Liberal Academic Middle East Experts Seem To Know Nothing About The Middle East

This one's just for fun:

Rashid I. Khalidi, an expert on Palestinian politics and the director of Columbia University's Middle East Institute, says the recent announcement that Fatah and Hamas factions have agreed on a unity government could be significant because it might lead to an end to the "dire economic crisis" in the Palestinian areas. He says it is also a "potential source of optimism if the formation of a new Palestinian government can be taken as an opportunity to see whether a real negotiation about the real issues could be started."

Meanwhile, anyone who was even remotely pro-Israel insisted that the unity government would fail because - really deep down - a lot of Palestinians just want to murder Jews. It didn't seem to matter how far left people were - if they were honest about the situation, they knew in advance that it would fail one way or another. But not the director of Columbia University's Middle East Institute. He looked at the same set of events and announced that they could be quite significant, and a source for optimism.

Now that we know who was right and who was wrong - again - please remind us why these people have any credibility at all. Other then the fact that they feed subtle and not so subtle anti-Israel "expert opinion" to journalists and academics alike...

Previously: Academics Who Attack Israel are Brave if Brave Means "Doing Things All Your Colleagues Who Agree With You Will Tell You That You Were Brave for Doing", Walt and Mearsheimer's Best Defense For Their Anti-Semitic-ish Accusations Is In Trouble, Juan Cole Is So Incoherent That We Have To Believe He's Doing It On Purpose - Global Wave Of Moderate Islam Edition

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Omri Ceren is a PhD candidate studying Rhetoric at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.

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