This is the quality of work being done today in the politicized Middle East Studies Departments of our nation’s universities. Yet in those Departments the “Orientalists” are routinely derided by men who are just (at best) propagandists and shills, not academics. “Rashid Khalidi: Plagiarist?” from Lee Kaplan at FrontPage:
For those unfamiliar with Khalidi, he is the recipient of the Edward Said Chair at Columbia University. Columbia has been in the news lately due to accusations its Middle Eat Studies department is patently anti-Israel and even unfair to Jewish students. A new film recently out titled “Columbia Unbecoming” has been circulating and reveals this academic bias with tales of Middle East faculty abuse against students who support Israel. Khalidi, for his part, once said that killing Israeli soldiers is justified during the peace process.
The article where my friend found the quotation was posted on the web page of the American Committee of Jerusalem. She wanted a better reference than a web page, so she Googled a particularly absurd phrase: “The simple fact is that the majority of the Arab people of Palestine are not descendants of those that arrived as part of the wave of Islamic-Arab conquest in the seventh century.”
The search produced a nearly identical sentence, but this one was from a 1994 article on the history of Jerusalem written by the late Kamil Jamil el Asali of the University of Jordan.[1] The two articles share more than bad scholarship. They are alike; too alike.
Like possible plagiarism.
Entire sentences appear in both articles:
Asali: “The names of the two oldest rulers of the city, Saz Anu and Yaqir Ammo, were identified by the American archaeologist W. F. Albright as Amoritic.”
Khalidi uses the same sources and quotations used by Asali.
Asali: In The Golden Bough, the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) stressed that, “the Arabic-speaking peasants of Palestine are the progeny of the tribes which settled in the country before the Israelite invasion.”
Kahalidi: In 1902, the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer wrote in his famous study The Golden Bough: “The Arabic-speaking peasants of Palestine are the progeny of the tribes which settled in the country before the Israelite invasion.”.
Read it all.