It’s so important I’m reprinting Jo-Ann Mort’s post on McCain vile campaign against Rashid Khalidi in full …
It has come to this–the red baiting and the nastiness of the McCain/Palin campaign, in desperation to get Jewish support, is now baiting and bad-mouthing a notable Palestinian-American historian, Rashid Khalidi, for his and his wife’s friendship with Obama. The Khalidis know Obama from their time in Hyde Park, when Rashid was a professor at the University of Chicago.
Now at Columbia University, he is someone who has always reached out to all sides in the debate about the future of Israel and Palestine. He has been outspoken in his arguments against Arafat’s ways of governing and terrorism and when he was at U of C, he was close to Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, one of the most important American Jewish figures of our time. For the Republicans to go after him is pure vile–they think that the Jewish vote is so stupid and racist that they will turn away from the Democrats solely on this type of slander. For someone like Daniel Pipes, quoted in today’s New York Times story, to call him ‘marginal,’ is a joke. It’s time to move the Center back to the Center–let’s hope that happens as of November 5–for the sake of America, the sake of Israel and the sake of Palestine.
McCain’s final gambit is racism pure and simple, a stain on our national honor.
