From 1999 to December 11, 2002, Barak Obama worked as the director of the Woods Fund Board. He granted funding to an Arab group that mourns the creation of Israel and thinks of it as a "catastrophe." The founder of this Arab group is Rashid Khalidi, professor from Columbia University. He is an extremely harsh critic of Israel and his statements are supportive of Palestinian terror. There he has worked on behalf of the PLO while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labeled by the State Department as a terror group. It has been said that Rashid Khalidi is a friend of Obama.
Obama had taught at the U. of Chicago. He met Khalidi through his children. Their children went to the same lab school. Obama admits that Khalidi disagrees with a lot of Israel's policy. The two men worked together at the university. That's when Khalidi lectured there until 2003 while Obama taught law there from 1993 until his election to the Senate in 2004. They lived in a nearby residential area and the two families ate together many times. The Obamas were said to even have babysat the Khalidi children, so it sounds to me that they were fairly good friends.
Then in 2000 Khalidi had a successful fundraiser for Obama when he had a failure to get a seat in the US House of Representatives.
Obama's board was supposed to be a group that helped the disadvantaged. They managed to get a $40,000 grant for the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN. Khalidi's wife, Mona, was the president. They were awarded a second grant for $35,000 in 2002.
Another person on the board just happened to be the famed Weatherman William C. Ayers. The Weathermen were an American terrorist group who sought to overthrow the US government and were responsible for bombing the US Capitol in 1972. Ayers, who is still on the board, of course donated money to Obama's senatorial campaign. He is also a professor at the U. of Illinois at Chicago.
The headquarters of Obama's late employer is in the heart of Chicago's Palestinian immigrant community.
Obama is aware that his friendship with Khalidi has caused concern among American Jews. His defense is that so he knows him and has had a conversation with him who has very different views than his other friends . This should not make us think Obama is not sufficiently pro-Israel. He claims he is not guilty by association.
I say that Obama has been collecting many friends like Khalidi and that there is more to his association as expressed above than he has disclosed. And yes, I am worried about how much of his friend's philosophy has rubbed off with such an association.
Reference: http://www.americanthinker.com
Middle East studies in the News by Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily http://www.campus-watch.org.
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Nadine - why would you think that in this very complicated world, an intelligent, sentient being like Obama would not have friends who hold different opinions on things than he does? It's an impossibility. Further, it's not healthy, because what happens, what has happened, is that pro-Israel Jewish Americans ONLY want to hear things that support old, preconceived notions of how the system in the Middle East, and in Israel in particular, should work in the future.
Rashid Khalidi is a voice that supports "his" people. To my mind, there is nothing wrong with that. Just as there are Israelis and Jewish Americans who voice their opinions, Khalidi voices his on behalf of his constituency.
To my mind, Khalidi is probably exactly the kind of leader that the Palestinians need: not one who is going to continue, as Fatah, Arafat keeping the vast majority of the Palestinian people in a state of being pawns in a perpetual game of "who can outlast the Jews/Israelis?"
As he said in his speech at Portland State, it's not the Israelis or the US that came in and said "you cannot have rule of law". It was the failure of the Palestinians themselves that, in combination with an ideologue named George Bush who insisted on "free democratic elections" in the PA in 2006, which directly caused the rise of Hamas as both a political and terrorist power.
There has to be some new discussion in the middle east, abour Israel and what exactly are the most reasonable, responsible and practical solutions to that region's ills. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result.
Obama may not be in lock step with the Israeli right, but I believe that he is in tune with popular Israeli opinion that wants the killing and hate to stop and is the only one on the immediate horizon who can take a fresh view and make a new start to discussions that have been allowed, for too long, to languish, while Israelis get killed by rockets and terrorists and Palestinians continue to grow haters and live in squalor.
Thanks for your post.
Be well.
Randy Shiner
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