Okay, one more quick Khalidi comment. Over at the Motherblog, Tim Fernholz analyzes the controversy and concludes, "no one knows who Khalidi is outside of the media and high information voters, and an even smaller universe of people cares. The attacks by McCain are reprehensible...but ultimately this is not an election about small stuff. This is a big stuff election." If you want a one-line summary of why John McCain's Distract-O-Tron 3000 strategy has failed to connect, you can't do much better than that.Meanwhile, Khalidi is, as everyone keeps telling you, a well-respected and incisive scholar of the Middle East in general, and the Palestinian struggle for nationhood in particular. Take this Amazon.com review of his seminal book The Iron Cage, which investigates why Palestinian civil society is so curiously immature:
. Its an important book on its own terms, and its purchase is a worthy counter-statement to this type of anti-Arab fearmongering.
Khalidi poses the question of why Palestinian political development is so weak, certainly not up to the standards of contemporary high-income republics.[...]In the subsequent period from the early 1960s on, Khalidi gives the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) credit for three essential achievements in political organization: (1) winning most Palestinians' recognition of the PLO as their first-ever central point for political cooperation, (2) winning Arab countries' recognition of a Palestinian national cause, and (3) finally winning global recognition that the Palestinian nation existed.At the same time, Khalidi also identifies three failings: (1) not setting up internal democracy and efficient service bureaucracies, (2) not being categorical enough when they gave up armed resistance to the Israelis after the mid-1970s, and (3) neglecting Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza when Israel allowed the PLO leadership to return in the mid-1990s.Sure sounds racist to me! Presumably, this experience has not been a pleasant one for Khalidi. But it would be nice if some good emerged from it in the form of broader familiarity with his important works. So next time you hear Hannity explain how Rashid Khalidi urinates on a Haggadah during full moons, head over to Amazon and pick up a copy of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
. Its an important book on its own terms, and its purchase is a worthy counter-statement to this type of anti-Arab fearmongering. 
