Among the haters in Obama's circle was Rashid Khalidi, a former spokesman for Yasser Arafat and now, like communist and terrorist bomber Wiliam (Bill) Ayers, comfortably ensconsced on a university faculty where their prior activities don't raise an eyebrow. The Obamas and the Khalidis often had dinners together in Chicago and in 2003 Obama toasted Khalidi as he left to take over the official anti-Israel position at Columbia heading up Middle East Studies. With Ayers, it was the New York Times pooh-poohing any significance of the Ayers relationship to Obama, although the two worked together for seven years funding programs to indoctrinate Chicago school children in anti-American sentiments, teaching them that America was bad and they should join the needed social revolution. Now the Washington Post takes its turn in belittling the Khalidi-Obama relationship, denying that Khalidi was ever very close to Palestinian terrorists.
John Hinderaker of Power Line exposes that lie:
Salah Khalaf, better known as Abu Iyad, masterminded the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. By his own account in his memoirs, he personally selected the terrorists who carried out the attack and delivered weapons to them. So the fact that he was a leading terrorist was anything but a secret. Nevertheless, when Khalaf was murdered in 1991, Obama's close friend Rashid Khalidi praised him and said that he would be "sorely missed." He was, no doubt, missed by those who approve of terrorist mass murders. It is fair to say that Khalidi, a representative of the PLO, was among that number.It was shortly after this that Obama and Khalidi became friends and, as Obama has said, Khalidi "offered constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases." Isn't this a bit odd, to say the least? A person of normal sensibility would say that someone who praises the founder of Black September and the perpetrator of the Munich horror suffers from "blind spots and biases." (I, actually, wouldn't put it that politely.) So what was it, exactly, that Obama learned from Khalidi? Why did he, by his own account, find Khalidi to be not only a congenial friend but a mentor of sorts?
In short, what sort of a person would consider a professor who speaks for Yaser Arafat's PLO and mourns the death of a proud terrorist, the perpetrator of one of the 20th century's vilest acts, to be not just a profound thinker but a moral compass? That is to say: what sort of a person is Barack Obama?
Update: The Washington Post has decided in its Obama defense to deny that Khalidi was in fact associated with Arafat and the terrorist PLO during his time in Lebanon. The Post didn't do its homework. Martin Kramer did his.
