More Racism
And now, in the final days, McCain’s last spurious attack: that Obama is unfit to be president because he associates with Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia professor who speaks eloquently for Palestinian rights and Palestinian statehood, and is therefore an anti-semite and a PLO shill and a closet terrorist.
Now, one could point to the fact that Mr Khalidi has unequivically called suicide bombing — and civilian murder in general — a war crime. Or that the International Republican Institute, chaired at the time by John McCain, provided $500,000 worth of grants to a group that Mr Khalidi cofounded. Or that he is a consistent critic of the PLO and the Palestinian authority. But none of these things matter. What matters can be summarized in two words: “Rashid,” and “Khalidi”. Both of these words have about them the ring of Arabness, and we all know what that means.
This may be the campaign’s most lasting contribution to our society: emboldening those pockets of latent anti-Arabism that have been swelling under the skin of the body politic since 9/11. The campaign’s tactic has been to take the essential untrustworthiness of Arabs as a given, and then use that implicit assumption as the basis for their attacks: in the repeated references to Obama’s middle name, for example, from the bottomfeeder contingent of McCain’s surrogatry; in the milquetoast deflections when McCain’s supporters make the mistake of openly calling him an Arab on camera (the response was not: “There’s nothing wrong with being an Arab”; but rather: “No, Obama is a good family man”). And now in this: guilt by association — not with a troubling ideology, or an actual record of anti-semitism, or even anything particular extremist; but with an Arab who has one of those funny Arab names.
This is more than nauseating, and it’s going to have repercussions long after we’re done with this horrible campaign.
Update: Josh Marshall absolutely nails the point I’m trying to make. Man, I really like Josh Marshall.
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