Israel Matzav

The PLO and the Saudis pay for Khalidi's chair at Columbia?

For the past week, many right wing bloggers - including me when I've been able to get on my blog - have been screaming about the refusal of the Los Angeles Times to release a videotape in which Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama is present at a going away party for former PLO operative Rashid al-Khalidi, who is now a professor at Columbia. Even the Left is a bit uncomfortable with the notion of one of their own trying to throw the election, so they have attempted to minimize the impact of the Times' actions by claiming that Khalidi was not a member (Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs) of the PLO in the 70's and 80's, when it was officially a terror organization, or that even if he was, Khalidi is a 'moderate' 'Palestinian' who is being victimized (Hat Tip: Memeorandum) by the McCain - Palin campaign (an astounding ignoring of reality).

This evening, I received the following email that suggests that not only was Khalidi a member of the PLO, but it was the PLO that was actually responsible for getting him his current position in the Edward Said chair of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia.

Was the Palestinian Liberation Organization behind Khalidi’s being hired by Columbia University as a professor? Was Rashid Khalidi a spokesman for the Palestinian Liberation Organization? Apparently, it not only depends on who you ask but when you ask them.

Lee Kaplan, Chief editor and Investigative journalist with DAFKA and former Palestinian terrorist Walid Shoebat are available to discuss some very disturbing realities about not only Khalidi’s ties to the PLO but the PLO’s level of involvement in landing Khalidi a job at Columbia as a professor.

According to Kaplan, prior to Khalidi getting the job as Middle East professor at Columbia an anonymous donation was made in the amount of $5,000,000 to the Univeristy with the proviso of hiring Khalidi as professor.

“Anonymous donations to Universities in New York and NY is illegal,” says Kaplan “and State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle insisted on the information about the donor be made known.” After some resistance from Columbia University they released the information.

According to Kaplan, the money was paid by the law firm Stroock and Stroock with the Rita Hauser as the attorney, under the instruction and use of assets of the PLO. This should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Khalidi was an operative of the PLO. “That Terror money is being funneled into our Universities to promote propaganda to undermine the legitimacy of Israel and indoctrinate students to hate America,” Kaplan said.

I have mentioned Stroock before on this blog - they were a registered agent for the PLO until 2001 (yes, of course, it's a Jewish law firm). But this is from a post I did about Khalidi in March 2006. And it leaves little doubt that the PLO - and the Saudis - both had a role in Khalidi getting his professorship at Columbia.

A link at FrontPage Magazine.com took me to this profile of Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi was interviewed by the Beirut Daily Star on March 7 regarding his opinions about recent developments in the Israel - 'Palestinian' conflict.

As with Said before him, Khalidi's involvement with the Palestinian cause goes beyond mere support. Though Khalidi has consistently denied the charge, news reports, including a 1982 dispatch from Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, suggest that he once served as the director of the Palestinian press agency, Wikalat al-Anba al-Filastinija. Khalidi's wife, Mona, was reportedly the agency's main English-language editor between 1976 and 1982. Commentators have also noted that Khalidi so strongly identified with the aims of the PLO, designated a terrorist organization by the State Department during Khalidi's affiliation with the Yasser Arafat-run political entity in the 1980s, that he repeatedly referred to himself as "we" when expounding on the PLO's agenda.

Additional evidence of Khalidi's intimacy with the PLO can be seen in his involvement with a so-called PLO "guidance committee" in the early 1990s. Describing his appearance in the company of several PLO operatives at a 1991 conference, Khalidi related that "We had political decisions to make and diplomatic strategy to decide."

Khalidi's often aggressive cheerleading for the PLO has not escaped the notice of his employers in the academy. Upon luring Khalidi away from the University of Chicago in 2003, Columbia president Lee Bollinger conceded that has his hire "has a particular point of view, pro-Palestinian nationalism." It is also a prominent selling point for the financial backers of Khalidi's endowed chair, the total funds for which are estimated at between $3 and $4 million: Among the donors to the chair are the United Arab Emirates and the Hauser Foundation, a New York charity headed by Rita Hauser, a controversial philanthropist whose onetime law firm, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, was registered with the Department of Justice as an agent for the Palestinian Authority until 2001. Yet another donor was the Olayan Charitable Trust, a New York-based charity with ties to the Olayan America Corporation, an arm of the Saudi organization the Olayan Group.

This ties in with two other topics I've discussed on this blog: Obama's connection to the Saudis, and Columbia President Lee Bollinger's invitation to Ahmadinejad to speak on campus.

But millions of Jewish fools are going to go pull that lever for Obama on Tuesday, because they believe that he's 'pro-Israel.'

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:14 AM