During the 2008 campaign, word leaked out that President Barack Obama attended a dinner where Obama toasted Rashid Khalidi, who the LA Times described as an “an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights.” The dinner party Obama attended put Zionists on equal footing with Osama bin Laden:
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.”
The LA Times refused to release the tape of this dinner.
A little bit more on Obama, Khalidi and Obama’s support of the anti-Israel movement, from Gateway Pundit:
Barack Obama funnelled thousands of dollars of cash to Rashidi’s anti-Israel Foundation through his work on the Woods Fund.
In 2000, Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO operative who justified Palestinian terrorism as contributing to “political enlightenment,” threw a fundraiser for his friend Barack Obama.
Although he is described as a former PLO operative, via Free Republic, this is what Rashid Khalidi has to say about Palestinian terrorism against Jews– he said anti-Israel violence contributed to “political enlightenment…”
All of this was out during the campaign, which makes it hard for me to understand why Jews are shocked Obama would give America’s highest civilian honor to former Ireland President Mary Robinson, someone who very clearly hates Israel:
“AIPAC is deeply disappointed by the Obama administration’s choice to award a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson,” the group said in its statement. “AIPAC respectfully calls on the administration to firmly, fully and publicly repudiate her views on Israel and her long public record of hostility and one-sided bias against the Jewish state.”
The Anti-Defamation League also condemned Robinson’s medal, saying “she is not an ‘agent of change’ and is undeserving of America’s highest civilian honor.”
“She issued distorted and detrimental reports on the conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and blamed Israel for the outbreak of Palestinian violence – the Second Intifada,” ADL director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement. “As the convener of the 2001 U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, she allowed the process to be hijacked to promote the delegitimizing of Israel and pronouncements of hateful anti-Jewish canards, such as ‘Zionism is racism.’ She failed miserably in her leadership role, opting to join the anti-Israel forces rather than temper them.”
The Zionist Organization of America criticized Obama for the honors granted to Robinson and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, saying, “both have made statements and presided over organizations and conferences that were viciously critical of Israel.”
“We are aware that, while other Jewish organizations have criticized the award to Mary Robinson, none appear to have taken issue with the same award being made to Desmond Tutu,” ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said in a statement.
“We also note that President Obama recently met with Jewish leaders to reassure them about his policies to Israel, something words alone cannot do when so much else in the words and deeds of the Obama Administration gives genuine cause for concern,” Klein said.
Why all the outrage? Gil Troy at The Jerusalem Post explains:
As the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 until 2002, Robinson consistently displayed a pro-Palestinian bias during a fragile moment in the search for Middle East peace.
When Yasser Arafat led the Palestinians away from negotiations back toward terror in 2000, Robinson could have stood up and urged the Palestinians to eschew violence. Instead, she and the UN Human Rights Commission continued to demonize Israel, implicitly encouraging Palestinian terrorism.
Making matters worse, she presided over the infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. She repeatedly ignored the pleas of distinguished human rights activists including the late Congressman Tom Lantos and the US secretary of state at the time Colin Powell to stop the Durban conference from degenerating into an orgy of Israel- and Jew-bashing.
In fairness, eventually she herself was so appalled by a cartoon the Arab Lawyers’ Union distributed equating the Star of David with the Swastika that she proclaimed at an official dinner “When I see something like this, I am a Jew.”
Nevertheless it was too little, too late. And in her closing remarks Robinson declared “we… succeeded,” a shocking statement considering that anti-Zionists hijacked the conference, demonizing Israel, bullying Jewish participants and distributing crude anti-Semitic images of hooked-nose Jews at the parallel NGO forum.
For at least three years after the conference, Mary Robinson continued to celebrate Durban’s success. It was only in response to public campaigns at McGill University (which, full disclosure, I led) and at Emory University against her receiving honorary doctorates in 2004 that she began to acknowledge Durbans legacy as mixed.
As such, she was also responsible for trying to sanitize the historical record and soft-pedal the Durban disgrace.
For those who don’t remember what happened, the United States and Israel both ended up leaving the 2001 conference early because it had been hijacked by the anti-Israeli members in attendance:
A human rights forum running parallel to the U.N. World Conference on Racism ended rancorously on Sunday with a declaration that branded Israel a “racist apartheid state” guilty of “war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
…
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres expressed his government’s anger.
“It is an outburst of hate, of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism without any consideration,” he told reporters in Tel Aviv.
She also claimed the United Stated violated human rights and was guilty of war crimes in its prosecution of the war on terror.
Is it really any surprise that Obama would fail to see the problem, when it seems he supports the same people who promote the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli rhetoric vocalized at Durban? Plus, she was against the United state’s tactics in the war on terror. No, in Obama’s eyes, this is just the type of person we need to honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
