The refusal by the Los Angeles Times to release the
videotape featuring Barack Obama’s farewell toast to Rashid
Khalidi has thrust the Columbia University professor and activist
into the center of the presidential campaign, creating particular
interest in his ties to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation
Organization.
Liberals have defended
Khalidi as a “respected academic,” and amid all of the political
noise and accusations flying back and forth between the two
camps, it’s easy to see how some voters would tune out when
conservatives refer to him as a former “PLO spokesman.” But
without engaging in the semantic debate over what word should be
applied to his complex and long-standing relationship with the
terrorist group, a TAS analysis of contemporaneous news
accounts dating back to the 1970s as well a look at Khalidi’s own
writings leave no doubt that a close relationship existed.
While living in Lebanon from the early 1970s through 1983 (where
the PLO was based at the time), Khalidi was frequently cited in
the press as being close to the organization, and he even used
the word “we” while speaking on the group’s behalf. He was
described as a “director” of Wafa, the PLO’s official news
agency, and he thanked Arafat for research assistance in the
preface of one of his books. In 1991, Khalidi was part of the
Palestinian delegation to the Madrid peace talks with Israel —
by his own account, he did so at the request of the PLO.
Before delving into the details, it’s worth entertaining the
legitimate question of why Khalidi’s background and writings
should raise concerns about Obama himself.
The L.A. Times
story from April about their relationship answers this
question quite clearly. Not only did Obama know Khalidi, but the
professor was his “friend and frequent dinner companion” who
Obama was close enough to that he attended the 2003 going away
party thrown when Khalidi was moving to New York.
In his toast, Obama went out of his way to thank Khalidi (and his
wife Mona) for “consistent reminders of my own blind spots and
own biases,” and he added that the conversation they engaged in
was necessary around “this entire world.” Given that America is
on the cusp of electing Obama, a man of little experience about
whom very little is known, it is perfectly fair to learn more
about Khalidi, whose viewpoints Obama thought the whole world
needed to hear.
ON JUNE 11, 1979, the New York Times ran an
article explaining that the PLO was worried that the Camp
David peace accords between Israel and Egypt would undermine
Palestinians. The article quoted Khalidi opposing the deal for
that very reason, and identified him as somebody “close to Al
Fatah,” an arm of the PLO.
It read:
One view shared by the Palestinian leadership and the rank and
file, down to armed youths who guard doorways and
intersections, is that the goal of an independent state will be
foreclosed if the Camp David accords succeed. “We are in a
make-or-break-it period,” asserted Rashid Khalidi, a professor
of political science who is close to Al Fatah. “If we don’t
turn the tide, if what (Egyptian President Anwar) Sadat is
doing is not decisively repudiated, if the idea that Sadat had
brought peace is allowed to stick without regard to Palestinian
rights, then we are done in. Israel doesn’t need to sign with
us. They already control the land.”
Also noteworthy about the quote was Khalidi’s use of the term
“we” in reference to the Palestinian leadership, which turns out
to be more of a habit than an isolated occurrence.
For instance, a January 6, 1981 Christian Science
Monitor article that refers to Khalidi as “a Palestinian
with good access to the PLO leadership,” reads:
Dr. Khalidi also argued that the PLO’s standing among Arabs in
the Israeli-occupied areas has grown significantly. “Quite
apart from the politics of it, we have built up tremendous
links with the Palestinians ‘on the inside’ in different ways.
We can render them services, often through our compatriots in
the West, that King Hussein, for example, could never match.
We’ve never been stronger there, and the trend is continuing,”
he said.
Ironically, the same article quotes him as saying that hardliners
within the PLO “perceive the new administration as basically
hostile — possibly more hostile than the Carter administration.”
Yes, on Planet Khalidi, even Jimmy Carter could be seen as being
overtly hostile to the Palestinians.
But the evidence for the connections between Khalidi and the PLO
are much more explicit than that. Thomas Friedman, in a June 8,
1982 New York Times piece about the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon, referred to Khalidi as “a director of the Palestinian
press agency, Wafa.” To be clear, Wafa is controlled by the PLO
—and you don’t have to take my word for it. Even Khalidi
himself, on page 7 of his 1986 book Under Siege: P.L.O.
Decisionmaking During the 1982 War, describes it as “the
P.L.O.’s news agency.”
That’s not the most telling part of Under Siege. In the
book’s preface, Khalidi reserves his first paragraph of thanks
for the research assistance provided by the PLO in general, and
Arafat specifically. “Permission to utilize the P.L.O. Archives
for the first time was generously given by the Chairman of the
P.L.O. Executive Committee, Yasser ‘Arafat,” Khalidi wrote. “To
him, and to the dedicated individuals working in the Office of
the Chairman, the P.L.O. Archives, and the Palestine News Agency
(WAFA), who extended every possible assistance to me on three
trips to Tunis, I owe deep thanks.”
IN THE WAKE OF THE 1991 GULF WAR, then Secretary of State James
Baker launched peace talks featuring Israel and the Palestinians,
which were held in Madrid. The Israelis only agreed to the talks
under the condition that the PLO not be involved in the
negotiations, which turned out to be farcical, because the
terrorist group operated from behind the scenes, giving marching
orders to the Palestinian delegation of which Khalidi was a part.
As Khalidi recounts in his 1997 book Palestinian Identity:
The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, while he
was in Jerusalem during the summer of 1991, he “agreed to the
request of Faisal al-Husayni that, if the Palestinians became
involved in negotiations with Israel…I would serve as an adviser
to the Palestinian delegation.”
That fall, he wrote, “on the eve of the sudden convocation of the
Madrid conference, I received a call from PLO officials in Tunis
asking me to confirm that I was indeed going to Madrid, since the
names of the delegation and its advisers had to be presented to
Secretary Baker’s assistants that very night.”
Khalidi goes on to explain that while he “did not participate in
the entirety of every round of discussions” he and his
Palestinian colleagues “worked extremely hard,” and he not only
acted as an adviser during the October and November Madrid talks,
but also in “each of the ten Palestinian-Israeli bilateral
negotiating sessions in Washington which continued until June
1993.”
(A digital scan of the relevant section of the book is available
here.)
Taken as a whole, the record shows that Khalidi — whether or not
he should officially be called a “spokesman” — clearly was tight
with the PLO, having acted as an adviser at the group’s request,
and regularly speaking on its behalf.
As a professor, Khalidi has established himself as the heir to
Edward Said, the leading anti-Israel intellectual of the 20th
century (with whom Obama famously broke
bread at a 1998 Arab community event in Chicago). He has
said
that American Jewish supporters of Israel have been “brainwashed”
and that they can’t accept the fact that Israel is “an apartheid
system in creation.” And when it comes to peace talks,
Khalidi said, “The United States is actually worse than Israel on
some issues.”
So what, exactly, are the “blind spots” and “biases” that Obama
is so grateful to Khalidi for exposing in their frequent dinners?
And what part of their conversation does Obama hope spreads
around “this entire world”?
Somehow, I don’t think Obama was referring to his love for the
Chicago White Sox.
