[If Obama wins a second term, there will be nothing political to prevent his
raw emotions from bubbling to the surface. df]
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
May 26, 2011
<http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/268159/pro-palestinian-chief-stanley-kurtz>
Pro-Palestinian-in-Chief
Obama’s hard-Left tilt is real... depending on how the next presidential
election turns out, we’re going to meet him again in 2013.
By Stanley Kurtz
It’s time to revisit the issue of President Obama’s Palestinian ties. During
his time in the Illinois state senate, Obama forged close alliances with the
most prominent Palestinian political leaders in America. Substantial evidence
also indicates that during his pre-Washington years, Obama was both supportive
of the Palestinian cause and critical of America’s stance toward Israel.
Although Obama began to voice undifferentiated support for Israel around 2004
(as he ran for U.S. Senate and his national visibility rose), critics and even
some backers have long suspected that his pro-Palestinian inclinations survive.
The continuing influence of Obama’s pro-Palestinian sentiments is the best way
to make sense of the president’s recent tilt away from Israel. This is why
supporters of Israel should fear Obama’s reelection. In 2013, with his
political vulnerability a thing of the past, Obama’s pro-Palestinian sympathies
would be released from hibernation, leaving Israel without support from its
indispensable American defender.
To see this, we need to reconstruct Obama’s pro-Palestinian past and assess its
influence on the present. Taken in context, and followed through the years, the
evidence strongly suggests that Obama’s long-held pro-Palestinian sentiments
were sincere, while his post-2004 pro-Israel stance has been dictated by
political necessity.
Let’s begin at the beginning — with the controversial question of whether
Obama’s cultural heritage through his nominally Muslim Kenyan father and his
Muslim Indonesian stepfather, along with his having been raised for a time in
predominantly Muslim Indonesia, might have had some effect on the president’s
mature foreign-policy views. Obama supporters often mock this idea, but we have
it on high authority that Obama’s unusual heritage and upbringing have had an
effect on his adult views.
Top presidential aide and longtime Obama family friend Valerie Jarrett was born
and raised in Iran for the first five years of her life. In explaining how she
first grew close to Obama, Jarrett says they traded stories of their youthful
travels. As Jarrett told Obama biographer David Remnick: “He and I shared a
view of where the United States fit in the world, which is often different from
the view people have who have not traveled outside the United States as young
children.” Remnick continues: “Through her travels, Jarrett felt that she had
come to see the United States with a greater objectivity as one country among
many, rather than as the center of all wisdom and experience.” Speaking with
the authority of a close personal friend and top political adviser, then,
Jarrett affirms that she and Obama reject traditional American exceptionalism.
One hallmark of America’s exceptionalist perspective, of course, is our unique
alliance with a democratic Israel, even in the face of intense criticism of
that alliance from much of the rest of the world.
Obama’s close friend and longtime ally, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said’s successor
as the most prominent American advocate for the Palestinians, goes further.
Khalidi told the Los Angeles Times that as president, Obama, “because of his
unusual background, with family ties in Kenya and Indonesia, would be more
understanding of the Palestinian experience than typical American politicians.”
Khalidi’s testimony is important, since he speaks on the basis of years of
friendship with Obama.
Those who know Obama best, then, affirm that his foreign-policy views are
atypical for an American politician, and are grounded in his unique
international heritage and upbringing. That is important, because our core task
is to decide whether Obama’s pro-Palestinian past was a stance rooted in
sincere sympathy, or nothing but a convenient sop to his leftist Hyde Park
supporters. Jarrett and Khalidi give us reason to believe that Obama’s
decidedly pro-Palestinian inclinations are rooted in his core conception of who
he is.
Obama came to political consciousness at college, and prior to his discovery of
community organizing late in his senior year, his focus was on international
issues. Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, highlights his anti-apartheid
activism during his sophomore year at California’s Occidental College. Obama’s
anti-apartheid stance, however, was part of a far broader and more radical
rejection of the West’s alleged imperialism. Obama himself tells us, in a
famous passage in Dreams, that he was taken with criticism of “neocolonialism”
and “Eurocentrism” during these early college years.
What Obama doesn’t tell us, but what I reveal in Radical-in-Chief, my political
biography of the president, is that he was a convinced Marxist during his
college years. More important, once Obama graduated and entered the world of
community organizing, he absorbed the sophisticated and intentionally stealthy
socialism of his mentors. Obama’s socialist mentors strongly supported what
they saw as the “liberation struggles” carried on by rebels against American
“oppression” throughout the world. So Obama’s continuous radical political
history strongly suggests that his early support for Palestine’s “liberation
struggle” grew out of authentic political conviction, not pandering.
Although Obama has long withheld his college transcripts from the public, the
Los Angeles Times reported in 2008 that Obama took a course from Edward Said
sometime during his final two undergraduate years at Columbia University. This
was just around the time Obama’s ties to organized socialism were deepening,
and certainly suggests a sincere interest in Said’s radical views. As Martin
Kramer points out, in his superb 2008 review of Obama’s Palestinian ties, Said
had just then published his book The Question of Palestine, definitively
setting the terms of the academic Left’s stance on the issue for decades to
come.
After Obama finished his initial community-organizing stint in Chicago and
graduated from Harvard Law School, he settled down to a teaching job at the
University of Chicago around 1992, and went about laying the foundations of a
political career. Sometime not long after his arrival at the University of
Chicago, Obama connected with Rashid Khalidi.
To say the least, Rashid Khalidi is a controversial fellow. To begin with,
although Khalidi denies it, Martin Kramer has unearthed powerful evidence
suggesting that Khalidi was at one time an official spokesman for the Palestine
Liberation Organization. Also, in the years immediately prior to his friendship
with Obama, Khalidi was a leading opponent of the first Gulf War, which
successfully reversed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. According to Kramer,
Khalidi condemned that action as an American “colonial war,” insisting that
before we could end Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait, we would first have to end
Israel’s supposedly equivalent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As Kramer
puts it, Khalidi’s influence helped turn the University of Chicago of the
Nineties into “the hot place to be for . . . trendy postcolonialist,
blame-America, trash-Israel” scholarship.
While we don’t know exactly when their friendship began, Khalidi was reportedly
present at the famous 1995 kickoff reception for Obama’s first political
campaign, held at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. That is no minor
point. We’ll see that as Khalidi’s close friend and political ally, Ayers
played an integral role in the story of Obama’s relationship with Khalidi.
In May 1998, Edward Said traveled from Columbia to Chicago to present the
keynote address at a dinner organized by the Arab American Action Network, a
group founded by Rashid and Mona Khalidi. We’ve known for some time that Barack
and Michelle Obama sat next to Edward and Mariam Said at that event. (Pictures
are available.) It has not been noticed, however, that a detailed report on
Said’s address exists, along with an article by Said published just days before
the event (Arab American News, May 22, June 12, 1998). Between those two
reports, we can reconstruct at least an approximate picture of what Obama might
have heard from his former professor that day.
For the most part, Said focused his article (and likely his talk as well) on
harsh criticisms of Israel, which he equated with both South Africa’s apartheid
state and Nazi Germany. Said’s criticisms of the Palestinian Authority also
were harsh. Why, he wondered, weren’t the 50,000 security people employed by
the Palestinian Authority heading up resistance to Israel’s settlement
building? In his talk, Said called for large-scale marches and civilian
blockades of Israeli settlement building. To prevent Palestinian workers from
participating in any Israeli construction, Said also proposed the establishment
of a fund that would pay these laborers not to work for Israel. Presciently,
Said’s talk also called on Palestinians to orchestrate an international
campaign to stigmatize Israel as an illegitimate apartheid state.
So broadly speaking, this is what Obama would have heard from his former
teacher at that May 1998 encounter. Yet Obama was clearly comfortable enough
with Said’s take on Israel to deepen his relationship with Khalidi and his Arab
American Action Network (AAAN). We know this, because Ali Abunimah, longtime
vice president of the AAAN, has told us so.
In many ways, Abunimah is the neglected key to reconstructing the story of
Obama’s alliance with Khalidi and AAAN. While Abunimah’s accounts of Obama’s
alliance with AAAN have long been public, they are not widely known. Nor have
Abunimah’s writings been pieced together with Obama’s history of support for
AAAN. Doing so creates a disturbing picture of Obama’s political convictions on
the Palestinian question.
In late summer 1998, for example, a few months after Obama’s encounter with
Edward Said, Abunimah and AAAN were caught up in a national controversy over
the alleged blacklisting of respected terrorism expert Steve Emerson by
National Public Radio. In August of that year, NPR had interviewed Emerson on
air about Osama bin Laden’s terror network. According to columnist Jeff Jacoby,
however, Abunimah managed to obtain a promise from NPR to ban Emerson from its
airwaves, on the grounds that Emerson was an anti-Arab bigot. It took Jacoby’s
research and public objections to lift the ban.
Attempting to bar an expert on Osama bin Laden’s terror network from the
airwaves is not exactly a feather in AAAN’s cap. Yet Obama continued his
relationship with AAAN. Abunimah himself introduced Obama at a major fundraiser
for a West Bank Palestinian community center a short time later in 1999. And
that, says Abunimah, was “just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very
comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and
opposing the Israeli occupation.”
The year 2000 saw yet another public clash between Ali Abunimah and Jeff Jacoby
over terrorism, along with a deepening alliance between Obama, Khalidi,
Abunimah, and AAAN. In May 2000, Abunimah published a New York Times op-ed
taking issue with a State Department report on the rising threat of terrorism
from the Middle East and South Asia. The report focused on al-Qaeda, in
particular. This was one of the most timely and accurate warnings we received
in the run-up to 9/11. Yet Abunimah trashed the report. In a longer study
released around the time of his op-ed, Abunimah went further, questioning
Hezbollah’s designation as a terrorist organization, and suggesting that we
ought to be, at the very least, “deeply skeptical” of the State Department’s
warnings about Osama bin Laden.
As Abunimah continued to downplay the threat from bin Laden, his ties to Obama
deepened. In 2000, AAAN founder Rashid Khalidi held a fundraiser for Obama’s
ultimately unsuccessful congressional campaign. Abunimah remembers that Obama
“came with his wife. That’s where I had a chance to really talk to him. It was
an intimate setting. He convinced me he was very aware of the issues [and]
critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs. . . . He
was very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel.” Obama’s numerous statements
over the years criticizing American policy for leaning too much toward Israel
were vivid in Abunimah’s memory, he says, because “these were the kind of
statements I’d never heard from a U.S. politician who seemed like he was going
somewhere rather than at the end of his career.” Obama’s criticism of America’s
Middle East policy was sufficient to inspire Abunimah to pull out his checkbook
and, for the first time, contribute to an American political campaign.
Within a year, Obama did Khalidi and Abunimah a good turn as well. From his
position on the board of Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama, along with Ayers and the
other five members of the board, began to channel funds to AAAN, totaling
$75,000 in grants during 2001 and 2002. Now Obama and Ayers were effectively
supporting the pro-Palestinian activism of AAAN’s vice-president, Abunimah, and
funding an organization founded by their mutual friends, the Khalidis, in the
process.
In the first year of the Woods Fund grant, Abunimah was the focus of a critical
Chicago Tribune op-ed by Gidon Remba, a former translator in the Israeli prime
minister’s office. Pointing to Abunimah, among others, Remba decried attempts
by “Yasser Arafat’s Arab-American cheerleaders” to “vindicate the resurgence of
attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian gunmen and Islamic suicide
bombers.” Yet Obama and Ayers re-upped AAAN’s money in 2002.
An August 2002 profile of Abunimah in the Chicago Tribune quotes a supporter of
Israel noting that, while he has heard Abunimah deplore terrorism, he has never
heard Abunimah affirm that he “supports the continued right of Israel to exist
alongside a future Palestine.” That is because Abunimah does not appear to
recognize such a right. Instead, Abunimah favors a “one-state solution,” in
which Israel’s identity as a Jewish state would be drowned out by an influx of
Palestinian immigrants seeking the “right of return.” Abunimah’s book, One
Country, which spells out his one-state solution, features an extended
comparison between Israel and South African apartheid.
For Bill Ayers, Abunimah’s claims that Israel is an apartheid state, along with
his arguments that international law at times licences violent resistance
against Israel, surely resonate. As I show in Radical-in-Chief, Ayers has never
abandoned his Weatherman ideology. The reason Ayers refuses to repudiate the
Weathermen’s terrorist past is that he sees the group’s violent actions as
justified resistance to the “internal colonialism” and apartheid of a racist
American society. That likely explains why Ayers happily channeled grant money
to AAAN, which makes a Weatherman-style argument against Israel.
In the acknowledgments of Resurrecting Empire, a monograph he worked on toward
the end of his time in Chicago, Khalidi credits Ayers with persuading him to
write it. A core theme of Resurrecting Empire is that the problems of the
Middle East largely turn on America’s failure to force Israel to resolve the
Palestinian question. This claim that Israel is the true root of the Middle
East’s problems is what Martin Kramer identifies, correctly, I think, as the
key lesson imparted to Obama by Khalidi.
Khalidi left Chicago in 2003, after the now-famous farewell dinner at which
Obama thanked Khalidi for years of beneficial intellectual exchange. The
article in which the Los Angeles Times reports on that dinner adds that many of
Obama’s Palestinian allies and associates are convinced that, despite his
public statements in support of Israel, Obama remains far more sympathetic to
the Palestinian cause then he has publicly let on.
Specifically, Abunimah has said that, in the winter of 2004, Obama commended an
op-ed Abunimah had just published in the Chicago Tribune, saying, “Keep up the
good work!” (This is likely the op-ed in question.) According to Abunimah,
Obama then apologized for not having said more publicly about Palestine, but
also said he hoped that after his race for the U.S. Senate was over he could be
“more up front” about his actual views.
It didn’t turn out that way. Once Obama’s new-found stardom gave him national
political prospects, he swiftly shifted into the pro-Israeli camp, to
Abunimah’s great frustration. Would a reelected Obama finally be able to be
“more up front” about his pro-Palestinian views, belatedly fulfilling his
promise to Abunimah? In short, was Obama’s pro-Palestinian past nothing but a
way of placating a hard-Left constituency whose views he never truly shared? Or
is Obama’s post-2004 tilt toward Israel the real charade?
The record is clear. Obama’s heritage, his largely hidden history of leftist
radicalism, and his close friendship with Rashid Khalidi, all bespeak
sincerity, as Obama’s other Palestinian associates agree. This is not to
mention Reverend Wright — whose rabidly anti-Israel sentiments, I show in
Radical-in-Chief, Obama had to know about — or Obama’s longtime foreign-policy
adviser Samantha Power, who once apparently recommended imposing a two-state
solution on Israel through American military action. Decades of intimate
alliances in a hard-Left world are a great deal harder to fake than a few years
of speeches at AIPAC conferences.
The real Obama is the first Obama, and depending on how the next presidential
election turns out, we’re going to meet him again in 2013.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and
the author of Radical-in-Chief.
Dan Friedman
NYC
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