Jonathan Schanzer and Madeleine Morgenstern: Rashid Khalidi Headlines Taxpayer-funded Palestinian Fest - 'The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), a U.S. taxpayer-funded organization noted for the virulent anti-Israeli attitudes of its academic members, held a conference in October at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Most of the conference was apolitical, but two lectures in particular raise (again) the question of whether PARC should be the recipient of taxpayer monies. Indeed, this is not the first time the public has been warned about PARC's questionable scholar-activism... it was keynote speaker Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University's Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, who turned the conference's tone on its head. Khalidi, who served as a spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) when he lived in Lebanon in the late 1970s...lived up to his reputation by blasting Israel and its supporters in vitriolic and paranoid terms. He accused a mysterious "movement" of attempting to de-legitimize scholarly work on "Palestine."...'