A: Over 65
42. Q: How many UN resolutions on Israel did America veto between 1972 and 1990?
A: 30+
43. Q: How much does the U.S. fund Israel a year?
A: $5 billion
48. Q: How many nuclear warheads does Israel have?
A: Over 400
49. Q: Has Israel every [sic] allowed UN weapon inspections?
A: No
50. Q: What percentage of the Palestinian territories are controlled by Israeli settlements?
A: 42%
51. Q: Is Israel illegally occupying Palestinian land?
A: Yes.14
Wright demonstrated his own anti-Semitism anew when he complained in June 2009 that “them Jews ain’t going to let [Obama] talk to me.” In the same interview, Wright echoed jihadist propaganda regarding Israel: “Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing of the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel.”15
In fact, it was Obama’s new rigid and strident policies toward restricting Jews from living in parts of Israel that mandated ethnic cleansing: the ethnic cleansing of Jews from parts of the Jewish homeland. He pressed Israel to freeze construction of settlements on land that belonged rightly to Israel, and in November 2009 issued a veiled warning: settlement construction, he said, “embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous.”16 In other words, Jews had to clear out of Jewish land, or risk terror attack.
During the campaign, the mainstream media yawned and generally did not publicize information about Wright’s anti-Semitism or ties to Farrakhan. One thing is certain: if Barack Obama had been a Republican presidential candidate with analogous ties to pro-Israel spokesmen and groups, the mainstream media would not have considered this story a matter of indifference.
During the campaign, Obama aide David Axelrod said that Obama disagreed with Wright about Farrakhan.17 But after a year of the post-American presidency, the question of Obama’s ideological kinship with these anti-Semites cannot be so easily dismissed. It should come as no surprise to anyone that an Obama presidency would prove lethal for Israel. It is not an illegitimate question to ask whether the views of Wright and Farrakhan influenced Obama and formed his opinion of Jews and Israel, and helped form in turn the policies of Obama’s administration toward Israel. Wright was his spiritual mentor.
And Obama has other ties to anti-Israel entities that the liberal media generally found unworthy of notice. Obama’s mentors, friends, and comrades tell us his story. These associations show us who he is. And his record during the first year of his presidency demonstrates that these associations were not casual and tangential to his intellectual and ideological development.
KHALID AL-MANSOUR
In September 2008, the eighty-seven-year-old Percy Sutton, former Manhattan borough president and lawyer for Malcolm X, reminisced in a New York 1 television interview about when he first met Barack Obama: “I was introduced to (Obama) by a friend who was raising money for him,” he recalled. “The friend’s name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas. He is the principal adviser to one of the world’s richest men. He told me about Obama.”
Al-Mansour, said Sutton, wanted a favor from him—he wanted Sutton to write young Obama a letter of recommendation for Harvard Law School. “He wrote to me about him. And his introduction was there is a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends up there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?” Sutton complied: “I wrote a letter of support of him to my friends at Harvard, saying to them I thought there was a genius that was going to be available and I certainly hoped they would treat him kindly.”
But why was Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, who was already winning renown as a lawyer and black nationalist and would later become notorious as an associate of Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and unabashed anti-Semite, taking such a keen interest in a promising but anonymous law school aspirant? That crucial part of the story Sutton left unexplained, and al-Mansour himself declined to elucidate; how and why Obama caught his eye and became the object of his patronage remains mysterious.
Not mysterious at all, however, is al-Mansour’s fervent anti-Semitism. “Today,” he once declared in a speech in South Africa, “the Palestinians are being brutalized like savages. If you protest you will go to jail, and you may be killed. And they say they are the only democratic country in the Middle East.… They are lying on God.” The Jews, he said, were “stealing the land the same way the Christians stole the land from the Indians in America.”18 He is the author of a nineteen-page booklet entitled “Americans Beware! The Zionist Plot Against Saudi Arabia.”
Khalid al-Mansour is also featured in a DVD with a title that foreshadowed the internationalism of the Obama administration: Will the West Rule Forever?
RASHID KHALIDI
In 2005, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi taught a fifteen-week course on Middle Eastern politics at Columbia’s Middle East Institute. The New York Sun reported that the Saudis “funneled tens of thousands of dollars” into the institute’s programs.19 However, New York City’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, removed Khalidi from the program after it came to light that Khalidi had justified jihad terror attacks against Israeli civilians: “Killing civilians is a war crime, whoever does it. But resistance to occupation is legitimate in international law.”20 Martin Kramer, a trenchant critic of the anti-Israel and pro-jihad bias that prevails in American academia, explained: “If you’re a Saudi, it’s very convenient for Rashid Khalidi to claim that the source of America’s problems in the region is not their special relationship with Saudi Arabia, but their special relationship with Israel. All he has to do is say it’s Palestine, stupid.”21
That wasn’t all. Reports indicate that Khalidi was a director of WAFA, the official press agency of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in Beirut from 1976 to 1982. According to journalist Aaron Klein, “Rashid Khalidi at times has denied working directly for the PLO but Palestinian diplomatic sources in Ramallah told WorldNetDaily he indeed worked on behalf of WAFA. Khalidi also advised the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference in 1991.” What’s more, “during documented speeches and public events, Khalidi has called Israel an ‘apartheid system in creation’ and a destructive ‘racist’ state. He has multiple times expressed support for Palestinian terror, calling suicide bombings a response to ‘Israeli aggression.’ He dedicated his 1986 book, ‘Under Siege,’ to ‘those who gave their lives… in defense of the cause of Palestine and independence of Lebanon.’ Critics assailed the book as excusing Palestinian terrorism.”22
In 2001 and 2002, the fiercely anti-Israeli Arab American Action Network (AAAN), headed by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, received $110,000 in grants from the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization.23 One of the members of the Woods Fund board of directors at that time was Barack Obama, Khalidi’s former colleague back in the 1990s, when they both taught at the University of Chicago. Like Ayers, Khalidi also took a financial interest in Obama’s political career: in 2000, he held a fund-raiser for Obama’s unsuccessful run for a seat in the House of Representatives.24 In October 2008, the Los Angeles Times obtained a video of a 2003 AAAN dinner attended by Obama, Ayers, Dohrn, and Khalidi. The Times refused to release the video, leading to angry accusations of journalistic bias from the McCain campaign, since it was widely rumored that the video showed Obama making or at very least assenting to anti-Israel statements.25
One thing that the Times did reveal was that Obama spoke warmly at the banquet about his numerous conversations with Rashid and Mona Khalidi, saying that they had served for him as “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.… It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation—a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but on the big stage of “t
his entire world.”26
Times reporter Peter Wallsten noted that “the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor’s going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say. Their belief is not drawn from Obama’s speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.”
One of those was the 2003 AAAN dinner, at which “a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, ‘then you will never see a day of peace.’” Another speaker compared the “Zionist settlers on the West Bank”—to whom Obama as president has been notoriously hostile—to Osama bin Laden. Obama is not recorded as having contradicted these remarks, although he did, according to Wallsten, adopt “a different tone in his comments and called for finding common ground.”27
In any case, whatever was said on this notorious video, no smoking-gun videotape was really necessary to establish Obama’s close ties to haters of Israel.
The evidence was already there in abundance.
CAMPAIGN MONEY FROM GAZA
Obama’s 2008 campaign finance records are full of riddles, mysteries, and unanswered questions. Contributing nearly $25,000 to the Obama campaign was Monir Edwan, who was listed on FEC documents as contributing from the city of Rafah in the state “GA.” Georgia? No—there is no Rafah in the Peach State. Monir Edwan sent money to Obama from Rafah, Gaza.
Rafah is a Gaza refugee camp.
The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) “prohibits any foreign national from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any federal, state, or local election in the United States, either directly or indirectly. It is also unlawful to help foreign nationals violate that ban or to solicit, receive or accept contributions or donations from them. Persons who knowingly and willfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or imprisonment.”28
Yet no one has found it noteworthy that Barack Hussein Obama himself appears to be in violation of this statute.
According to the FEC, contributions to the Obama campaign from three brothers, Osama, Monir, and Hosam Edwan, all from Rafah, totaled $33,000.29 And they weren’t alone. Al-Jazeera reported on March 31, 2008, that Gazans were manning phone banks for the Obama campaign.30
The brothers were vocal in their “love” for Obama—which in itself spoke volumes to Obama’s campaign. The media showed no interest, but Obama pricked up his ears. He smelled trouble; even though no reporters asked him about these contributions, he answered anyway. The Obama campaign contended in the summer of 2008 that they had returned $33,500 in illegal contributions from Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza—despite the fact that records do not show that it was returned, and the brothers said they did not receive any money. And indeed, Obama’s refunds and redesignations on file with the FEC show no refund to Osama, Hosam, or Monir Edwan in the Rafah refugee camp.
One of the Gazan brothers, Monir Edwan, claimed that he bought “Obama for President” T-shirts off Obama’s Web site, and then sold the shirts in Gaza for a profit. All purchases on the Barack Obama Web site are considered contributions. The brothers allegedly claimed that they were American citizens—so said the Obama camp. They listed their address with the zip code 972 (ironically, the area code for Israel) and entered “GA,” the state abbreviation for Georgia, as their location, while actually living, as we have seen, in a Hamas-controlled refugee camp. If Obama’s people thought they were dealing with American citizens from Georgia, why did they ship the T-shirts that Monir Edwan ordered to the correct address in Gaza? Shipping overseas to a Gaza refugee camp is vastly different from sending a package to the state next door.
On Watchdog.net, a site that monitors campaign contributions, Monir Edwan is listed as Barack Obama’s Top Contributor, giving $24,313 between October 27, 2007, and November 11, 2007.31 Intriguingly, however, although it gives zip codes and other details for the other four of Obama’s top five individual contributors, it provides no additional information at all for Monir Edwan—and Edwan’s link is the only dead one on the Watchdog page.
Why did Palestinians in a Gaza refugee camp have such love for Obama in the summer of 2008? Did they know he was going to run a jihad presidency?
Did Jamal M. Barzinji know the same thing?
Jamal M. Barzinji gave the Obama campaign $1,000.
Dr. Jamal M. al-Barzinji is a noted American businessman and political operative. He has most recently been associated with, notably, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). The IIIT is linked to the international Islamic organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood. In a May 22, 1991, document entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” the Brotherhood lays out a plan to do nothing less than conquer and Islamize the United States. The Brotherhood’s success in America would ultimately further the even larger goal of establishing “the global Islamic state.”32
The Brotherhood memorandum includes “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends,” with the appended note: “Imagine if they all march according to one plan!!!” Among these organizations are some of the most prominent “moderate Muslim” organizations in the United States today, including the IIIT as well as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); the Muslim Students Association (MSA); the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT); the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA); the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), out of which emerged in 1994 the most prominent Muslim group in the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); and many others.
The memorandum also explains that Muslim Brotherhood operatives “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”33
According to The Wall Street Journal, Jamal Barzinji also has business ties to a Muslim Brotherhood activist, Youssef Nada.34 And the destruction of Israel is high on the jihadist agenda. After 9/11, federal agents raided Barzinji’s office and home. An affidavit filed in federal court charges that “Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ (as evidenced by ties to al-Arian, including documents seized in Tampa), but also with Hamas.”35
PIJ is the jihad terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Just as disturbing were the phone banks in Gaza campaigning for Obama. Muslims in Gaza methodically worked the phones in Internet cafes, calling Americans and doing everything they could to influence the vote.36
When New York congressman Jerrold Nadler was confronted with the Gaza phone banks issue while campaigning for Obama in South Florida in early November 2008 he said that if there “really were phone banks in Gaza, that would be a major campaign issue.” He said it would be all over the media and be a major problem for the campaign. And he laughed at the idea that Obama was receiving campaign contributions from Gaza. The mainstream media laughed along with him, continuing its refusal to cover this explosive story.
If there had been just one questionable tie, one link to jihadist entities, one link to groups advocating the destruction of Israel, Barack Obama might have merited the free pass he got from the mainstream media about this. But there were so many.
And to this day they have never been explained.
SAMANTHA POWER
Some say, of course, that Barack Hussein Obama should not be held responsible for associations he made years or even dec
ades ago. It’s unclear why that should be if he has never adequately renounced or repudiated these associations. But even if he has in some cases, as a candidate and as president he has surrounded himself with advisers who have distinguished themselves by their anti-Israel positions.
One Obama foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, resigned from the Obama campaign team under fire in March 2008 after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” Obama never seemed fazed by her calling, in a 2002 interview with Harry Kreisler of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley, for military action against Israel to secure the creation of a Palestinian state.37
Power said that establishing a Palestinian state would mean “sacrificing—or investing, I think, more than sacrificing—billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence.” She said that this would “require external intervention.”
Many observers quite reasonably concluded that in this Power meant that the United States should invade Israel in order to secure the creation and protection of a Palestinian state. Confronted about this during the Obama presidential campaign, Power made no attempt to explain or excuse her statement: “Even I don’t understand it.… This makes no sense to me.… The quote seems so weird.” She assured supporters of Israel that she did not believe in “imposing a settlement.”38
Power’s anti-Israel bias was not limited to that one statement. When the much-hyped “Jenin Massacre” of 2002 turned out to have been a Palestinian propaganda operation rather than an actual massacre, Power remained skeptical, saying at a conference funded by George Soros: “I was struck by a [New York Times] headline that accompanied a news story on the publication of the Human Rights Watch report. The headline was, I believe: ‘Human Rights Reports Finds Massacre Did Not Occur in Jenin.’ The second paragraph said, ‘Oh, but lots of war crimes did.’ Why wouldn’t they make the war crimes the headline and the non-massacre the second paragraph?” National Review’s Michael Rubin commented: “It is questionable whether any war crimes occurred in Jenin, except of course the war crimes associated with Palestinian assembly of suicide bombs which Palestinian terrorists—not uniformed officials—used to target civilians on buses and elderly in hotels. But, that does not seem to be what Samantha Power means.”39
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