Those who would dismiss "orientalists" and "orientalism" are practioners of "occidentalism" and are no better qualified to critique their opposites than they believe their opposites to be qualified to comment on the Middle East and Islam.

Posted by: waterdragon52 at June 9, 2005 12:33 PM

Rashid Khalidi was a propagandist for the PLO in Beirut. He then got, as so many Arabs do, to that hotbed of PLO apologists, St. Antony's College, Oxford. St. Antony's is a schizophrenic place. It has essentially two parts. The part that is devoted to the study of Eastern European and Russian matters is, on the whole, mostly serious scholarship (except where some, in that wing, have come naively to rely, for their views on Islam, on the other wing, that composed of Arabs, Muslims, and sycophants of both, such as the celebrated Avi Shlaim, a kind of St. Antony's equivalent of Columbia's Gil Anidjar, another Israeli eager to please his Arab and Muslim colleagues. Comical, both of them).

St. Antony's was founded with money supplied by one Antoine (or Anton) Besse, a Jewish trader in, among other places, Aden. Hence the punning name: St. Antony's, which offers a tribute to Besse and yet remains firmly Christian. Besse would not have been pleased with how that Middle East he knew well is now studied.

For years the Middle Eastern wing, so to speak, was headed by Albert Hourani, a Lebanese Christian or rather, one has to admit, an islamochristian, for he was so concerned with Arab identity, arabtum, that he could not forthrightly see, as for example the greatest Lebanese stateman, Charles Malik, saw, that the real theme of the MIddle East was Islam, Islam, Islam, that explained everything, its wars, its atmospherics, its politics, its economics, its intellectual and artistic paralysis or stagnation, its social backwardness. Hourani lorded it over everyone, somewhat like a plumb Benedictine abbot dispensing his favors among his monks.

Rashid Khalidi, a kind of downmarket Said (if such were possible) ended up from his PLO work in Beirut at St. Antony's. Where he got his D.Phil. Now, this sounds grand, but a D.Phil. at Oxford requires no courses at all. He did not have to study anything. He had only to write his thesis. If you want to find out about the highly tendentious and limited nature of that thesis -- on, bien sur, the "Palestinians" (in the world of Rashid Khalidi, as of so many other Arab and Muslim pseudo-academics, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know). Armed with this D.Phil/. he began his resistible rise. At the University of Chicago, there was no one to see through him, no one to stop him, and quite a few people who shared his animus toward Israel. Think of Fred Donner, a signer of anti-Israel petitions (did Khalidi put him up to it? Or was his disposition in that direction responsible for his helping Khalidi come to the University of Chicago? The chicken, or the egg?), though even he managed to attend a Notre Dame conference a half-year ago on the work of Christophe Luxenberg (wherer almost everyone, even the estimable Sydney Griffith, kept tiptoeing around the spectacular philological work, and its implications -- no one, least of all Fred Donner, would dream of ever offending Muslim sensibilities by daring to study Islam the way all other religions are routinely studied). But the University of Chicago, where Martha Nussbaum is now doing her imitation of the comic Irwin Corey ("world's greatest authority"), which she may take on the road to Harvard Law School (Columbia has the similar universal genius, the testy empire-builder and Director of the grandly-titled World Institute, the comical Jeffery Sachs, fresh from his triumph in so splendidly transforming the Russian economy -- so splendidly, in fact, that he thought he just might cure all of world poverty for his next act).

Khalidi is the most extreme example of an academic Johnny-0ne-Note it is possible to find. That note -- hold it now -- is the "Palestinians." Their ancient existence, as far back as Canannites and Jebusites. Far from being a transparent invention of the post-1967 Arab propaganda machine, the "Palestinian people" have existed in a direct line from the Canannites and the Jebusites. Now let's stop right there.

If someone writes something that is not simply wrong, but sheer nonsense, completely without any foundation, the kind of thing that could only be promoted by someone who thinks he can, from the safety of his position, get away with absolutely anything, possibly because he is at at one of those places still called, by U.S. News and World Report, and by loyal alumni who continue to be imressed by the deluge of Development-Office-generated propaganda that they are on the receiving end (American universities -- surely the corrupt and corrupting education industry awaits its muck-rakers, its Ida Tarbell), and that someone possesses a chair at a major, and "prestigious" (wearing thin, that "prestige" of Major American Universities -- wearing thin indeed)American university, what should be done? What should be done when John Mack at Harvard Medical School writes a book about aliens coming to earth and meeting with, talking to, humans? Anything? Nothing? Should a professor of biology suffer a mental sea-change, and begin to teach Creeationism and deny evolution, should anything happen to him? When someone tells us, without the slightest evidence, without the slightest study of the demographics of "Palestine" (even thedemographics of the 19th century, including the arrival of various Muslim groups from Algeria, from Egypt, and from Bulgaria), and claims, as PLO propagandists like to claim, the entire Jewish past, or rather even the pre-Jewish past, as "Palestinian" Arab -- forgetting that the Arabs arrived only in, at the earliest, the seventh century. How the "Palestinian people" (born 1967, died ?) could be both proud Arabs, with all that that arabness means for race-proud Arabs, and simultaneously, as Khalidi repeatedly suggests, trace their lineage all the way back to the Canannites and Jebusites -- which is of course a staple of PLO propaganda, but a complete fabrication as far as all real historians and archeologists go -- remains unexplained.

Is there no one in the History Department -- that is, outside the Middle Eastern and Islaic morass -- who is prepared to raise this matter? Not the matter of plagiarism (that has already been raised), not the matter of turning the swtudy of the MIddle East into a "Palestine-first-last-and-always" farce, where the main subject, Islam, is kept locked up in the backroom, so as not to scare the women and horses, but the matter of simple adherence to the most elementary principles of historical truth. One cannot simply assert that for which there is no evidence, if one is a professor at a university, and is using one's putative prestige to promote, among the credulous, this view.

Khalidi's assertion -- but he was only plagiarizing it, you will argue in his defense, in this Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass World we now live in of American academic -- needs to be explained by him. He needs to be asked, if not by the History Department, then by President Bolinger, who by now has discovered that the climb up the greasy pole of academic administration, while it pays well, and the free housing is nice, may bring more migraines than previously contemplated.

If he has no such evidence, what penalty will be offered? For if all Khalidi has to offer is an unbroken record of what is essentially propaganda on behalf of the "Palestinian" cause, and the "Palestinian" people, and the "Palestinian" this-and-that, if there is really no difference between his previous existence as a PLO propagandist in Beirut and his comfortable existence as a pseudo-academic who went from St. Antony's (J. B. Kelly informs me that the place was full of "Palestinian groupies" -- another lucky one was Roger Owen, who from a lowly position, possibly a lectureship, at St. Antony's, managed to maneuver himself into that appetizing thing, the A. J. Meyer Chair in Middle Eastern Economics, named after someone who also evoked Kelly's dismissive tone and a few wry remarks, for Meyer was an apologist for Saudi oil policies, not a serious scholar of economics or of anyting else.)

On top of this current affairs, this Journal-of-Palestine-Studies level of scholarship, and on top of the plagiarism, and on top of running a department that is mostly current events. presented tendentiously and outside of history --for putting things into context, including the Arab refusal to accept Israel, Khalidi's main theme, would require a serious scholar to discuss the tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam which explain that essentially un-ending, unappeasable, relentless hostility to Isarel as to any Infidel sovereignty within dar al-Islam, but which Arab and Muslim propagandists naturally frame as something having nothing to do with Islam, and carefully present and frame the conflict as something else.

When the propagandist, the plagiarist, the inventor of history Rashid Khalidi claims that "Palestinians" are both completely Arab, and descended from the completely non-Arab Canaanites and Jebusites, what is to be done?

University administrators have risen to the top by not offending. They plan their irresisitible rises early. First a job as provost somewhere. Then, the first presidency at a slightly lesser school -- the Starter-Home of academic administration, and no sooner do you move in, then you begin to plan how to move out, and up. Then, the Big Offer. But all along you must take all the "right" positions on all the "right" issues. Do not even hint that Diversity as a Good Thing is absurd, or that Affirmative Action should have no place at a university, though in certain kinds of government jobs (police, fire) there may be a case. Do not wince when such words as "innovative" and "change" and "challenge" are used -- in fact, get used to using them yourself. To the extent that your speech, and hence over time your mind, declines into that state of commencement-speech banalities, the kind of things both Trustees (businessmen, easily impressed, not too probing) and the Search Committee members will like. Don't worry; there are few Jacques Barzuns around to make trouble -- most such people stay well away from such committees, and no one wants them on anyway.

How is it that the late Dr. John Mack, a professor at Harvard Medical School, was kept on, continued to teach, even after publishing a solemn study about humans he had interviewed who had met with, talked with, aliens from Outer Space. Untouchable, this bamboozled Boston Brahmin, simply because he had tenure? Untouchable, Rashid Khalidi, because he is one of the "Protected People" -- Muslims and Others who are supposedly under siege, not for nonsense, not for plagieriam, not for faulty or current-events-and-propaganda masquerading as scholarship, but for his "unpopular" views -- the same "unpopular" views that are being promoted worldwide, and accepted without question in all the chanceries of the West, in the corridors of power at the E.U., and the U.N., and godknowswhereelse? Those kind of "unpopopular" views?

All over the Western world thousands of intelligent, lively, humorful people, well-trained in such subjects as history, philosophy, literature, are forced to run from college to college to eke out a benefits-less existence. Still others are mis-employed, or underemployed, or unemployed altogether, while those like Rashid Khalidi, the plagiarists, the politically-clever, the ethnic blackmailers, usurp the positions that by right belong to those who did not have Ward Churchill's pseudo-American-Indian ancestry, did not have Rashid Khalidi's fashionable "Palestinianism" and the aid, at every step, of partisans not of scholarship, but of the Arab/Muslim/"Palestinian" cause, could not bear to subject writers and books to the kind of literary theory that has so little to do with transmitting to students, ever less at home with words, the verbal techniques that distinguish writers, and the pleasures to be derived from words artfully chosen and well-placed, one after the other.

A sign of the times, is Rashid Khalidi. A sign of intellectual collapse, both individual and intellectual. In the days of Jacques Barzun, such a phenomenon at Columbia would not have been possible.

Posted by: Hugh at June 9, 2005 1:13 PM

Hugh:

I'm not sure we should find Gil Anidjar or Avi Schlaim very comical. Their ultradhimmihood is extremely dangerous, giving more than succour to the jihaddists and we are living in extremely dangerous times.

Posted by: waterdragon52 at June 9, 2005 3:06 PM

In a parallel track, any news if Ward "Reversed Painting!? What plagiarized reversed painting!?!" Churchill was ever fired for stealing the intellectual property of a dead man (another artist whose work he pillaged)?

And faking his 'Indian heritage' (And thus voiding his university contract and tenure by reason of fraud)?

And using slander against 3,000 dead Americans (calling "little Eichmanns" those murdered by Islamic savages) to promote his political agenda of "Surrender Now, America, and Die Already!" politics?

May Mullah Khalidi join him in Tehran for the international conference honoring the first failed assassin of Salman Rushdie.

And may they be failed assassins (of character) as well.

Posted by: BigSleep at June 9, 2005 4:03 PM

Moral: stop contributing to American universities. Punish them for their hiring and promotion policies. Punish them for failing to have their literature and history faculties engage willingly in the transmission of culture, rather than in the self-indulgence of the narrowest of subjects, and the most fashionable of interpretive and scholarly fads. In the end, it is not money that will talk, but the absence of money. Only thus.

Posted by: Hugh at June 9, 2005 8:10 PM

BigSleep:

FrontPageMag.com has been carrying a series of investigations published in the Rocky Mountain Times detailing Ward Churchill's plagarism, bad scholarship and fraudulent claims to native American heritage, presumably to shame Colorado University into holding hearings appropriately and terminate his tenure.

Posted by: waterdragon52 at June 10, 2005 9:16 AM