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Edward Said - (Note: “Rashid Khalidi is a member of an old and prestigious Palestinian family. His cousin, Jerusalem-born Walid Khalidi.”)

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Sadat Proposes U.S. Professor as Palestinian Envoy
Washington Post, The (DC) - Sunday, November 13, 1977
Author: Dusko Doder, Washington Post Staff Writer; Washington Post staff researcher Jane Freundel contributed to this article.

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, in a move to circumvent the main stumbling block to reconvening Middle East peace talks, had proposed that the Palestinians be represented at Geneva by an American university professor of Palestinian origin.

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Another U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent who was mentioned as a possible candidate is Edward W. Said , 42, a native of Jerusalem who was educted at Harvard and Columbia and served on the faculties of both universities . He is currently a professor of literature at Columbia and is also a member of the Palestine National Council.

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Building an Arab-American Lobby
Washington Post, The (DC) - Sunday, September 14, 1980

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Hisham Shirabi, 50, a professor of political science at Georgetown, and Edward Said , 44, a professor of literature at Columbia , are considered luminaries among Arab-Americans, having written important studies on the Mideast struggle. But they are different from Shadyac and Zogby, who are American-born. Though American citizens, and married to Americans, Shirabi and Said are Palestinian born and think of themselves as exiles. Though they will probably never go “home,” their feeling for the Arab stake in the Middle East is personal and direct.

Lean and taut, friendly enough but rigidly formal, Shirabi talked with me in a student restaurant near the Georgetown campus. He smiled rarely and with melancholy. “When we lost the country in 1948,” he said softly, “I was studying at the University of Chicago, and I could not go home. The tragedy has shaped my life ever since. Until 1967 we had confidence that Nasser would liberate the land. When the war came, we went into deep cultural shock. It drove some of us to reconsider the entire Arab past and future. We had to ask, ‘How come?’”

Said is dark and handsome with an athletic look and an easy but nervous laugh. I met with him in his dingy office on the Columbia campus. “My friends and I had all been admirers of Nasser,” he said , “and we couldn’t understand what had happened. The war gave us a sense of Israel’s dynamism and of its scientific, military, technical and intellectual prowess. At the same time, we saw the inability of the Arabs to work together. We did a lot of soul-searching in the months after the war.”

It was in those postwar months that Shirabi and Said met in Chicago with other Arab-American intellectuals, most of them exiles like themselves, to found the Association of Arab-American University Graduates. Currently its membership is about a thousand, most of whom are campus-based intellectuals. It publishes a newsletter, information papers, monographs, books and a scholarly periodical called Arab Quarterly.

The AAUG’s positions, Shirabi said , are militantly pro-Palestinian, pan-Arab and radical. Furthermore, the AAUG, he said , identifies openly with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he described as a “consensus group” supported by all Arab-Americans except some from the Lebanese Christian right. Shirabi himself maintains close ties with the PLO, and Said is actually a member of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parent body.

Shirabi said that withing the past few years the AAUG has followed the PLO in abandoning insistnece upon “liberation,” and now favors a “two-state solution” to the Palestine question. But, like the PLO, the AAUG refuses to support the Camp David agrement, and its subsequent criticism of President Sadat has caused its Egyptian members to drop out.

Though the AAUG addresses its literature to both Arab and Arab-American questions, much of its organizational work is directed at politicizing the Arab-American community. Shirabi told me the AAUG would be willingly accept funds from the PLO and the oil-producing countries to expand its activities, but he noted regretfully that they have never offered any. He acknowledged that the AAUG had probably had little impact on American policy. But he said it had been useful in establishing an Arab intellectual presence in America and had helped arouse Arab-Americans from their traditional indifference to world politics.

Abdeen Jabara, a Detroit-born Arab-American, had opened a law office in his home town in 1965 to serve the city’s 200,000-member Arab-American community. A year later he went to Lebanon, where his parents were from, to learn some Arabic. He was in Beirut when the Six-Day War broke out. “It was like standing before a dam that burst” was how he described his reaction to me.

Jabara was among those who met with Shirabi and Said in Chicago to found the Association of Arab-American University Graduates in the fall of 1967. A few months later the AAUG’s charter was actually written in his office. Jabara, now 39, was named the AAUG’s first executive secretary and later served as its president. In the mid-1970s, seeing a need to focus attention on the Palestinians, he joined with Jim Zogby to open the office of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in Washington.

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U.S. SUGGESTS 7 PALESTINIANS FOR NEW TALKS WITH ISRAEL
Miami Herald, The (FL) - Wednesday, June 5, 1985

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The Israeli also confirmed the names of Edward Said of Columbia University and Hisham Sharabi of Georgetown University. An Israeli newspaper said the third professor was Walid Khalidi of Harvard, a former member of the Palestine National Council.

U. OF C. PROF BRINGS `FAIR` VIEW TO TALKS
Chicago Tribune - Thursday, October 31, 1991
Author: Cheryl Lavin.
What`s a New York-born University of Chicago professor doing in Madrid as a member of the Palestinian advisory committee to the Middle East peace talks? It`s precisely because he was born in the U.S. and teaches in Chicago,

among other factors, that made the U. of C.`s Rashid Khalidi a logical, and

even obvious, choice, according to Palestinians and others.

They said the advisory committee, a link between the official

Palestinian-Jordanian delegation and the Palestine Liberation Organization,

was designed to bypass Israeli objections to participation by Palestinians

living in Jerusalem. It had a French-Palestinian and an English-Palestinian

and needed an American.

And ``it was important to the PLO to have scholars on the committee,

because as much as possible, they have a more dispassionate outlook,`` said

Louise Cainkar, director of the Palestine Human Rights Information Center.

At 43, Khalidi is younger than such better-known Palestinian academics in the U.S. as Edward Said of Columbia University in New York and Ibrahim Abu-

Lughod of Northwestern University, both of whom were born in the Middle

East.

Moreover, to the press and the American public, Khalidi is perceived as

representative of a new, more moderate generation of leadership and as an

articulate spokesman for the Palestinian cause.

Khalidi is a member of an old and prestigious Palestinian family. His

cousin, Jerusalem-born Walid Khalidi , 65, who teaches at Harvard, is the

senior member of the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the talks.

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Middle East Studies Under Scrutiny in U.S. - Watchdog Groups Allege Left-Wing Bias
Washington Post - Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Author: Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Staff Writer
When Rashid Khalidi took over the newly established Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies at Columbia University last fall, the appointment was generally viewed as an academic coup for the school, which had succeeded in wooing away a prominent Middle East expert from the University of Chicago, a longtime rival.

But Khalidi soon became the target of an Internet campaign that questioned his patriotism. Conservative critics zeroed in on his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq and his public expressions of sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

“Columbia vs. America,” declared a story on Campus Watch, a Web site dedicated to revealing the alleged bias of mainstream Middle East studies programs at U.S. colleges and universities. The New York Sun dubbed Khalidi “the professor of hate.”

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