For pro-Israel voters, Obama's 2 middle names
should be the least of their concerns
By Jonathan Mark
Pro-Hamas advisor may be gone, but senator has more
radical backers press is ignoring
Recent weeks have seen a considerable amount of
coverage focusing on whether Sen. Barack Obama has
too many friends with an anti-American bias, notably his
longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama has
finally renounced, and William Ayers, a Chicago
professor who was a 1960s radical with the Weathermen
terrorist group, a friend****p Obama dismissed as casual.
But if Wright and Ayers have been thoroughly explored
in primary debates and interviews, Obama's other
relation****ps with radicals have been relatively
unexplored.
For example, the Los Angeles Times devoted a lengthy
front-page story (April 10) by Peter Wallsten headlined,
"Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama.
They consider him receptive despite his clear sup****t
of Israel." The story was not picked up by any other
American paper. It is rather unusual for a major daily to
think a story worthy of front-page coverage and no other
paper to share that *****sment.
The story focused on Obama's time as an Illinois state
legislator, just five years ago, when he was friends, if not
allied, with Ra****d Khalidi, the vocal anti-Zionist
professor at Columbia University who at the time was
living in Obama's Chicago district; Edward Said, the late
anti-Zionist professor and member of the Palestinian
Authority legislature; and Ali Abunimah, a resident of
Obama's district and editor of the Electronic Intifada
online journal.
At a farewell party for Khalidi, Obama is quoted as
saying that his conversations with Khalidi had been
"consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and
my own biases."
Wallsten writes, the Obama-Khalidi relation****p "have
left some Palestinian American leaders believing that
Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is
willing to say."
They base that belief on his presence at "events
where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy
was freely expressed," not unlike those who wonder
about Obama's truest self after his relation****p with
Wright and his anger.
"I am confident that Barack Obama is more
sympathetic to the position of ending the occupation than
either of the other candidates," said Hussein Ibish, a
senior fellow for the American Task Force on Palestine,
to Wallsten.
The foreign minister of Hamas has recently endorsed
Obama for president, another story that has sunk like a
stone, barely re****ted other than by Fox and a popular
right-wing website, even though Sen. John McCain
brought it up on the campaign trail.
In 1998, re****ts Wallsten, Obama attended a speech by
Edward Said in which Said called for a nonviolent
campaign "against settlements, against Israeli apartheid."
Later, Obama and his wife were photographed at dinner
with Said. "If only Obama could burn this picture," writes
Al Ahram, but the Cairo paper printed the picture anyway.
Abraham Foxman, national director for the
Anti-Defamation League, told the Los Angeles Times, "In
the context of [Obama] spending 20 years in a church"
where anti-Israel rhetoric was repeated, "that's what
makes his presence at an Arab-American event with a
Said a greater concern."
Wallsten re****ts that Abunimah of Electronic Intifada
said he heard Obama call for an "even-handed
approach" toward Israel. In 2004, when Obama was
running for the Senate, Abunimah quoted Obama as
saying that he was sorry he wasn't talking more about
the Palestinian cause, but that his primary campaign
had constrained what he could say. (Obama told
Jewish leaders in Cleveland recently that a pro-Israel
position is not necessarily a pro-Likud one.)
And yet Wallsten's story of Obama's
Palestinian-American sup****t, while burning up the
blogosphere from the Huffington Post to The Nation to
Zionist sites, received almost no coverage beyond that.
It was reprinted on a Fox TV Web site in Seattle and
was mentioned in the Jordan Times.
Obama has not been asked about it in the debates,
and in meetings with Jewish communities in Cleveland
and Philadelphia, where he has been asked repeatedly
about Wright's relation****p with Louis Farrakhan but
not about his own relation****p with Electronic Intifada.
=95=95 All of the above reinforces my opinion that Barak
Hussein Muhammad Obama is a plant of the Muslim
Brotherhood. It should be known that HAMAS, CAIR,
al Qa'eda, Hizb ut-Tahrir, etc are all subsidiaries of
the Muslim Brotherhood.
* Jonathan Mark is Associate Editor
of the New York Jewish Week.
=A9 2008, NY Jewish Week
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