubt the terror-associating cooties still thrive somewhere in my bloodstream.
anyway, you have to be completely ignorant of khalidi's work to think he's some kind of terrorist or anti-semite. but don't believe me, such bastions of anti-semitism as the JTA (the jewish telegraphic agency) have debunked the khalidi=terrorist smear.
juan cole calls the mccain campaign's use of khalidi "racist" and honestly, it is hard to see it as anything but that. there have been a lot of charges of racism in this race and i've been extremely reluctant to jump on the bandwagon with any of them. any time you have a black candidate running against a white candidate in this country, race is going to be lurking in the background. the white candidate inevitably will attract racists who don't want to support the black candidate, even if the white candidate isn't overtly trying for the racist vote. the things each candidate says will be viewed through the prism of race in a way that they wouldn't if they were two white guys. any candidate in mccain's situation is inevitably say something that someone will see as racially charged, even if mccain doesn't always mean it that way. so i've been trying to give mccain the benefit of the doubt even on some questionable things that could be seen as racist dog whistles.
but there really is no way to see the khalidi attacks as resting on anything other than anti-arab bigotry. the only reason to call khalidi a terrorist is because he's an arab who has been critical of israeli policy. his criticisms are of the sort that are regularly made by israelis against their own government, they're hardly unusual or out of bounds. there is no doubt in my mind that if khalidi were anglo, the mccain campaign would not be referring to him as a terrorist supporter or comparing him to a neo-nazi. unlike the black-white racism that inevitably will be implicit in any race between a black person and a white person and which mccain therefore can't do much about, mccain didn't have to bring up this khalidi attack. it's completely gratuitous--there is absolutely no reason to go down this path unless he's trying to tap into anti-arab bigotry. it really sickens me to see the mccain campaign stoop to this level.
