“Given the extraordinary sudden turnabout in US policy toward Israel under the Obama Administration, I have become obsessed by the repressed 2003 videotape of Rashid Khalidi and Barack Obama,“ I wrote. ”That tape—or so we are told—is ensconced in a safe at the Los Angeles Times [LAT] building. In the current situation, its release by the paper is more important and newsworthy than ever.
“The Khalidi tape could be of tremendous significance in revealing the provenance of Obama’s views on the Middle East and the degree to which the public was misled on those views during the presidential campaign.”
Why was this important? As I wrote then:
“Rashid Khalidi—a Palestinian-American historian known for his strong pro-Palestinian opinions—is currently the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia and director of that university’s Middle East Institute. After Khalidi received this Columbia appointment in 2003, a farewell dinner party was held in his honor in Chicago. A videotape was made of that party where many good things were said about the Palestinian cause and many bad things about Israel. Then Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama was in attendance, as were, some say, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
“Perhaps because it was so attenuated, that article engendered a cry for the release of the full tape. What really happened at the party? What was said? How did Obama react? People wanted to know more details of the Middle East views of the presidential candidate. But the LAT was effectively mum and sequestered the tape in its safe.”
Despite attempts by me and others to find the tape, to this day it has vanished. I once tried to call Mr. Wallsten, who by then had moved from the LA Times to The Wall Street Journal, but he, in essence, hung up on me.
That was then, as they say, and this is now.
At first, President Obama was silent about the Hamas invasion, but recently, the former president is coming out of the proverbial woodwork.
“What Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it,” President Obama said. “And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”
The latter part, not surprisingly, got by far the biggest applause in the podcast, which consisted of a packed audience of his supporters and former employees.
He also said: “If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.”
Ah, to be above the fray, to be the even-handed purveyor of justice.
But is he really?
I think a number of readers can remember that heady moment of rebellion against the despotic mullahs during the 2009 Green Movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The brave students and their supporters were marching in the streets for freedom, shouting, “Obama, Obama, are you with us, or are you with them?”
It was infuriating to those of us who sided with the courageous demonstrators that President Obama opted to ignore them, preferring to continue his ultimately fruitless nuclear negotiations with the mullahs’ henchman of the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Which side was he on?
But back to today, the era when that same ex-president tells us he would prefer to rule on earphones from the basement than have to deal with the tumult on the ground and seems to have gotten his wish.
What are we really to make of his even-handed argument, the assertion we are all to blame, other than that it’s a puerile truism that could be applied to just about anything?
How should we look at the benighted (we’re told) civilians of Gaza under constant bombardment by the allegedly bloodthirsty Israelis?
Well, I'll admit that President Obama is correct in saying in the podcast that it’s somewhat confusing but not nearly as much—not by a long shot—as he wants us to think.
For example, we’re asked to extend our sympathies to the many dual nationals (Americans and others) who are struggling to get out of Gaza.
But here’s an impolite response. What were they doing there in the first place?
Hamas has been ruling Gaza with an iron fist that makes the Nazis seem like softies since 2007, murdering the few dissenters and throwing gays off roofs. Were they OK with that? What moral person would be? Who would want to live there under those circumstances? Then why did they go?
Sure, there might be a few who were there for family reasons or something similar, but for the most part, you have to view many Gazans as acquiescing to or even preferring to be ruled by terrorists with an ideology of racial and ethnic murder, not to mention contempt for their own citizens.
Maybe for President Obama, there’s an element of even-handedness in this, but it’s hard to see it. Hamas has told the world quite explicitly that they’re ready to repeat their barbarian rampage in Israel, raping, kidnapping, and burning children alive.
Why on Earth would the Israelis sit back and allow that to happen?
At first blush, all this seems hard to wrap one’s mind around, but the facts on the ground are what they are. Most Gazans are people willing to live with missiles and bombs being hidden under hospitals, schools, religious institutions, and, we’re now learning, their only university.
Unlike with the Iranians, there has been little or no sign of rebellion.
But I guess to President Obama, there’s some kind of equality in this—tit for tat and all that.
To recapitulate, as those students in the streets of Tehran once said, “Obama, Obama, are you with us, or are you with them?”
But we know the answer as far as Israel is concerned. He made his first visit to the Jewish nation long after his apology tour to the Arab nations of the Middle East.
Too bad he won’t stay out of it now.
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