The “Distraction” of Questioning Senator Obama’s Commitment to Israel

Jewish-Americans have long had a love affair with the Democratic Party. Aside from the “black vote”, Jews overwhelmingly are liberal and vote Democrat. Despite the fact that the Bush Administration has probably been the most pro-Israel American Administration in history, both Gore and Kerry received a sizeable majority of votes from the coveted “Jewish vote” in the last two elections. Why? Why do they continually vote against their group identity self-interest?

According to his campaign website, Senator Obama

has traveled to Israel and witnessed Israelis’ determination in the fight against terrorism and their yearning for peace with their neighbors. His commitment to Israel’s security, to the U.S.-Israel relationship, and to Israel’s right to self-defense has always been unshakable. Demonstrating his personal connection to Zionism and understanding of Israel as the homeland Jews longed for, Senator Barack Obama has stated that it must be preserved as a Jewish state. He will work tirelessly to help Israel in its quest for a lasting peace with its neighbors, while standing with Israel against those who seek its destruction.

Why is it, like so many other things, does Senator Obama’s history not appear to support the political campaign rhetoric?

As Professor Alan Dershowitz, author of The Case for Israel, puts it, certainly Jewish-Americans should not be voting based upon

“which party or which candidates support Israel more enthusiastically. They should vote based on more general considerations about what is best for America, the world and the values that they hold dear.”

Of course support for Israel, an unwavering pro-American Democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East, IS in America’s best interest. Most conservative Republican voters recognize this; many in the Democratic Party, however, in Jimmy Carter-esque fashion, find themselves harshly critical of Israel, reverting to moral relativism and worse when it comes to the Palestine-Israel conflict and American foreign policy as it relates to that.

Even Hamas knows this.

Ben Shapiro:

Obama’s foreign policy advisors have been almost uniformly anti-Israel. Samantha Power, one of Obama’s earliest supporters, has suggested that American troops be placed on the ground in Israel to protect Palestinian Arabs against “human rights abuses.” Power was a senior foreign policy advisor to Obama until she was forced to resign after calling Senator Hillary Clinton “a monster” in March 2008.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, serves as a foreign policy advisor to Obama. He believes that the Jewish lobby forces America into pro-Israel policy, and he defends Carter’s anti-Semitic book, “Peace, Not Apartheid.”

General Merrill McPeak, Obama’s campaign co-chair, agrees with Brzezinski that the Jewish lobby, based in “New York City, Miami,” controls America’s Middle East policy.

Robert Malley, who served on President Clinton’s National Security Council, has stated that America ought to simply impose its Middle East solution on Israel. He served as an advisor to Obama until the media discovered that he was holding regular meetings with Hamas.

Obama’s friends, too, are far too anti-Israel for comfort. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor of 20 years, has blamed America’s pro-Israel policy for 9/11. Wright is close with notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, who has proclaimed Obama “the Messiah.”

Obama is also friends with former Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman Rashid Khalidi, an ardent foe of the Jewish State. Khalidi held a fundraiser for Obama in 2000. In 2003, he told a Palestinian Arab crowd, “You will not have a better Senator under any circumstances.”

Obama himself has demonstrated his ambivalence about Israel. Before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in July 2008, he stated that he supported an undivided Jerusalem. After pressure from Palestinians, he backtracked within 24 hours. He also declares that he will meet the leaders of Iran without preconditions, despite the fact that Iran wishes to turn Israel into radioactive wasteland.

Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky pieced a great American Thinker article covering Samantha Power and Obama’s Foreign Policy Team. Please read it.

Within the past few days, renewed interest and controversy in a Los Angeles Times article by Peter Wallsten has erupted into criticism and pressure for the LA Times to release a video tape that purports to show Senator Obama toasting a tribute to his pal, Rashid Khalidi who has called Israel a “racist state”; who has said of Senator Obama, that he is “the only candidate who has expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause.”

More on Khalidi, via American Power:

note futher this section on Khalidi from Discover the Networks:

Khalidi’s involvement with the Palestinian cause goes beyond mere support. News reports – including a 1982 dispatch from Thomas Friedman of the New York Times – suggest that he once served as Director of the Palestinian press agency, Wikalat al-Anba al-Filastinija. Khalidi’s wife, Mona, was reportedly the agency’s main English-language editor between 1976 and 1982. Khalidi so strongly identified with the aims of the PLO, which was designated as a terrorist group by the State Department during Khalidi’s affiliation with it in the 1980s, that he repeatedly referred to himself as “we” when expounding on the PLO’s agenda. Additional evidence of Khalidi’s intimacy with the PLO can be seen in his involvement with the organization’s so-called “guidance committee” in the early 1990s.

Khalidi’s 1986 book, Under Siege: P.L.O. Decision-Making During the 1982 War, was dedicated to Yasser Arafat. Opening with a glowing tribute to anti-Israel fighters (“to those who gave their lives during the summer of 1982 … in defense of the cause of Palestine and the independence of Lebanon”), the book offered an airbrushed account of PLO-instigated violence against Israelis and Lebanese. By contrast, Syria’s brutal occupation of Lebanon elicited no criticism from the author.

Now check out Scott Horton’s description of Khalidi at Harper’s:

Rashid Khalidi is an American academic of extraordinary ability and sharp insights. He is also deeply committed to stemming violence in the Middle East, promoting a culture that embraces human rights as a fundamental notion, and building democratic societies. In a sense, Khalidi’s formula for solving the Middle East crisis has not been radically different from George W. Bush’s: both believe in American values and approaches. However, whereas Bush believes these values can be introduced in the wake of bombs and at the barrel of a gun, Khalidi disagrees. He sees education and civic activism as the path to success, and he argues that pervasive military interventionism has historically undermined the Middle East and will continue to do so. Khalidi has also been one of the most articulate critics of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority—calling them repeatedly on their anti-democratic tendencies and their betrayals of their own principles. Khalidi is also a Palestinian American. There is no doubt in my mind that it is solely that last fact that informs McCarthy’s ignorant and malicious rants.

Horton’s criticizing Andrew McCarthy’s essay, “The L.A. Times Suppresses Obama’s Khalidi Bash Tape.”

Horton is a perfect example of the views of those on the relativist-left toward American foreign policy, Israel, and Palestianian terrorism: Comfort and aid to the enemies of the United States is perfectly legitimate, especially when their friends wrap their hostility to the U.S. in quasi-legitmate theories of a post-colonial American-Israeli alliance to dominate the Middle East and oppress the refugees of the founding of the Jewish state.

The LA Times, thus far, refuses to even release a transcript of the video, even though a transcript would be a good compromise to their stated reasoning of protecting the identity of their source.

Doug Ross:

I received a tip from a person who has provided useful, accurate and unique data from LA before (e.g., “All six of CNN’s ‘undecided voters’ were Democratic operatives”). Take it for what it’s worth, but I believe this person is on target.

Saw a clip from the tape. Reason we can’t release it is because statements Obama said to rile audience up during toast. He congratulates Khalidi for his work saying “Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine” plus there’s been “genocide against the Palestinian people by Israelis.”

It would be really controversial if it got out. Tha’s why they will not even let a transcript get out.

Hearing it and seeing it would certainly have a much more dramatic effect than simply reading about it. Perhaps enough to influence an election. Is the LATimes withholding the tape due to journalistic integrity? Or is it partisan journalism, which includes the endorsement of a Senator Obama presidency?

Some are wondering, if the tape is so damaging, and it was known about back in April, why Hillary Clinton did not bring pressure to bear on the Times during the long Democratic primaries. I think it might have to do with the fact that since Monica Lewinsky’s boyfriend saw fit to pardon a Weather Underground terrorist, Senator Clinton didn’t have the political ground to stand on in being the one to connect Senator Obama to radical activists.

Hugh Hewitt:

Which brings us to the Khalidi-Obama tape and the decision of the Los Angeles Times to suppress it. This is an astonishing moment in the history of journalism. In the last presidential campaign, an arm of MSM attempted to influence the race by inventing a major story. This time, a different arm is influencing the race by censoring the news.

Times‘ owner Sam Zell and every single editor and reporter at the paper are thus now complicit in a decision to manage the news so that voters are not informed of all that might influence their choice of president. The videotape might be as bland as skim milk, or as incendiary as even the most inflammatory Jeremiah Wright sermon, but the content doesn’t matter. The paper is suppressing the news and using Orwellian language to claim otherwise. The silence from other MSMers tells us all we need to know about their commitment to the mission of getting important facts before the public.

Imagine that the tape is of the sort as to tilt the election to McCain, but because of its suppression by the Times, Obama is elected. The paper then “owns” everything that follows on Obama’s watch. This is of course true for the author of every partisan action that yields a decisive influence on an election, but it is an unprecedented position for an alleged newspaper to be in. Newspapers thump their chests when state secrets are revealed, claiming the need of the public to know even at the risk of damaging national security. What a turnaround to be wholly and irrefutably exposed as a mere agent in a presidential campaign rather than the guardian of the public’s interest in truth.

When the Times published stories on the SWIFT program used to track terrorist financing, I interviewed the Times’ D.C. bureau chief, Doyle McManus. Here’s the core of that interview:

HH: Is it possible, in your view, Doyle McManus, that the story will in fact help terrorists elude capture?

DM: I did…I neither believed it nor disbelieved it. I would believe I took that seriously. It’s impossible for me to evaluate independently to what degree…whether the potential assistance to terrorists…I think they actually didn’t argue that it would help terrorists. They argued that it would disadvantage, or make more difficult, counter-terrorist programs. But that’s probably a distinction without a difference. What…would that be momentous? Would it be marginal? I don’t know.

HH: Is it possible, in your view, Doyle McManus, that the story will in fact help terrorists elude capture?

DM: It is conceivable, yeah, although it might be worth noting that in our reporting, officials told us that this would, this disclosure would probably not affect al Qaeda, which figured out long ago that the normal banking system was not how it ought to move its money, and so turned to other unofficial and informal channels.

HH: The terrorist Hambali came up. He was captured in August of ‘03, mastermind/financier of the Bali bombing. Are you familiar with Hambali?

DM: I am.

HH: And did they alert you to the fact that they believe that Hambali was captured as a result of this SWIFT program?

DM: They did not. The first I knew of that was when I read it in the New York Times.

HH: Is it possible now that whoever was familiar with what Hambali did, those terrorists in Southeast Asia, could just simply reverse engineer his financing, and figure out what they shouldn’t do now?

DM: Well, I suppose it’s possible, except in effect, what we’re talking about here is the simple question of whether international banking transmissions are monitored….

The Times was willing to run the risk of informing terrorists about efforts to capture them, but is refusing to inform the American people about relevant, indeed, potentially decisive facts on the eve of an election.

Mainstream media which purports to be objective is not to be trusted.

Senator Obama’s political rhetoric to woo voters is also not to be trusted. In a number of ways, he has carefully crafted his centrist image to not reflect his dalliance with radical ideology and past alliance with radical activists. Given the company he keeps, his selection of foreign policy advisors, what would an Obama Administration and Cabinet appointments look like?

Obama obfuscates the obvious: He is no staunch supporter of Israel. At best, he’d reflect a second Carter term.

Investor’s Business Daily Editorial:

Obama’s deception reminds us of the way that Arafat tolerated Israel when talking to the Western media, but had the tongue of a terrorist when speaking in Arabic to radical Palestinian elements. Arafat said what he needed to say to keep his position of power. Obama will say anything to get elected, and then do another to achieve his goal of cutting off oxygen to Israel, the only freely elected government and U.S. friend in the region, outside of the newly formed Iraq.