A Personal Encounter with Rashid Khalidi, Whose Book the President Recently Displayed https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2024/12/a-personal-encounter-with-rashid-khalidi-whose-book-the-president-was-recently-displaying/

December 5, 2024 | Jonathan Schanzer
About the author: Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the United States Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is author of the new book Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War (FDD Press). Follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer.

While vacationing in Nantucket last week, Joe Biden was photographed walking out of a bookstore holding The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017. This book is the work of the retired academic and former PLO spokesman (a position he held long before the group made a pretense of forsaking terrorism) Rashid Khalidi, one of the deans of anti-Israel pseudo-scholarship. Jonathan Schanzer describes meeting Khalidi in February 2001, while searching for a dissertation adviser:

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.

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.

Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/jonathan-schanzer/bidens-radical-reading/