Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2008-11-12 Rashid Khalidi


 * Note: Please limit posts to this page to brief statements about the nature of the dispute until a volunteer adopts the case. Keep ongoing discussions about the topic to the appropriate talk page(s), but feel free to provide links to the talk page(s) where discussion has happened (and may be ongoing) for the convenience of the informal mediator and other parties. This will help keep discussion from fragmenting out across more pages and make it easier for a volunteer to review the case. Thanks!

Who are the involved parties?
No one but me seems to be involved at the moment. The others appear (I surmise this form the fact that they are still editing other pages) to have come to this page (a bio of an academic,) when his name became an issue in the Presidential campaign, and to have now lost interest. They were: Alex Bakharev, Khoikhoi, Glen Twenty, Wikidemon, and Ron Cram. Avraham became involved by locking the page when edit wars escalated.

What's going on?
For many years at least from the time Khalidi moved from Chicago to Columbia in ~2003, there have been accusations that he once worked for the PLO as a young man in the 1970's & early 1980's, while pursuing a degree and then teaching in Lebanon. The only piece of evidence that I knew for this accusation until recently was a 1978 New York Times article by Thomad Friedman citing Rashid as a PLO "spokesman." Becase this is so thin, it was not taken very seriously. Certainly I did not.

In the heat of the recent campaign people began to dig and produced a remarkable series of articles from the period verifying that Rashid was giving interviews at PLO headquarters to reputable reporters who cited him as a PLO official. they are collected here on Martin Kramer's blog. http://sandbox.blog-city.com/khalidi_of_the_plo.htm Kramer makes no pretense to being non-partisan. But the cumulative evidence compiled is very impressive. Khalidi denied all of this to a reporter in 2004. He has not, however, done so in a printed article with a by-line or, to my knowledge, since 2004. I know him rather well and he is, perhaps, as careful with words, with, as it were, skirting truths and implying what he actually does not directly say as any man I know. I find that fact that he does not deny in print or in person that he was a PLO official but, rather, allows others to deny it on his behalf very telling. In person, he deflects the question. He is a witty man.

I posted the new information. It was taken down by the individuals listed above. I appparantly violated a rule with a third post. Since it contained new sources (i.e., not new citations of old knowledge, but entirely new sources that had surfaced very rapidly at the end of the campaign) it was not a revert and I did not regard it as a third post. Eikidemon blocked me form editiong and Avraham froze the page. We discussed and reachesd a concensus. I posted the information again. It was taken down. Someone put it back up. It was taken down. Avraham again froze the page. A discussion began. But with the campaign over, no one is now discussing and I don't see how to reach a concensus without discussion.

What would you like to change about that?
I would like to have the page unfrozen. I would put the information back up as per the earlier concensus.Historicist (talk) 16:32, 12 November 2008 (UTC)historicist

Mediator notes
The edit protection on the article has an expiry (18th November), and if the problems are indeed caused by people with only a short-term interest in the article, who have now departed, it seems likely to me that the problem will have vanished of its own accord by the time the protection expires.

Even if we can get anybody round a table to talk, we aren't going to reach an agreement in a timespan that will get the protection lifted early.

You say that the other editors have now departed, but I note edits from some as recently as yesterday. What makes you think they have gone?

Mayalld (talk) 21:27, 12 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I made the assumption because they are posting regularly, but have not come back to this page. I did not understand that the edit protection on the page would expire. I thought that a concensus was required to unprotect the page. Historicist (talk) 01:00, 13 November 2008 (UTC)Historicist