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Khalidi is Maximum Leader Obama's main man when it comes to 'advising' on all things Israeli.

http://hnn.us/articles/exposing-rash...eli-propaganda

A myth unravels

From news article:
Last fall, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, offered his audiences an account of how Leon Uris came to write the book. In a speech at Brooklyn Law School, Khalidi made this claim:
This carefully crafted propaganda was the work of seasoned professionals. People like someone you probably never heard of, a man named Edward Gottlieb, for example. He’s one of the founders of the modern public relations industry. There are books about him as a great advertiser.
In order to sell the great Israeli state to the American public many, many decades ago, Gottlieb commissioned a successful, young novelist. A man who was a committed Zionist, a fellow with the name of Leon Uris. He funded him and sent him off to Israel to write a book. This book was Exodus: A Novel of Israel. Gottlieb’s gambit succeeded brilliantly. Exodus sold as many copies as Gone With the Wind, which up to that point was the greatest best-seller in U.S. history. Exodus was as good a melodrama and sold just as many copies.
Khalidi made a similar assertion in another speech a few weeks later, this time at the Palestine Center in Washington:
Now, I think it’s worth noting that this book was not the unaided fruit of the loins as it were, the intellectual loins of Leon Uris. He wrote it, of course, but the book was commissioned by a renowned public relations professional, a man who was in fact considered by many to be the founder of public relations in the United States, a fellow by the name of Edward Gottlieb, who desired to improve Israel’s image, and who chose Uris to write the novel after his successful first novel on World War II, and who secured the funding which paid for Uris’s research and trip to Israel. Given that many of the basic ideas about Palestine and Israel held by generations of Americans find their origin either in this trite novel or the equally clichéd movie, Gottlieb’s inspiration to send Leon Uris to Israel may have constituted one of the greatest advertising triumphs of the twentieth century. The man deserves his place in the public relations pantheon.
...Khalidi warned his Brooklyn audience that Gottlieb would be “someone you probably never heard of.” Quite right: I regard myself as reasonably informed about the history of American Zionism, and I had never heard of Edward Gottlieb. Khalidi claimed there were “books about him as a great advertiser,” so I did a search, but I couldn’t find one. When Gottlieb died in 1998, at the age of 88, no major newspaper ran an obituary. That seemed to me a rather scant trail for “the father of the American iteration of Zionism” and “the founder of public relations in the United States.”

One reason for the thin record, I discovered, is that Edward Gottlieb wasn’t the founder or even one of the founders of American public relations. He had been a journalist in the 1930s, and in 1940 joined the long-established public relations firm of a true founder, Carl Byoir. After Pearl Harbor, Gottlieb did radio and informational work for the war effort in the European theater of operations. In 1948 he opened his own shop, Edward Gottlieb and Associates, which grew into a respected mid-size firm, focused primarily on products. Most notably, Gottlieb popularized French champagne and cognac in the United States. When he sold his company in 1976 to a bigger competitor, it ranked sixteenth in size among PR firms in America. He seems to have been well-regarded, but he was not dominant in the business. If the Encyclopedia of Public Relations constitutes “the public relations pantheon,” then Gottlieb is noticeable only by his absence.


Gottlieb is likewise completely absent from works on American Zionism—there isn’t a single reference. Moreover, his name doesn’t appear in the two scholarly studies of Leon Uris: Matt Silver’s Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story and Ira Nadel’s Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller. I wrote to both scholars, asking them whether they had encountered the name of Edward Gottlieb in Uris’s personal papers, housed at the University of Texas and cited extensively in both studies. Silver wrote back that “I didn’t see anything about Edward Gottlieb” and Nadel answered that “I never came across G[ottlieb]‘s name.”


Both biographers are in agreement that the idea for a novel on Israel originated with Uris (encouraged by Dore Schary, a Jewishly-active Hollywood executive); that Uris’s agent Malcolm Stuart pushed him to realize his plan; that Uris successfully shopped the idea in Hollywood studios and New York publishing houses; and that his research trip to Israel in 1956 was financed by advances on the film rights and book from MGM and Random House. (United Artists and Doubleday subsequently acquired the rights.) The contracts and correspondence are preserved in Uris’s papers. And the Gottlieb “commission”? Silver wrote me that “my feeling is that this reference could be a complete canard.” Nadel wrote me that “the story is a complete fabrication.”


Khalidi always presents himself as a historian, so I figured he wouldn’t have concocted the Gottlieb story out of whole cloth. He must have had a source. As it happens, the Gottlieb claim figures in three books that are classics in the Israel-bashing canon. In Deliberate Deceptions (1995), Paul Findley wrote that Exodus “was actually commissioned by the New York public relations firm of Edward Gottlieb.” In Fifty Years of Israel (1998), Donald Neff wrote that Gottlieb “hit upon the idea of hiring a writer to go to Israel and write an heroic novel about the new country. The writer was Leon Uris.” And in Perceptions of Palestine (1999), Kathleen Christison wrote that Gottlieb “selected Uris, and sent him to Israel” in an “astute public-relations scheme