Biden’s Radical Readingby Jonathan Schanzer A photo of outgoing President Joe Biden made the rounds over the Thanksgiving holiday. The octogenarian lame-duck president was spotted leaving a Nantucket bookstore carrying a copy of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, a book released in 2020 by Columbia University professor emeritus Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi was once best known in academic circles for his 1997 book, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. In it, Khalidi largely refrained from the vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric for which he later became well-known. I met Rashid Khalidi four years after he published that book. I knew his scholarship from my master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I studied from 1998 to 2000. When I completed my graduate studies, I returned to the United States and promptly applied to Ph.D. programs. One of them was at University of Chicago. The Middle Eastern Studies department accepted me, so I paid a visit in February 2001. As a modernist, I was matched with Rashid Khalidi as my likely adviser. Our meeting began pleasantly enough, as I sat in his office, which I remember being adorned with Chicago Cubs swag. As Khalidi quietly reviewed my transcripts and writing, I must admit that I didn’t give my Hebrew University education a second thought. I naively believed that Khalidi would welcome working with me, even if our outlooks on the Middle East were not aligned. I was in for a rude awakening. Khalidi asked me what I wanted to study. I told him that I wanted to conduct comparative research on the ideologies of violent Islamist movements in the Middle East. That sounds like something Zionist think tanks study, Khalidi told me. I flinched. But I didn’t back down. I told him that Al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban, and other groups had been terrorizing the region in recent years. The news was filled with stories about their attacks. But few academics had taken the time, at least back then, to understand their motivations. Khalidi responded negatively. He told me that these news reports were wildly exaggerated. He said that this was the way newspapers sold advertising. I pushed back. But I could immediately sense that this was not up for debate. So I tried another approach. Back in the 1950s, I said, there was a major push in academia to learn more about the Soviet Union. “Soviet Studies” took off, as academics learned Russian language and culture, seeking ways to bolster American national security. Perhaps we could work on a pilot program that would similarly merge the study of Islamist ideology, Middle East history, and national security. It was an interesting idea, Khalidi told me. But it was not something he was keen to do at University of Chicago. So, I asked him: What would you have me study? He looked at me for a moment. The room was eerily quiet. “Palestinian poetry,” he said. And with that, our meeting soon concluded. I would not be getting a Ph.D. at University of Chicago. I was despondent for several months. As it turned out, Chicago was not the only place that was a poor fit for me. I soon found that American universities were simply not inclined or geared to support academic work with a view toward national security. Certainly not in the Middle East. In the wake of 9/11, some seven months after our meeting in his office and just days after the attack I had a thought: Given the stakes, Khalidi might reconsider. I called him and asked if he remembered me. He said he did. I asked him what he thought about my proposed field of work after the attacks that rocked America. He was unmoved. This is a topic that should be studied by Muslims, he said. Our conversation ended abruptly. In that phone call, Khalidi invoked the ideas of Edward Said, who wrote Orientalism in 1978. The book argued, inter alia, that Westerners are ill-equipped to study the Orient. Said’s book has dominated the field of Middle Eastern studies ever since, leading to the rot and group think that has only recently become obvious to most Americans. One American-Israeli scholar understood the extent of that rot early on. In 2001, Martin Kramer published a blistering critique of the field of Middle Eastern studies in America, noting the ways in which professors apologized for Islamist terrorism and pilloried Israel, and in the process undermined Middle East and U.S. national security. Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America is still a must read. Khalidi ranked among Kramer’s top targets in his book. Deservedly so. But Kramer didn’t stop at Khalidi’s problematic scholarship. He dug deeper into Khalidi’s history. In 2008, Kramer exposed Khalidi as a former spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Indeed, Khalidi represented the PLO in Lebanon back when the group was still designated in the United States as a terrorist organization. Apparently, that did not get in the way of his tenured position at University of Chicago. Nor did it stop him from becoming the Edward Said professor at Columbia University in 2003. His new position, fittingly named, afforded him a platform for scholar-activism—something all too common among Middle East professors at Columbia, and a host of other schools. Kramer’s spadework was well-timed. In 2008, Khalidi became something of a public person. In the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain, it emerged that Obama had delivered a speech during a 2003 farewell dinner for Khalidi, before his departure from the University of Chicago. We still don’t know what was said during that dinner. The Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the video, but has refused to release it for reasons that were never clear. One can only surmise that the speech would have been embarrassing for both Khalidi and the future president of the United States. Khalidi has written five books in the years since I met him. I’ve read two of them. Both were screeds. On his latest book—the one Biden bought in Nantucket —even the New York Times notes that Khalidi’s “persuasiveness is undermined at times by a tendency to shave the rhetorical corner.” The Times also notes how Khalidi’s credibility was undermined by his own sources: “if the writer himself notes that the source of a quote is probably wrong, then it’s deeply problematic to use that quote.” Indeed, Khalidi has become a poster child for what Colombia and too many other universities have embraced: unserious scholarship by radical, tenured activists. It will now take years to undo the damage that has been done to America’s universities. But it’s now beyond academics. The lack of even-handed inquiry is now overshadowed by an overt strain of anti-Semitism not seen in this country for decades. By brandishing Khalidi’s most recent screed outside a bookstore in Nantucket, and engaging in naked virtue signaling, Biden is now a walking billboard for the corruption of Middle Eastern studies in America. |