Israel Matzav

The pro-Democrat double standard at the LA Times

You will recall that in October 2008, the Los Angeles Times suppressed a tape it has in its possession of former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi's departure party from Chicago. Among those present at the party were Billy Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Barack Hussein Obama. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, what went on at that dinner would have taught us a lot about the current President of the United States.

A special tribute came from Khalidi's friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "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 around "this entire world."

Today, five years later, Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois who expresses a firmly pro-Israel view of Middle East politics, pleasing many of the Jewish leaders and advocates for Israel whom he is courting in his presidential campaign. The dinner conversations he had envisioned with his Palestinian American friend have ended. He and Khalidi have seen each other only fleetingly in recent years.

And yet 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.

At Khalidi's 2003 farewell party, for example, 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."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."

...

At Khalidi's going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. "You will not have a better senator under any circumstances," Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times.

But the Times refused to release the videotape in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election. Could that videotape have influenced the 2008 election? We'll never know for sure.

Fast forward two and a half years. The Times still hasn't released the video, but this week it released 24,000 private emails belonging to Sarah Palin (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

Would those emails have been released if they belonged to Barack Hussein Obama or Hillary Clinton? Would the video have been released if it were a video of Sarah Palin with the head of the John Birch Society? (I doubt any such video exists).

A bunch of hypocrites....

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, liberal media bias, Los Angeles Times, Rashid Khalidi, Sarah Palin

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:45 AM