It turns out that the “change agent” running for president has yet
another colorful associate the media seldom ask him about. “You
mentioned Rashid Khalidi, who’s a professor at Columbia,” Barack Obama said in Boca Raton this year. “I do know him because I taught at the University of Chicago.”

“And he is Palestinian.” Actually, “Between 2001 and 2002, when Obama
was director of the board, the Woods Fund gave a total of $75,000 to
the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), an anti-Israel outfit run by
Mona Khalidi,” Brad O’Leary reports in his new book, The Audacity of Deceit. “Mona is the wife of Rashid Khalidi, and both are friends of Obama’s from his days at the University of Chicago.”

“A University of Chicago professor who was interviewed for this book,
speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the relationship between
Khalidi was so close that the Obamas used to babysit the Khalidi’s
children.” O’Leary is president of ATI-News.com.

“And so I do know him and I have had conversations,” Obama had said in
that synagogue in Boca Raton of his acquaintance with Khalidi. “He is
not one of my advisers; he’s not one of my foreign policy people.”

“His kids went to the Lab school where my kids go as well.” Put Khalidi together with former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers.
Ayers sat on many boards with Obama and used his home to launch the
One’s political career yet the Democratic presidential candidate
characterizes him as “a guy in the neighborhood.” Barry is a regular
Mr. Rogers.

“When Khalidi departed the University of Chicago in 2003, Obama
delivered an in-person testimonial at a farewell ceremony reminiscing
about conversations over meals prepared by Mona Khalidi,” O’Leary
writes. So that’s where those “conversations” that Obama remembered in
Boca took place.

“He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot
of Israel’s policy,” Obama admitted on that Florida trip. As O’ Leary
recounts, Khalidi has called Israel “racist” and an “apartheid system
in creation.”

AIA awarded Dr. Khalidi one of its Little Churchills, named after deposed University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, for the former’s complaint, among others,
that the U. S. media makes too big a deal out of suicide bombers.
Additionally, like Obama’s running mate, Khalidi’s work, in comparison
to that of others, brings into question how original his scholarship
is.

Most of his reviews on ratemyprofessor.com from his Chicago tenure are favorable but come from students
predisposed to agree with him. Two who don’t share his viewpoints got
very specific in their reviews:

• “Khalidi is articulate,” one reviewer conceded. “However, he puts his
political affiliations ahead of his professional obligations. He
derided undergraduates at a public U of C panel because of their
pro-Israel views. Indeed, he approaches the Conflict as an activist
rather than as a scholar, and thus fails students.”
• “Has a political agenda,” another reviewer concluded, characterizing
Khalidi as “a historian who is careless with his facts” who “claims
without any evidence that Israel has used weapons of mass destruction
against Palestinians.”

Khalidi now holds the Edward Said chair at Columbia,
named for the late Middle East scholar, whose scholarship itself was
somewhat controversial. “Since the communist (or should we just call
them ‘pro-communist’) left had already seized the means of intellectual
production (i.e., taken over the university faculties by the systematic
application of Stalinist methods during the ‘70s and ‘80s), the next
step in Middle Eastern Studies was to hire only—or mainly—left-wing
ethnic academics from the benighted theocracies of that region,” author
and activist David Horowitz wrote of Said in 2001. “In other words they imported the second-rate
Marxist ideologies of the Third World into the university using their
ace card—anti-white racism—to maximum advantage.”
“Said himself is almost as big a liar as Chomsky, but having served on
the PLO Council and thrown rocks at Jews, he trumps the MIT sage easily
as an authentic terrorist.”

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