Here’s another unprinted letter of mine, this one sent a few weeks ago to The Daily Princetonian (Princeton University’s student newspaper, popularly known as “The Prince”), a paper that prides itself on its fact-checking protocols, but has a lot of trouble admitting error when it gets things wrong. Well, sorry, but it’s gotten this issue badly wrong.

My objection here, I should stress, isn’t to any particular reporter or editor, but to the institution as a whole. I wasn’t trying to be snarky in the letter when I said that I appreciated The Prince’s coverage of recent anti-war activities on campus, and of my comments at the March 18 rally. I sincerely do, but in many ways, The Prince’s reporting ends up being less than the sum of its parts: somewhere between my conversation with reporter Daphne Lewis and The Prince’s printing her article, and between my challenging Kahane in 1988 and then-reporter Craig Palosky’s not reporting a word I said (or even mentioning the fact that a Q&A had taken place), The Prince seems systematically to have lost touch with reality. Having done so, whether by act or omission, it now finds the admission of error a difficult ordeal.

Well, it’s not my fault that the paper can’t manage to get the facts straight over four decades. It might help to stop bragging about its fact-checking protocols and actually deal with some, but maybe that’s just wild talk from an aging alum.

To the Editor:

I appreciate The Prince’s coverage of recent anti-war activities on campus, and of my comments at the March 18 rally (“Community members hold teach-in, vigil, and rally amid US-Iran War,” March 19). That said, I hope you’ll permit me two clarifications.

First, I should have made clearer that though I’m affiliated with Princeton Alumni for Palestine, I don’t officially represent or speak for the organization.

Second, there are some errors in the article’s reporting on what I said about Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane gave two separate lectures at Princeton, one on April 27, 1984, and the other on February 11, 1988. In the 1984 appearance (which I didn’t attend but was reported in The Prince), Kahane made the case for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, i.e., their expulsion en masse from what he called “Eretz Israel” (Greater Israel).

Meir Kahane (photo credit: Bernard Gottfryd, Wikipedia)

At his 1988 appearance (which I did attend, but whose Q&A was not reported in The Prince), Kahane admitted that his argument for ethnic cleansing entailed genocide. In the 1988 talk, as at the 1984 one, Kahane had argued that the “Arab” population of Israel ought to be expelled from Greater Israel. When I asked during the Q&A period what was to be done with the “Arabs” who refused the expulsion order, Kahane said that they were to be killed en masse. In other words, at the 1988 talk, Kahane explicitly advocated the genocide of the Palestinian population of Greater Israel, whatever the ultimate boundaries of that entity.

It’s worth noting that no Princeton University president ever condemned either claim of Kahane’s. William Bowen was President of Princeton in 1984. There is no mention of the Kahane lecture in Nancy Weiss Malkiel’s recent book on Bowen, Changing the Game; I recently wrote to Malkiel asking if there was a condemnation of the event by Bowen in the archives, and she said no. Harold Shapiro was President of Princeton in 1988. I know of no condemnation by Shapiro of Kahane’s advocacy of either ethnic cleansing or genocide. I asked Shapiro last year for confirmation of this fact, and never heard back. Obviously, neither individual was called before Congress to answer questions about either episode.

That said, I’m grateful that The Prince is rectifying its past misreporting, however inadvertently. It’s remarkable that The Prince not only failed to report on Kahane’s on-campus advocacy of genocide back in 1988, but failed to report on the Q&A to his talk altogether. Better late than never, I suppose—even if timely reporting might have been preferable.

Irfan Khawaja ’91
Princeton, New Jersey