…And we’re back. So is Rashid Khalidi

This weekend, the Commentariat was suffering the residual effects of a temporarily severe, but overall inept, web-borne attempt at bringing down the fledgling Specblogs empire. While this prevented us from giving you the up-to-the-second analysis on which you probably, almost certainly rely, I’m happy to report that the enemy has been beaten back, and that your blog is back online. In the great words of our president, we will treat those who aid and abed the terrorists no different from how we’d treat the terrorists themselves. “Verrrry strange group stating that they’re from Morocco” (our tech editors’ words, not mine)–you’re on notice.

Also on notice are the handful of undecideds who tuned into Sean Hannity’s America last night. What they were notified of: Obama’s ties to noted terrorist spokesperson and occasional Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, ties that were last relevant (albeit barely) when they were deployed as a subtle anti-Obama smear by desperate Hilary supporters. It isn’t surprising that Khalidi is being brought up in the thick of this quadrennial’s Mud Month, and the transparent desperation of the Hannity segment (Khal wrote Resurrecting Empire on Bill Ayers’ kitchen table. Holy shit!) similarly argues against giving another word of attention to the Obama-Khalidi tie. The connection is super-circumstantial, even in the context of the still-prevalent argument that Obama’s ties to the far left speak to some latent intellectual proclivity even if they don’t correspond to any of his publicly stated views. Contrary to what Bwog says, Khalidi actually did work for WAFA in the late 70s. But the Hannity segment proves that it’s a major strain on the imagination to figure out how this factors into Obama’s worldview.

Of course, this segment factors into the popular and not totally unfounded Columbia-as-everything-that’s-wrong-with-liberalism narrative, one that tends to ignore the self-isolating nature of the academy in general. The guilt-by-association canard would have a lot less sting if we had universities that could foster intellectual pluarity rather than allowing faculty to entrench their particular ideological cliques in positions of permanant academic and intellectual authority.  The Khalidi charge ties Obama to a monolithic instutitional left far more than it ties him to the so-called “Arab Lobby”–I’m not saying that this is fair; only that this is one aspect of the culture wars that universities have been more than complicit in perpetuating.