Source: Israel Academia Monitor

Rashid Khalidi, Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Despite his academic appointment at a leading US university, Khalidi is regarded by senior PLO officials as a reliable propagandist who “wouldn’t harm the cause”:

Khalidi enjoys the confidence of the PLO and has access to its leaders that stems from the ties he forged while teaching in Beirut from 1974 to 1985, when the PLO maintained its headquarters there.

“He became close to the leadership and gained their confidence,” said Suhail Miari, executive director of the United Holy Land Fund.

For Khalidi’s book, Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking During the 1982 War, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat made the organizations archives available to him, for the first time.

“He was given access because he’s a serious scholar and a Palestinian who wouldn’t harm the cause,” said Hassan Abdul Rahman, director of the Palestine Affairs Center in Washington ... (Chicago Tribune, October 31, 1991; emphasis added)

Just like Beit-Hallahmi, Khalidi has repeated the canard that non-Jews are barred from most land in Israel:

... non-Jews are barred by law from purchasing or leasing most properties (Jewish National Fund property, “state land,” and land under control of the Custodian of “Absentee” Property – ie., stolen Arab land) and are barred from renting in segregated Jewish-only neighborhoods. Where is the racism in this picture? (Washington Post, October 1, 1997)

Khalidi also heads the so-called American Committee on Jerusalem , a Washington-based non-profit that regularly engages in crude anti-Israel propaganda. Khalidi, for example, more than once has signed fund raising letters for the ACJ claiming that Israel engages in “ethnic cleansing” in Jerusalem:

... forcing out its Muslim and Christian Arab population, and making Jerusalem an exclusively Israeli city. Israel is attempting to reach its stated goal of a 70% Jewish majority in all of Jerusalem by the year 2020. (ACJ fund raising letter, dated December 1998 and signed by Dr. Rashid Khalidi)

Khalidi’s claim is arrant nonsense. The fact is that Jerusalem’s population in 1967, after reunification, was 74.2% Jewish and 25.8% Arab, and since then the Jewish proportion has declined and the Arab proportion grown, so that today Jerusalem’s population is 31% Arab. That is, the city has become less Jewish and more Arab! Some ethnic cleansing.

 

Perhaps Khalidi’s most shocking propaganda, however, was his “Remembrance” for the PLO terrorist mastermind known as Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf). Khalaf was notorious for his plots to assassinate King Hussein, and for his leadership of the so-called “Black September” organization, the PLO group that slaughtered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and in 1973 murdered US diplomats in Khartoum. The assassination of the US Ambassador to Lebanon in 1976 was also carried out under Khalaf’s orders. (For details on Khalaf see entry in An Historical Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Greenwood Press.)

 

Incredibly, Khalidi remembers not one word about any of these bloody terrorist attacks in his “Remembrance.” Instead he credits Khalaf with pioneering the PLO’s “diplomatic strategy” in 1988, with his “eloquent speeches and his back room political skills.”

 

According to Khalidi, “Abu Iyad will be sorely missed by the Palestinian people to whom he devoted his life.” (Middle East Report, March-April 1991) If this is the sort of history Khalidi writes, no wonder the PLO places so much trust in him.