What is striking about the McCain campaign’s deplorable smear attack in which they label Rashid Khalidi as an anti-Semite, which Philip Giraldi and Glenn Greenwald have already discussed, is how unusually lazy it is.  Of course, flinging such labels at political opponents is already very intellectually lazy and disreputable, but one expects a certain degree of polemical effort when the usual suspects set out to defame someone.  You come to expect these sorts of smears to be directed against people who do not hold approved views of Israel and Palestine, but in this case there haven’t even been the normal lame attempts to equate Khalidi’s views with anti-Semitism.  As an Arab-American with a Palestinian parent and someone who is a scholar of the history of Palestinians, Khalidi is simply assumed by the McCain campaign to hold the worst views, because this ultimately has less to do with the false claims of ties to the PLO and more to do with Khalidi’s own background and political views.  His views on Israel and Palestine would probably not be very popular, but it is Khalidi’s ethnicity that has made him the particular target of scorn.  Indeed, if Khalidi were not of Arab descent it is difficult to imagine Obama’s friendship with him being even remotely controversial. 

Contrary to the title of Mr. Giraldi’s post (which I understand was a bit of rhetorical flourish), we are not all Palestinians, just as we are not all Israelis, and neither are we Georgians nor Russians.  We Americans are Americans, and it has been our tendency to identify ourselves with other nations and take sides in conflicts that have nothing to do with us that have contributed, as I am sure Mr. Giraldi will agree, to the problems in our foreign policy debates and in our foreign policy itself.  As I said regarding the Second Lebanon War two years ago:

It is ludicrous because, no matter the feelings of goodwill and solidarity, we cannot seriously identify ourselves with another nation, nor can they identify themselves with us, because in so many respects every nation, every people is significantly different in meaningful ways that precludes an identification of any two. The fundamental differences between nations also prevent a ready and reflexive identification of the interests of any two nations on the basis of decent moral outrage at evils perpetrated on another people’s civilians.

The impossibility of such an identification does not absolve us of the obligation to condemn and, insofar as it is possible, oppose excesses and outrages in war, but it also points to the truth that our outrage, if it is as genuine as it should be, cannot be selective or one-sided and should not prefer the innocent of one side over the innocent of the other.

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