Doug Bandow

John McCain: He is a Dishonorable as well as Crazy Warmonger

The attempt by John McCain and his spokesman to smear Barack Obama as an anti-semite by smearing those he has met with as anti-semites is truly beneath contempt.  McCain’s guns have been focused on Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American who has, understandably, been critical of Israeli brutality throughout a 40-year occupation of Palestinian lands, but also of the Palestinian leadership.  Juan Cole gives a good account of Khalidi, a man with whom one might disagree, but not one who can seriously be called an anti-semite:

The increasingly sleazy John McCain, who once promised to run a clean campaign, has now attacked my friend Rashid Khalidi and attempted to use him against Barack Obama. Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the Middle East Center at the University of Chicago for some time, and he and his family came to know the Obamas at that time. Knowing someone and agreeing with him on everything are not the same thing.

Scott Horton has a fine, informed and intelligent discussion of the issue. Likewise Barnett Rubin (”My Friend the Neo-Nazi”) and Chapati Mystery suddenly alarmed about the Hyde Park crowd.

I know it may seem a novel idea to people like McCain and Palin, but it would be worthwhile actually reading Khalidi’s book on the Palestinian struggle for statehood. (I urge bloggers interested in this issue to link to his book, which the American reading public should know).

At the least, read a whole essay Khalidi has written.

Far from being a knee-jerk nationalist, Khalidi has been critical of the decisions of the Palestinian leadership at key junctures in modern history.

McCain’s and Palin’s attacks on Khalidi are frankly racist. He is a distinguished scholar, and the only objectionable thing about him from a rightwing point of view is that he is a Palestinian. There are about 9 million Palestinians in the world (a million or so are Israeli citizens; 3.7 million are stateless and without rights under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza; and 4 million are refugees or exiled in the diaspora; there are about 200,000 Palestinian-Americans, and several million Arab-Americans, many living in swing vote states). Khalidi was not, as the schlock rightwing press charges, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was an adviser at the Madrid peace talks, but would that not have been, like, a good thing?

Much of the assault on Khalidi comes from the American loony Zionist Right, which quietly supports illegal Zionist colonies in the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of the remaining Palestinians. They have been tireless advocates of miring the US in wars in Iraq and Iran to ensure that their dreams of ethnic cleansing are unopposed. They are a tiny, cranky but well-funded group that has actively harassed anyone who disagrees with them (at one point, cued by Daniel Pipes, they cyberstalked Khalidi and clogged his email mailbox with spam for weeks at a time). All opinion polling shows that most American Jews are politically liberal, overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and support trading land for peace to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Khalidi is their political ally in any serious peace process, which many have recognized.

Michael Goldfarb has been one of the smear agents.  At least he names Khalidi.  But he insists that there is a second anti-semite close to Obama whom everyone knows about but he won’t name.  Cute.  I know of a dozen Nazis who hang around with John McCain but since everyone knows them I won’t name them.  This is the representative of a man who wants to be president. 

Republicans like to complain about dirty Democratic tactics.  But this is about as dirty as one can imagine.  It’s another reason to vote against John McCain and most any other Republican on the ballot.