“Is Peace Possible? Political and Religious Ideologies in the Middle East” is the title of a discussion panel I will share with Shibley Telhami (Anwar Sadat Professor, University of Maryland) at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City on Monday evening. The panel is sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, and will be moderated by Hillel Fradkin of the Hudson Institute. There are cocktails at 6:30pm, and the program starts at 7:00pm. Admission is free, but you must register in advance, here.
Category: Sandbox
Settlers from Brooklyn
Here is a quick aside about a passage in Christopher Hitchens’s overwrought and over-written defense of Rashid Khalidi. Hitchens announces that the Khalidi family “hold[s] a celebrated house and position in the city [of Jerusalem] since approximately the time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house. If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn’t care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so.”
Let us leave aside the typically English schoolboy enchantment with assumed Arab aristocracy (please, don’t get me started). Rashid Khalidi was himself born and raised in… Brooklyn. Here is testimony from a witness: “I lived in Brooklyn and watched young Rashid and his brothers grow, even held him as an infant while listening to his father, Ismail, talk about Palestine and the diplomatic issues he dealt with.” On the maternal side, Rashid’s roots in Brooklyn go back a good ways: “His grandmother,” he is reported to have told an audience, “who immigrated to America from Lebanon was a member of First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn.” His mother and father married in that church, and he attended Sunday school there.
So were Khalidi to forgo the familiar pleasures and privileges of Columbia University for the rigors of Jerusalem, wouldn’t he also be a settler from Brooklyn?
Khalidi-PLO, for email subscribers
This short post is to alert rss and email subscribers (via Feedburner) that there are several important updates to my earlier post, “Khalidi of the PLO.” One brings a passage from a 1978 New York Times report from Beirut, noting that Rashid Khalidi “works for the P.L.O.” Another uncovers a passage from a 1976 Los Angeles Times report, also from Beirut, describing Khalidi as “a PLO spokesman.”
The last update, the most compelling, unearths a 1979 radio documentary on the PLO featuring Khalidi, in which he is repeatedly identified as an official PLO spokesperson in the Palestinian news service, Wafa. The interview with him was conducted in PLO headquarters in Beirut. The documentary may be heard in its entirety.
To read these updates, revisit the post here.
Martin Kramer on the Middle East 
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