Post-American Presidency (13 page)

Of course, Farrakhan has disclaimed anti-Semitism: “You say I hate Jews. I don’t hate the Jewish people, I never have. But there [are] some things I don’t like. ‘What is it you don’t like, Farrakhan?’ I don’t like the way you leech on us. See a leech is somebody that sucks your blood, takes from you and don’t give you a damn thing. See, I don’t
like that kind of arrangement.” He has called Jews “the greatest controllers of Black minds, Black intelligence,” and has warned them that “Allah will punish you. You are wicked deceivers of the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews, those of you that are not real Jews. You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell. But I warn you in the name of Allah, you would be wise to leave me alone. But if you choose to crucify me, know that Allah will crucify you.”

“As I said over 20 years ago,” Farrakhan said in 2008, “there will be no peace for Israel, because there can be no peace as long as that peace is based on lying, stealing, murder, and using God’s name to shield a wicked, unjust practice that is not in harmony with the Will of God.”
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Wright copublished a book defending Farrakhan’s Million Man March,
When Black Men Stand Up for God: Reflections on the Million Man March.
In it, Wright continues to defend Farrakhan, saying that “The enemy is not white people, but white supremacy. The enemy isn’t Farrakhan. The enemy is still white supremacy.”
¹¹

Wright’s association with Farrakhan is long-standing. In April 2008, when he appeared at the National Press Club in order to address the controversy that had engulfed the Obama campaign because of his incendiary anti-American remarks from the pulpit, his security detail was made of members of the Nation of Islam.
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He and Farrakhan even once traveled to Libya to confer with Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi—as Wright recalled during the 2008 campaign: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit [Gaddafi] with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”
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Surprisingly, it didn’t, but Wright had good reason to suspect that it might. Wright’s anti-Semitism matches Farrakhan’s, as is clear from his “War on Iraq IQ Test,” which purported to answer the question,
“Do you know enough to justify going to war with Iraq?” It was clear from Wright’s questions and answers that he believed that the Iraq venture was all about protecting Israel—and that Wright’s slant was all about demonizing Israel:

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 “this entire world.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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And they weren’t alone. Al-Jazeera reported on March 31, 2008, that Gazans were manning phone banks for the Obama campaign.
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