The New York Times Once Again Shamelessly Displays Its Partisanship & Contempt for Facts

No doubt that the New York Times lies or omits vital information on all sorts of matters and issues. But when Israel is concerned, the NYT can be relied upon  to both be partisan and to falsify almost always. This carries over of course to Arab affairs. The officials and operatives of the PLO, known to be bloodthirsty enemies of Israel, need to be protected from their own records of mass murder and Big Lies.
Therefore, Rashid Khalidi, now an American professor, must have his reputation protected and his personal record sanitized. He is a scion of the al-Khalidi family, long prominent in the Jerusalem area with some of its sons taken into the imperial service by the Ottoman Empire and given high imperial rank. His relative Walid Khalidi worked with British political agents to make propaganda for the Palestinian Arab cause --also a British cause-- in the UK and the USA.  Rashid is American-born, yet served the PLO as one of its leading PR agents, that is, leading liars, for several years in Beirut. Now that Rashid is a prof at the Ivy League Columbia University, it might embarrass not only him but Columbia and his friend B Hussein Obama if it became common knowledge that he was a leading PLO liar in Beirut when the PLO and its member groups made no attempt to conceal their terrorist bloodthirst.
 So the NYT must cover up for its pet "moderate" Arab terrorist mouthpiece. Here is the essence of Prof Martin Kramer's devastating refutation of  the lies about Khalidi in and by the NYT:
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. . .  I do care how the New York Times reported one aspect of the story this morning: “Critics have accused the professor of having had ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he has denied.” The reference here is to the activities of Khalidi when he resided in Beirut in the 1970s and up until Israel’s 1982 invasion. In those days, the PLO ran an exterritorial gangland, and was neck-deep in terrorism planned by Arafat and his mob.
Note this phrase: “Critics have accused…” Today’s article thus repeats a trope that appeared back in 2008, when the Times ran a piece on Khalidi prompted by his past association with Barack Obama:

He taught at universities in Lebanon until the mid-’80s, and some critics accuse him of having been a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Mr. Khalidi has denied working for the group, and says he was consulted as an expert by reporters seeking to understand it.

Again, it’s the “critics” who “accuse him.”
Well, I’m a critic, but we critics didn’t just imagine Khalidi’s PLO affiliation. We were alerted to it by a parade of highly regarded journalists, including two from the New York Times. So here are the “critics” who first leveled the “accusation” (still more sourcing here):
• Joe Alex Morris Jr., reporting from Beirut for the Los Angeles Times on September 5, 1976, quoted Khalidi and described him as “a PLO spokesman.”
• James M. Markham, reporting from Beirut in the New York Times on February 19, 1978, quoted Khalidi and described him as “an American-educated Palestinian who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut and also works for the P.L.O.”
• A Pacifica Radio documentary, reporting in 1979 from Beirut, interviewed Khalidi “at the headquarters of the PLO in Beirut,” and described him as “an official spokesperson for the Palestinian news service Wafa,” “PLO spokesperson,” “official spokesperson for the PLO,” and “the leading spokesperson for the PLO news agency, Wafa.”
• Thomas Friedman, reporting from Beirut in the New York Times on June 9, 1982, quoted Khalidi and described him as “a director of the Palestinian press agency, Wafa.”
• Doyle McManus, reporting on rumored American-PLO contacts in the Los Angeles Times on February 20, 1984, quoted Khalidi and described him as “a former PLO official.”
• James Rainey, reporting on Khalidi’s connection to Obama for the Los Angeles Times on October 30, 2008, described him as “a renowned scholar on the Palestinians who in the 1970s had acted as a spokesman for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.” (As I noted at the time, the Los Angeles Times thus honorably stood by the 1976 reportage of its legendary, long-dead Beirut correspondent, Joe Alex Morris Jr.)
• Thomas W. Lippman, for thirty years a diplomatic, national security, and Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post, in a letter published in that paper on November 1, 2008, wrote that “Khalidi was indeed ‘a PLO spokesman.’ In the early years of the Lebanese civil war, Mr. Khalidi was the Beirut-based spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, and his office was a stop on the daily rounds of journalists covering that conflict. As we used to say in the pre-electronic newspaper business: Check the clips.”
None of these people were or are “critics” of Rashid Khalidi, and two of them were reporting for the New York Times itself. So why does the Times repeatedly inform us that it is only Khalidi’s “critics” who have “accused” him, when in fact a raft of esteemed journalists who interviewed him in Beirut identified him as a PLO spokesman, as a fact? This is not another he-said she-said (or Jew-says Arab-says) question. As Thomas Lippman said: Check the clips.
This is another opportunity to urge the New York Times to get off its derriere and get to the bottom of the Khalidi story. It is unthinkable that a Brooklyn-born, Yale-educated U.S. citizen operated in PLO headquarters in Beirut in the late 1970s, and wasn’t known to the personnel of the U.S. embassy and the CIA station. That was over thirty years ago, so some documents must have been declassified. Can we get some investigative reporting here? Instead all we’ve ever read about Khalidi in the Times is the puff piece.
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For full article by Martin Kramer, go here.

Palestinian Arabs as Imperialist Paladins

REVISED/EXPANDED 6-23-2009

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

One of the big falsifications is the regular depiction of Arabs, especially Palestinian Arabs, as innocent of doing anything bad in history. This falsehood goes back perhaps to Lowell Thomas' post-WW I depiction of TE Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, as the savior of oppressed, colonized Arabs from Ottoman Turkish tyranny. What is not said, almost never said, is that many Arabs from the leading Arab families held high posts in the imperial service. The Ottoman Empire was a Sunni Muslim state and most Arabs, as Sunni Muslims, were loyal to it. This has been confirmed by writers as diverse as the historian Elie Kedourie and the PLO propaganda hack Rashid Khalidi [when he thought that the hoi polloi were not paying attention]. Khalidi, we recall, is an old pal of Prez Obama and supposedly his chief instructor in matters Middle Eastern. That is, Khalidi conveyed to obama the straight Pan-Arab nationalist, pan-Islamist orthodoxy that has long been looked upon fondly in the State Dept and the CIA.

The Arab upper crust was so well integrated into the Ottoman governing class that the Arab historian Zeine N Zeine and the Turkish sociologist Zia Gok Alp both called the Ottoman Empire a Turkish-Arab state. As Ottoman officials, these Arabs took part in Ottoman tyranny and the exploitation and oppression of the subject peoples of the Empire, that is, of non-Muslims such as Bulgars, Armenians, Greeks, etc., as well as of the working poor among the Muslims.

The offspring of leading Arab families in what was designated "palestine" after World War One by the international community, mainly Western powers to be sure, received high posts in the Empire too [of course, there was no "palestine" under the Ottoman or Mamluk empires]. One of these families was the Khalidis of Jerusalem, the family of Obama's pal Rashid. Other leading Arab families of the future "palestine," like the Jerusalem Husseinis and the Abdul-Hadis of Nablus [Sh'khem] also received high imperial posts.

Let's start with the Khalidis. First, they are a "Prominent family of Jerusalem notables. It claims descent from Khalid bin al-Walid, the great 7th century Muslim general" [Shimoni & Levine, see below]. This founding Khalid was a military conqueror of Jerusalem, the Land of Israel and Syria.
-- Ruhi al-Khalidi was the Ottoman consul in Bordeaux, elected in 1908 and 1912 as one of three Jerusalem members of the Ottoman parliament.
-- Yusuf Dia` al-Khalidi, first speaker of the Ottoman parliament and later the Ottoman consul in Vienna, an especially sensitive position since the Austro-Hungarian [Habsburg] Empire coveted Ottoman territories and had indeed defeated the Ottoman armies on several occasions and taken vast lands away from it in the past. Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia, were lands that the Habsburgs had taken away from the Ottoman state. So an Ottoman representative in Vienna had to be especially aware of events, trends, moods, military moves and public declarations in the Habsburg Empire.
-- Mustafa al-Khalidi was a chief of police in Beirut in the Ottoman period. To complete the account, we need to point out that the British appointed him as mayor of Jerusalem 1937-1944. At that time Jerusalem had a Jewish majority as it had had since 1853. The British disregarded the Jewish majority in the city out of their own Judeophobia. Does Sandra Mackey know about that disregarded Jewish majority??

Here are some of the Husseinis [al- Husayni]. The family claims descent from Muhammad. They accumulated large tracts of land in the villages northwest of Ramallah:
Musa Kazem el-Husseini, educated at the Ottoman School of Administration in Istanbul. He served as qaimakam [sub-district governor] in several places and as mutessarif [district governor] in Transjordan, the Arabian Peninsula, and Anatolia. Now as governor of a district in Anatolia he quite possibly governed a district inhabited by many Armenians. How did he treat the members of this oppressed people while governing in Anatolia?
Be that as it may, the British appointed him mayor of Jerusalem [a city with a Jewish majority since 1853] from 1918 to 1920. His son Abdul-Qader Husseini served under the leadership of their kinsman, Haj Amin el-Husseini, in the so-called Arab Revolt ["the revolt by leave"] of 1936-39 and collaborated with the Nazis as Haj Amin did. Abdul-Qader also led terrorist gangs against Jews and fellow Arabs. He went into exile in Baghdad with Haj Amin and there in 1940 a son was born to him named Faisal, while Haj Amin --who was also Abdul-Qader's uncle-- incited the Iraqis in favor of the Nazis and against Jews. Many Jews, estimated in number from 179 to 600, were murdered in the notorious Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in the spring of 1941, at the Shavu`ot holiday, attributed to Haj Amin's agitation, among other causes. Years later, Faisal was a part of the PLO terrorist Arab nationalist irredentist movement, inciting violence among fellow Arabs living in Jerusalem. He called himself "a peace activist." They all do, don't they? He once admitted that the Palestinian Authority was like a Trojan Horse against Israel.
Salim el-Husseini was appointed mayor of the newly formed Jerusalem municipality [baladiyyah] in the 1870s and several occasions afterwards, while the city already had a Jewish majority. Two of his sons, including Musa Kazem mentioned above, were appointed mayors of Jerusalem, Musa Kazem by the British and Hussein Salim by the Ottoman state [1909-1918].
Sa`id el-Husseini was a delegate to the Ottoman parliament after the 1908 and 1914 elections [candidates needed a rather high minimal income to be elected].

Lastly come the Abdul-Hadis of Nablus [originally NeaPolis, also Sh'khem]. They come last because of Nablus' lesser importance compared to Jerusalem.

Ruhi Abdul-Hadi worked in the Ottoman Empire's diplomatic service. He later held senior positions in the administration of the British mandatory government in the country. He subsequently became a minister in the Jordanian govt.
[see here for info about a latter-day Abdul-Hadi]

All this information of course refutes the usual simplistic fake history of the Arabs in the Land of Israel as propagated by such as Sandra Mackey and many others. The poor of the Arabs were poor and oppressed, by their own ethnic and religious brothers as much as by any one else. The Arab upper crust were part of the Ottoman imperial class and later enjoyed privileged positions under the British mandatory govt while Jews were discriminated against. The fact that the Muslim and Arab poor and workers and peasants were exploited by their own upper class makes the Ottoman Empire no less imperialist, indeed no different in principle from the Russian Empire where the Russian workers, peasants, and poor were oppressed by their own upper crust.
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SOURCES:
Yaacov Shimoni and Evyatar Levine, Political Dictionary of the Middle East in the 20th Century (New York: Quadrangle 1972, 1974)

יעקב שביט, חיים באר, יעקב גולדשטיין -- לקסיקון האישים של ארץ ישראל 1948- 1799 [מרכז זלמן שזר]

יעקב שמעוני, לקסיקון פוליטי של העולם הערבי [ירושלים : כתר1988

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools