---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kendall David Corbett <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Subject: Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayres and Barack Obama (From the Washington
Post)
To: [log in to unmask]


 *John McCain's 'Trick or Treat'?*

* *

*"I don't care much about an old, washed-up unrepentant terrorist, and his
wife who was on an FBI top 10 wanted list. But we should know about their
relationship, including apparently information that is held by the Los
Angeles Times concerning an event that [William] Ayers attended with a PLO
spokesman."*
--John McCain, Interview with Radio Mambi, October 29, 2008

On the eve of Halloween, the McCain campaign has come up with a new villain
to scare away votes from Barack Obama. He is Rashid
Khalidi<http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/mei/khalidi.shtml>,
professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and an Obama associate
from his days at the University of Chicago. Regarded as a mainstream scholar
by many American Middle East experts, Khalidi has been denounced as an
"extremist" by some Jewish groups because of his pro-Palestinian views and
sharp criticism of Israel. The Republican candidate is now tying to tie
Khalidi to former Weather Underground leader William Ayers -- and suggesting
for good measure that the mainstream media (in the form of the Los Angeles
Times) is trying to suppress the connection.

Let's try to sort it all out.

*The Facts*

The author of several books on the Middle East, Rashid Khalidi has long been
a target of self-appointed "campus watchdog" groups who have dubbed
him the "professor
of hate"<http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2003/07/23&ID=Ar00103>because
he has spoken sympathetically about resistance to the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank. For their part, Khalidi and other academics
have complained about a McCarthyist "witch hunt" aimed at stifling free
debate on campuses. For more background on this controversy, see an article
I wrote for The Washington Post
<http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/942>four years ago, including
interviews with Khalidi and his critics.

The McCain campaign has depicted Khalidi as a former "spokesman" for the
Palestine Liberation Organization. Questioned about this claim, McCain
spokesman Brian Rogers referred me to an April 10, 2008 story
<http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-obamamideast10apr10,0,1780231,full.story>from
the Los Angeles Times that reported that Khalidi "often spoke to reporters"
on behalf of the PLO in the early 1970s while teaching at a university in
Beirut. Khalidi has denied ever being a spokesman for the PLO, but this may
be a question of semantics, revolving around whether he was a formal or
informal spokesman.

The same Los Angeles Times story described a farewell party for Khalidi in
Chicago in 2003 prior to his departure for New York that was attended by
Obama. As described by the Times, the event included the recitation of a
poem by a young Palestinian American accusing the Israeli government of
terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians. Obama himself adopted a
different tone in his comments, calling for Israelis and Palestinians to
find common ground.

McCain has accused the Times of suppressing a videotape of the event that it
obtained from a confidential source. The Times says that it is keeping a
promise to the source not to air the videotape.

In two radio interviews on Wednesday, McCain claimed that the videotape
would show that William Ayers also attended the party for Khalidi. According
to the McCain campaign, he based this claim on a February 4, 2005 article
<http://www.nysun.com/new-york/mideast-parley-takes-ugly-turn-at-columbia-u/8725/>in
The New York Sun written by Sol Stern, a long-time Khalidi critic. But the
Stern article does not say that Ayers was present at the party. Instead, it
reports that Ayers contributed to a testimonial book that was presented to
Khalidi at his farewell dinner. Obama and Chicago mayor Richard Daley also
contributed testimonials for Khalidi.

"I never tried to say that Ayers was there," said Stern. "I didn't think it
was a big deal at the time."

Stern told me that he was sent photocopies of a few pages from the
testimonial book at the time that he was writing opinion pieces criticizing
Columbia University for hiring Khalidi. He said he no longer has the
photocopies.

The L.A. Times is being coy about what the tape actually shows, apparently
out of deference to promises made to its original source. "We reported in
April on everything that we saw on the tape that we considered newsworthy,"
the paper's Washington bureau chief, Doyle McManus, told me. "Our April
story did not report that Ayers was at the event."

It turns out that McCain is treading on tricky ground when he cites the
Khalidi case as an example of Obama consorting with terrorist sympathizers.
The Obama campaign was quick to point out that an organization co-founded by
Khalidi has received large sums of grant money from the International
Republican Institute<http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/IRIForm9901998.pdf>,
chaired by McCain since 1993. One such grant was for $448,873 in 1998 to
assist the Center for Palestine Research and Studies in its work in the West
Bank.

*The Pinocchio Test*

This is a case of guilt by association gone haywire. Both President Bush and
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have had extensive
dealings<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051020.html>with
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is much more
closely
identified with the PLO than Rashidi ever was. Verdict: the McCain camp has
wildly exaggerated the significance of the Obama-Ayers-Khalidi triangle.

[image:
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/factchecker/pinocchio.gif][image:
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/factchecker/pinocchio.gif]

(About our rating
scale)<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/about_the_fact_checker.html#pinocchio>
.

  --

Kendall

An unreasonable man (but my wife says that's redundant!)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.

-George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950

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