Back in August Johnson posted his thoughts about “The Unusual Hashmi Case”. A 2003 graduate of Brooklyn College, where Johnson is on the faculty, Syed Fahad Hashmi is being held on charges of providing material assistance to Al Queda. But the focus of the post isn’t Hashmi’s situation, it’s the efforts of two of his former instructors to protest the conditions of his detention, pursued under the banner Educators for Civil Liberties. It’s too bad that people who organize these fights against injustice are drawn to expansive names like that. The Organization for Truth and Fairness from the lacrosse case is a classic of the genre. Hashmi’s supporters weren’t that grandiose, but one case, no matter how serious, is not a surrogate for the whole realm of civil liberties.

A petition is central to the effort, and I have to admit I cringe at the thought of another statement of concern making the faculty rounds—the Support Bill Ayers petition I mentioned in the last post shows how strong the bandwagon effect can be with those things. The one for Hashmi is quite a bit more focussed and substantive, though. The main issue is the special administrative measures dictating that he’s to be held in solitary confinement and severely restricting his communication with anyone, including his attorney. The petitioners believe these measures are excessive and unnecessary and should be lifted.

Johnson has nothing good to say about the undertaking, but he’s particularly hard on “[the] commentary about the case’s possible effects on free speech and the academy” from Hashmi’s former instructors. I don’t have the background to fully judge the legal issues, but it seems to me that Johnson’s most convincing point is about how constitutionally protected speech and associations are valid evidence of a defendant’s “state of mind.” And in general the petitioners’ claims are more speculative and probably weaker as they turn from Hashmi’s plight to the chilling effects of the case on activists or in the classroom. According to Johnson, this amounts to “cross[ing] over from one-sided to merely bizarre.” That’s overstating the problem quite a bit. In fact, it strikes me as a better characterization of Johnson’s attack on the petitioners.

The first version of Johnson’s post is as one-sided as anything Hashmi’s supporters produced, and it’s no credit to Cliopatria, the high-minded blog for academic historians where it was posted. Like the Ayers/Khalidi piece I wrote about last time, a rewritten and expanded version appeared on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), Johnson’s blog about the lacrosse case. In this case the time lag was much longer, the extent of the changes much greater. The result is much more narrow-minded and polemical, so it fits right in on DIW.

It seems like some of the legal issues that Johnson has been so insistent about in his analysis of the lacrosse case would carry over. The two cases are quite different, and I’m not suggesting that he should necessarily have approached the Hashmi case with exactly the same attitude and exactly the same issues as he brought to the lacrosse case. But terrorism, like sexual assault, demands a difficult balancing act from the justice system, one that’s vulnerable to political manipulation and abuse. Something could be made of the parallels, I’m sure. For Johnson, though, the only connections worth making are in the realm of the academic culture crusade. It seems that his approach to the legal issues in the Hashmi case is largely determined by the professors he’s attacking—what they stand for, he opposes. In his view, the fact that the claims of the two organizers have been endorsed by so many other professors, “says more about the rush-to-judgment attitude of the academy than any violations of civil liberties by the government.” That rush-to-judgment attitude is at the heart of Johnson’s case against the Duke faculty, and what really ties Hashmi’s petition to the obsessions that drive DIW is that, among the signatures, Johnson found “no fewer than eleven members of the Group of 88” (as always, the “Group” is where the action is). The table-thumping rhetoric is a DIW staple—if only Johnson could brandish a sheaf of papers the demagogic effect would be complete. [Here’s what Johnson has to say about the differences between the Cliopatria and DIW posts.]

I’ve picked out a few of the highlights (or lowlights)—unless noted, quotes are from the DIW post. Besides Johnson’s own “rush-to-judgment attitude” towards the charges against Hashmi, what’s striking about the critique is how primitive a lot of it is. He’s a remarkable specimen, though—an anti-intellectual intellectual who assumes that the people he’s criticizing are as shallow and monomaniacal as he is.

• Rushing to judgment is a no-no… except when it gives your argument more rhetorical bite. Berating and denouncing guilt-presuming professors is a major preoccupation on DIW, but apparently the standard that applies to comments about the Duke lacrosse players doesn’t extend to Hashmi:

  In 2006, a former Brooklyn College(!) student named Syed Fahad Hashmi was arrested in Britain on charges of providing material assistance to Al Qaeda. At the time of his arrest, Hashmi sought to travel to Pakistan, carrying with [him] such items as a large amount of cash, night vision goggles, and sundry military apparel. Hashmi is currently awaiting trial in the United States, which is holding him without bail.

  These incriminating details, which weren’t in the Cliopatria post, make the case against Hashmi sound quite strong—it’s hard to imagine why anyone would be taking piles of cash and night vision goggles to Pakistan except to help terrorists. Johnson’s sources don’t inspire much confidence, though. His first link is to an MSNBC article that cites, first, “a terrorism expert and NBC News analyst” and then “Law enforcement sources.” The information about the goggles is “based on a USA TODAY review of public records and reports from Justice, Commerce and the Pentagon.” Wasn’t one of the lessons of the lacrosse case that sources like this should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, since prosecutors and investigators are known to overstate their case, and “Experts can have agendas, too”?

  Johnson seems to have some reservations about the case against Hashmi:

  Given the Bush administration’s record on civil liberties in terrorism-related cases, it’s possible to believe that Hashmi has suffered improperly. […]

  The Chronicle of Higher Education, a non-partisan, non-ideological journal that covers college and university issues, produced an article that appropriately described the case against Hashmi as “murky.”

  Commenter “One Spook” objects that “the prosecution has said very little about its case,” which “could very well mean that it is quite strong.” In response, Johnson backpedals:

  I agree with you completely. By “appropriately murky,” I only meant to say that the facts known publicly—facts largely, as you point out, framed by the defense—don’t point to any clear case of either civil liberties violations or likely innocence.

  That’s a strange claim to make after presenting the essence of the government’s case as unqualified fact. The Chronicle article by Allie Grasgreen is more detailed and more circumspect (It’s no longer available for free at the magazine’s web site, but here’s a pdf). Though she was only able to interview Hashmi’s attorney (the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment), there’s no imbalance of “facts largely… framed by the defense.” What Grasgreen describes as “murky,” anyway, is the government’s allegations.

  The details in the indictment against Mr. Hashmi are murky. Among the four counts are allegations that he conspired with unnamed persons to provide “material support or resources”—including money and military gear—to co-conspirators who delivered the materials to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. The materials were to be used by Al Qaeda against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the indictment says.

• Expect self-serving spin from a defense brief… except when the defense is arguing for your team.

  [P]olitical science professor Jeanne Theoharis, the statement’s author, has said that the signatories take no position on the merits of Hashmi’s guilt or innocence. Yet their petition and the remarks of the petition’s two chief sponsors (Theoharis and political science professor Corey Robin) read as if cribbed from a defense brief.

  That’s from Cliopatria—maybe even Johnson realized that DIW was not the place to scoff at someone else for sounding like a defense brief. As I already pointed out, there’s never been much critical distance between him and the various legal teams that have represented lacrosse players, not even after the action moved from criminal to civil proceedings. My impression is that Until Proven Innocent is the same—just scan the source notes for “Joe Cheshire interview,” “Jim Cooney interview”, and “Brad Bannon interview.”

  In December 2006, the defense’s request to change the trial venue for the three indicted students was, for Johnson, “yet another in a string of extraordinary defense motions.” A few days later he noted that he knew of “no other criminal case in which the statements and behavior of the students’ own professors constituted grounds for a change of venue.” He wrote more or less the same thing eight months later, but framed it more dramatically as “the first time in American history,” and he’s cited the motion on other occasions as damning evidence against the “listening” statement and its endorsers. But it was never considered in court, and it seems like even a sympathetic critic should be able to treat a defense motion as something less than an automatic slam dunk, even if it makes a compelling case (and this one does, on the back of Mike Nifong much more than the Duke faculty, though).

  More recently, with his Obama-partisan hat on, Johnson analyzed a 30-page motion from the defense as if it was the judge’s ruling in their favor, and more importantly, against Sarah Palin’s flunkies in the Alaska state legislature (it was a “Troopergate” thing). Scott Eric Kaufman should know better than to trust what Johnson says about his own sources, but the opportunity to really stick it to Gov. Palin was too good to pass up, and he let himself be fooled into posting “second-class, legally-mandated snark” instead of “first-rate, smack-down snark.”

• In the mind of the simple-minded extremists at Duke, guilt and due process are mutually exclusive. The name of one of those extremists, it seems, is so full of significance that it can stand as a complete sentence:

  Wahneema Lubiano. Her authorship of the guilt-presuming Group of 88 statement (something “happened” to Crystal Mangum; “thank you” to protesters carrying “castrate” signs; the signatories would hold firm “regardless of what the police say or the court decides”) didn’t exactly identify her as a friend of civil liberties.

  Based on their attitudes and actions since 2006, Lubiano and her Group colleagues would be about the last people expected to stand up for due process or the rights of the accused.

  Whether the “Group of 88 statement” (the “listening” statement, that is) is really “guilt-presuming” is a matter of opinion. But granting that it is for the sake of argument, how does a “guilt-presuming” statement that makes no legal demands and carries no legal authority automatically imply a position on civil liberties? It’s possible to believe someone is guilty of a crime and also entitled to due process. I imagine that in the right circumstances, even Johnson is capable of the mental gymnastics it takes to hold onto both ideas at once—lawyers have to do it all the time, don’t they? (The phrase “regardless of what the police say or the court decides” has nothing to do with the students’ civil liberties unless it was the prevalence of racism and sexism at Duke that the police were investigating.)

  Just as he assumes that Rashid Khalidi’s favoritism towards Arab-American students is categorical, Johnson assumes that Lubiano’s antipathy to the lacrosse players is all-encompassing. And it does seem like an extremist should have simplistic, unbalanced opinions, though assuming that the person under scrutiny is an extremist and therefore one-dimensional is about as superficial as a critic can get. If Johnson is taking such a superficial approach it would explain why he’s so confident that Lubiano’s agenda was tied to guilty verdicts being handed down in the lacrosse case and that Khalidi would have joined the “Group of 88” had he been at Duke. It’s easy to guess what simple people are thinking and what they’ll do, and if they’re black women it seems to be especially easy. Perhaps the assumption is that, unless there’s unambiguous evidence to the contrary, they’re in the grip of mindless identity politics—a principle that could easily be extended to Palestinians, as well.

• When criticizing extremist ideologues and other wrong-headed types, insist on simple-minded, slavish consistency. To some extent, this is a corollary to the last point—simple-minded extremists should be both predictable and consistent.

  The “attitudes and actions since 2006” of “Lubiano and her Group colleagues,” are in response to one outrageous incident. Why is it that they “would be about the last people expected to stand up for due process or the rights of the accused”? I agree that, on the whole, the professors he’s referring to weren’t concerned about due process when they should have been. But most people pick and choose when to get worked up about such things—just look at Johnson’s reaction to the Hashmi case. Nonetheless he acts as if the commitment of these Duke professors to due process is summed up by their attitude towards the one case he happens to have written 1200 or so posts and a book about. To sign the Hashmi petition, they must have “suddenly discovered civil liberties.” It’s a claim full of forced sarcasm, so it may be giving Johnson too much credit to treat it as something he’s actually thought through. But consider this (and while you’re at it, note the effect of sneer quotes in the abbreviation he uses for Hashmi’s petitioners):

  According to the “Educators,” Hashmi’s civil liberties also have been violated because “under a plea agreement reported in the media, [alleged Hashmi confederate Junaid] Babar will receive a reduced sentence in return for his cooperation.”

  … [I]t’s possible… that Babar is lying. But it’s very strange indeed to claim that all testimony obtained as a result of a plea bargain automatically violates the civil liberties of a suspect. If the “Educators” really believe this point, however, perhaps they should petition the court to overturn convictions of such figures as Martha Stewart, Enron executives, or WorldCom executives. After all, each of those cases (like the Hashmi case) involved testimony obtained from plea bargains.

  The suggestion that the “Educators” really ought to take up the cause of a bunch of white-collar convicts they presumably find odious is as ridiculous as it is obnoxious, but it has no bite. The dull-witted assumption behind it is that there are no meaningful distinctions to be made between the various cases—as far as Johnson is concerned, apparently, a plea bargain is a plea bargain is a plea bargain (and it does seem like he’s letting the label do his thinking for him). Offhand I can think of two reasons why it’s likely to raise more concerns in Hashmi’s case than in the other ones Johnson dredged up. First of all, it’s likely than the government had more leverage over Babar, so he faced a starker choice. Second, the restrictions on Hashmi’s defense may make it hard for him to challenge Babar’s testimony. And I’m confident that the plea bargains in the three white-collar cases were challenged vigorously in court. Here’s a little snippet from CNN’s coverage of the Martha Stewart trial (Douglas Faneuil was the guy who copped a plea):

  The stockbroker’s defense attorney, David Alfel (ph), then began his assault on Faneuil. The 28-year-old admitted to using drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy. Faneuil also told the jury about his plea bargain for having lied to government investigators.

  Will Hashmi’s defense be able to level an “assault” on Babar’s credibility? Likely not, it seems to me, though of course I can only speculate.

  Along the same lines, Johnson “assume[s] that each of the signatories is committed to advocating the repeal of all hate crimes laws.” If not, their objection to the government’s use of constitutionally protected speech and association is inconsistent. And he’s incredulous because Tim Shortell, a hot-headed Brooklyn College professor who once called religious people “moral retards,” had signed on to support Hashmi. Apparently a moment of rhetorical excess at the expense of religion disqualifies the man from sincerely caring about either the civil liberties or the suffering of a religious person. The model of human thought and behavior at work here has been liberated from any trace of subtlety. It has very little to do with the real world, but on the plus side the criticism must be incredibly easy to write.

It’s depressing to see this stuff treated as intelligent criticism, and there’s plenty more where it came from. Even smart and educated people seem to approach the culture war with a tribalistic mindset, though, which means that it will always have a receptive audience, inside and outside academia.

It’s ironic that Johnson takes the time to describe the Chronicle of Higher Education as a “non-partisan, non-ideological journal” and then ignores the non-partisan and non-ideological message, except for the one detail that he misrepresents. I think the author of the Chronicle article is appropriately skeptical of the various claims from all sides, but in the end she doesn’t leave the impression that the case warrants such a dismissive attitude.

This part sums up the underlying dilemma, as I see it, pretty well:

Chris Zambelis works as a political analyst on Middle East issues for Helios Global, a Washington-based risk-analysis firm. Mr. Zambelis wrote about Mr. Hashmi’s arrest in 2006 for Global Terrorism Analysis, a newsletter published by the Jamestown Foundation, and he says “there’s no doubt” the government’s actions against Mr. Hashmi, including the special administrative measures, are completely warranted if the allegations involving Al Qaeda are true. But, he reiterated, that’s a big “if.”

“If you want to give the government the benefit of the doubt on this, if there is something substantive that they’ve found that they want to pursue, obviously they are right in holding onto him,” Mr. Zambelis said. “At the same time, there are a lot of mistakes and a lot of people get brought in and roped into these plots, and it turns out they had nothing to do with them.”

I think it’s foolish to come to any firm conclusion about a case like this from news reports—the murk is just too thick. Most of us will either go with our gut reaction to the superficial information available to us or take the lead of an expert we find credible (which, I have to admit, sometimes amounts to pretty much the same thing). Zambelis strikes me as credible—he at least seems to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, which is a major asset in my book. The extreme measures being taken against Hashmi while he’s awaiting trial are a separate issue. In that department, Michael Ratner (president of the Center for Constitutional Rights) carries some weight—in the Chronicle article, he describes Hashmi’s treatment as “incredible” and “outrageous.”

Johnson nonetheless finds “no items in the Chronicle article, the few other publications on the case, or any public statements by the signatories point to even one specific violation of Hashmi’s civil liberties.” Given how tightly held the details of the case are, I’m not sure what could be produced that he would find convincing. Johnson grants that “it’s possible to believe that Hashmi has suffered improperly,” and if so he’s suffered far more from it than the lacrosse players did and has much less recourse. Maybe all of this adds up to a coherent, principled stand, but I can’t make it out.

As I wrote this post, I was curious whether there have been any new developments in the case. Apparently not, but I did come up with a couple of heated opinion pieces about the case from Nat Hentoff. Near the end of his DIW post, Johnson makes a sarcastic reference to the “born-again civil libertarians” from Duke who signed Hashmi’s petition. Johnson seems to be a bit of a fair-weather civil libertarian, himself. Hentoff, on the other hand, seems to be the genuine article. It’s instructive to see how he works through some of the issues surrounding Rashid Khalidi, too.

CODA

The DIW post that went up right after I wrote this post has a variation on a plea bargain is a plea bargain is a plea bargain. “Crime & Punishment” is about Michael Burch, charged with the Feb. 2007 rape of a Duke student and recently charged with another rape allegedly committed while he’s been out on bail. An ugly situation, and it seems likely that some of the authorities handling the case didn’t do their jobs very well—the judge who set Burch’s bail at $50K, for instance.

But, as Johnson said in response to my previous post, “DIW is a blog about the lacrosse case and its effects,” a place to “focus on the lacrosse case angle.” He does that to the max in response to Burch’s rearrest. In his post, he lists the differences between the way justice officials and Duke faculty and administration reacted to the allegations against Burch and the way they reacted to the allegations against the lacrosse team. That involves rehashing the horrific record of Duke and Durham in some detail, with special attention to the indictments against the faculty. Johnson doesn’t theorize about why the reactions were different, except by implication. The difference that’s obviously significant is that in the Burch incident the accuser is white and the accused is black. No other differences—between the circumstances or the charges or the evidence or whatever—are treated as significant when considering the differences in the way the cases were handled. So, although DIW is all about how Duke and Durham did most everything wrong after the lacrosse incident, they still should have done exactly the same thing in response to this other incident. Divergences aren’t evidence of better (or worse) judgment or of different circumstances, they’re evidence of double standards. Because a rape allegation is a rape allegation is a rape allegation. Or maybe it’s only interracial rape allegations that are like that.

There are, I’m sure, valid and illuminating comparisons between the two rape allegations and their aftermath. Quite likely they highlight, among other things, how badly the lacrosse incident was handled. The grim reappearance of Burch in the news could be a fine chance for reflection on a lacrosse-case blog, but DIW is too mired in mindless but smug tribalism to pull anything of value from it. Another recent entry—“Amazing”—is a showpiece of rampant tribalism. It turns out that Bob Steel, chairman of Duke’s board of trustees, invested in the movie being made from Tim Tyson’s book Blood Done Sign My Name. I think there are quite reasonable criticisms of both men for their behavior during the lacrosse scandal—I’ve expressed my own reservations about some of the things Tyson has said. But true to his word, Johnson looks at the investment through the pinhole of lacrosse-case tunnel vision. The bulk of his entry is parallel instances of one of his classic rhetorical formulas, good for prosecuting, crusading, witch hunting, and other special demagogic occasions—“the same Bob Steel who…” and “the same Tim Tyson who…,” each followed by the sins of the man enumerated. The transaction, on DIW, has nothing to do with a book or the incident it’s based on or a movie-in-progress, and the two men involved are nothing more than the ugly characters revealed by the scandal. It’s a great way to nurse a grudge.

If you google obama ayers khalidi, what comes up is mostly the ranting of people already certain about who to be more afraid of. It was in the interest of the Republican side to make the most of the two professors’ radicalism and their ties to Obama, and anyway, radical professors are a favorite specter of the Right. The academic world’s reflex to circle the wagons and shout “McCarthyism” is represented by the fulsome petition at supportbillayers.org, and the list of over 4000 names under it. But not all Obama supporters were sympathetic to Ayers and Khalidi, and the first line of defense from his camp was to downplay the connection.

I noticed one person conspicuously trying to play on both sides of the fence, to make the most of the radicalism but downplay the connection—KC Johnson. Inside Higher Ed tags him as someone who’s “frequently criticized academe for a lack of political diversity” when he’s dragged in for balance in an otherwise soft-headed article “In Defense of Ayers”. In fact he approached the controversy about Obama’s radical pals the same way he’s approached the Duke lacrosse case, not as a critic but as a crusader rooting out the extremists of the academic Left. As I’ve pointed out ad nauseum about his lacrosse-case stuff, his crusading mentality reduces people and issues to cartoonish black-and-white, and his reasoning, evidence, and rhetoric are all compromised. His defense of Obama shows how in the grip of it he is, because it’s not really a defense, it’s an attempt to capitalize on the controversy in order to promote the academic culture war as a Democratic party agenda.

Inside Higher Ed picked up Johnson’s take on the controversy from a post on Cliopatria, a group blog on the History News Network. I imagine that one reason the blog exists is to give academic historians a place to editorialize, but it’s a shame to see it used as a soapbox for misrepresentation and simple-minded polemics—my opinion hasn’t changed in the months since my testy exchange with Ralph Luker, the chief blogger over there. A premise of the site is that “history is complicated,” and behind this controversy are the complicated histories of several complicated people. Ayers went from being a fugitive militant radical to being a key player in Chicago school reform, apparently acceptable in that context to establishment figures from both parties. Khalidi was attractive to the International Republican Institute (chaired by John McCain) in the mid-90s because of his “coolness to the PLO” but a decade or so earlier was apparently, despite his denials, speaking for the PLO (I like this post by Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief for the Jewish news organization JTA, grappling with the ambiguity after being forced to back down from defending Khalidi against the PLO-spokesman charge). Johnson wants the two as poster boys for academic extremism—not exceptional but typical—so it served his purpose to leave intact the simplistic and superficial impressions that were already in circulation and contribute a little spin of his own to the caricature of Khalidi. All in all it does nothing for Obama but it’s a nice little gift to the Republican operative Johnson quotes who wants Obama to “own his friendships with individuals that are in some cases anti-American, anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist.”

A couple of days after it went up on Cliopatria, Johnson posted a modified version of the commentary on his lacrosse-case blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), and the rhetoric and agenda-driven reasoning are ramped up somewhat in the process. The same thing happens with another KC Johnson polemic that initially went up on Cliopatria, this one about a couple of Brooklyn College professors who’ve been petitioning on behalf of Syed Fahad Hashmi, a former student detained on terrorism charges. In that one, the crusading logic is even more obviously in the drivers seat, especially in the rewrite, which panders to DIW loyalists with cheap rhetoric that Johnson couldn’t get away with on Cliopatria (I hope). The funniest part is a line about statements made by Hashmi’s supporters that “read as if cribbed from a defense brief.” Has anyone covering a legal controversy ever written more “analysis” that sounds like a defense brief than Johnson?

[For more on the Hashmi case, read the next post. There’s a response to this paragraph from KC Johnson in the comments.]

The tribalism runs deep in DIW. Wherever you look over there, including at the legal teams and their arguments, one side seems to have cornered the market on whatever’s honest, decent, sensible, and worthwhile. Mike Nifong’s efforts were pathetic and dishonest enough that an unbalanced impression of the criminal investigation is probably unavoidable. But Johnson’s treatment of the ongoing lawsuits has the same cheerleading slant. The way he describes “The Duke Motion to Dismiss”, it’s cynical legal maneuvering, or else “(scarcely credible) p.r. spin” straight out of Creative Writing 101. The “powerful response” from the plaintiff’s attorney, on the other hand, is beyond reproach or even criticism—no legal maneuvering there. It may be that Duke’s position is so weak that it can’t do anything but grasp at straws. But it’s hard to believe that such a lopsided characterization is the result of serious analysis. I haven’t tried to size up the lawsuits, but on one point I happened to look up, both sets of plaintiffs offer pure spin.

Though it’s toned down, Johnson brings the same attitude to his support for Obama. During the primaries a major focus of his Cliopatria posts was the disingenuous and muddle-headed nature of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Among the variations on the theme, “Clinton’s Rhetoric and Reality” has her making absurd claims of sexism in her concession speech, “Clinton’s Constitutional Conundrum” has her pandering to Guam and Puerto Rico, and “The Clinton Dozen” details the “latest in [her] campaign’s effort to play the race card.” And then there’s the other Clinton, who, in “Bill Channels Wilentz,” “[advances the] bizarre thesis that Obama, not the Clintons, played the race card in the nominating process.” I expect that a lot of the criticism is fairly well founded, and it often comes with interesting historical tie-ins. But like the DIW account of the lacrosse lawsuits, the overall impression is that only one side is playing politics.

Johnson is very good at framing a controversy or dispute so that he can efficiently sort the good/right/true from the bad/wrong/false and play them off against each other, or just dwell on the bad, which is more typical. Things can get ugly if the frames overlap, though. A bad joke that a mutual reader tried to post to DIW shows how ugly: “just to rib [Johnson], I wrote ‘Can’t we all get along?’ and suggested that perhaps he and Crystal [Mangum (the accuser in the lacrosse case)] should get together to co-host a rally for Obama.” Plenty of crude humor makes it through Johnson’s “lightest of touch” comment moderation, but this time, somehow, it didn’t.

In his analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks,” Johnson tries to play in both the culture-war and campaign frames and finesse the clash. It seems to have been an opportunity that was too good to pass up. His argument, in a nutshell, is that Ayers and Khalidi are so unexceptional and integrated in the “groupthink academic environment” that Obama couldn’t be expected to avoid them. In other words, the depth of the problem turns out, somehow, to be his candidate’s excuse. Oh, and by the way, the Democratic party better get with the program, because it was their “poor record in promoting diversity of thought and pedagogical approach on the nation’s college campuses” that made Obama vulnerable in the first place. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

On DIW it’s “The Lacrosse Case & the Khalidi/Ayers Controversy.” Here’s Johnson letting Obama off the hook—text removed from the Cliopatria post is overstruck, text added for DIW is bracketed.

For the GOP attack to work, Ayers and Khalidi have to be viewed as exceptional figures[—wholly unlike nearly all other professors]. Obama’s judgment can hardly be questioned if his “buddies” were not marginal characters but instead people who are like [resemble] lots of other academics, especially since Obama lived in an academic neighborhood (Hyde Park) and spent several years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the basic [pedagogical and academic] approaches of Ayers and Khalidi fit well within the academic mainstream. Ayers is, after all, a prestigious professor of education (hardly a field known for its intellectual diversity, of course [as I have explored elsewhere]). Khalidi was of such standing that Columbia hired him away from the U of C, and named him to chair its Middle East Studies Department. From that perch, [he presided over a wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum, even as] he informed readers of New York that students of Arab descent—and only such students—knew the “truth” about Middle Eastern affairs.

I lived in Hyde Park for six years, and I can’t tell you how many of my friends turned out to be unrepentant terrorists. Or, well, maybe I could… but I don’t have any political ambitions, so never mind. The DIW commentariat was no more more impressed than I am by Johnson’s clumsy sleight-of-hand, which insults not only the reader’s intelligence but the candidate’s as well. It would be understandable if it took a while before Obama realized that the Education professor putting together that big grant was once wanted for planting bombs in federal buildings—even in academia, believe it or not, that’s a singular bio. But Khalidi’s involvement with the Palestinian cause was ongoing and obvious, and over time it was the basis for conversations that included, by Obama’s account, “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

My impression is that Johnson’s fans mostly brushed the lame excuse aside. Rantburg sums up the real message of the post:

Prof. Johnson is certainly correct about the American academy: once you venture away from the hard sciences, you encounter a world in which people like William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, Ward Churchill and others like them are not just ordinary and common-place, but both accepted and powerful.

David Thompson thumps the same drum but at least has a little more imagination in conjuring up outrageous academic villains—after all, his banner promises comic books, and what could be more entertaining than vanquishing “far left fantasists” intent on “‘groom[ing]’ youngsters with the ‘correct’ political outlook”? (it’s a lot more fun than the actual research, that’s for sure).

The bone Johnson throws to DIW readers in the passage I quoted is the comment about Columbia’s “wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum.” Elsewhere, the revised version is sprinkled with references to Duke’s all-purpose band of extremist stick figures, the so-called “Group of 88.” Khalidi is, in Johnson’s account, not only overvalued and hostile to America’s true friend in the Middle East but also ready to pass dismissive and self-serving judgment on the students he’s supposed to be teaching. If that sounds a lot like the “Group” profile, well, lo and behold, a few paragraphs later Johnson reads his tea leaves and declares that “[i]f Khalidi or Ayres were employed at Duke, doubtless they would have joined the Group of 88.”

Johnson doesn’t give a link to that New York magazine article, but when I tracked it down I found that Khalidi’s comments are not nearly so clear-cut. True to form, Johnson whittled them down to just the bullshit that suits his agenda.

“Most kids who come to Columbia come from environments where almost everything they’ve ever thought was shared by everybody around them,” [Khalidi] says. “And this is not true, incidentally, of Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true. Whereas kids from, I don’t know, Teaneck. Or Scarsdale. Or Levittown. Or Long Island City. Many of them have never been exposed to a dissonant idea, a different idea, as far as the Middle East is concerned. And so you have a situation where it’s going to be problematic.”

Whatever this is, it’s absolutely not a blanket claim that one group owns the “truth” and the other doesn’t. The essence of it is that one has experienced more dissonance than the other, which doesn’t seem like such a controversial claim. Are the Jewish-American kids who go to Columbia more likely than the Arab-Americans to come from a relatively homogeneous community in which they’re well integrated? I believe they are. And are the students of Arab extraction more likely than the Jewish ones to encounter views on the Middle East that clash with their own views? Yes—public and political opinion in the US is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Now just because Khalidi’s basic claim is plausible doesn’t mean it’s right, and even if it is right the differences between the groups might not be as stark or as significant, in practice, as Khalidi seems to think—that’s where my skepticism really kicks in. But there are all sorts of ways to object to this passage without misrepresenting it.

The article is about the controversy over the classroom behavior of professors in Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). It’s well worth reading—the reporter, Jennifer Senior, gives a good account of both sides. Khalidi is quoted extensively. He’s “passionately invested in the future of Mideast studies,” and therefore on the defensive, since he sees the charges against his department as a “huge club” that’s being used to attack the field as a whole. But he doesn’t dismiss the charges, which date from when he was still in Hyde Park palling around with Obama.

“You know,” he concludes, “it could be the case that there are students who have serious grievances and it’s the case that threats to our academic freedom have developed over the last two years. This is a situation where you have to assume it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Johnson’s analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks” was a daredevil attempt to walk and chew gum at the same time. He failed miserably—not a surprise, since his heart wasn’t really in it in the first place. His talents run in the opposite direction, towards mind-numbing moralistic either/ors, and in that department the differences between him and Sarah Palin are mostly a matter of vocabulary and accent.