Facts do matter even if some are willing to just dismiss them. We need to send Obama home in November or those facts you easily dismiss will come back to haunt you. I hope we never find out.
Facts only matter if they have relevance to the conversation. The chemical formula of hydrogen peroxide is H2O2, the negitive square root of 16 is -4, the capital of California is Sacramento. Those are all facts, but they add no value to the current conversation.
Facts about the ideology of the man seeking reelection to the presidency definitely matter. Especially considering the volatility in the Moslem world and the danger it poses to this country and our ally Israel.
"The tragedy of September 11 was a godsend"
Rashid Khalidi
Khalidi formerly expressed some tepid support for the notion of an Israeli state alongside a Palestinian one. In more recent years, however, he has taken to dismissing such a solution as hopelessly unrealizable. At a February 2005 conference at Columbia, titled "One State or Two? Alternative Proposals for the Middle East," Khalidi agreed with his Columbia colleague, Joseph Massad, in declaring that the two-state solution was an impractical "utopian vision." Khalidi further assailed Israel's very legitimacy, proclaiming it to be "a state that exists today at the expense of the Palestinians," an existence that "fails to meet the most important requirement: justice."
The February 2005 conference was not the first time that Khalidi had dismissed the possibility of a two-state solution. In March 2004, when Israeli forces assassinated Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Khalidi told Newsweek: "I really think that the killing of this individual may well be the last nail in the coffin of the two-state solution."
Khalidi deceptively styles himself as a "severe critic of Hamas." But mere days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he rebuked the news media for what he termed their exaggerated "hysteria about suicide bombers."
During a June 2002 speech before a conference of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Khalidi offered a justification for the murder of armed Israelis:
"Killing civilians is a war crime. It's a violation of international law. They are not soldiers. They're civilians, they're unarmed. The ones who are armed, the ones who are soldiers, the ones who are in occupation, that's different. That's resistance."
Scholarly institutions that do not promote anti-Israel propaganda have incurred Khalidi's wrath. Appearing on Al-Jazeera TV in 2004, Khalidi took aim at the prominent Middle Eastern Studies think-tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). That the non-partisan center is headed by Dennis Ross (a respected diplomat and a former Middle East envoy in the Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations), and that it regularly hosts speakers from the Middle East who are critical of Israel, did not prevent Khalidi from execrating WINEP as "the most important Zionist propaganda tool in the United States."
Khalidi strongly opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In an illuminating polemic which he penned for the January 2003 issue of the far-left journal "In These Times," Khalidi, even as he conceded that "international terrorism has been sponsored by Iraq," dismissed the notion that such an invasion could have any legitimate justification. Instead, he put forward a farrago of theories that he described as the "real reasons" for the impending war:
"First, it will be fought because of an aggressive, ideological vision of America's place in the world, propagated by the neo-conservatives who dominate the commanding heights of the American bureaucracy. Their vision proposes unfettered world hegemony for the United States, to be consecrated by the demonstration of U.S. power crushing a weak Iraq.
"Second, this war will be fought because of an obsession with control of the strategic resources (read: oil) and geography offered by the Middle East, with the view of neutralizing potential challengers to American hegemony in the 21st century [meaning primarily China]."
As Khalidi saw it, the looming war against Iraq was the brainchild of "racist" neo-conservatives who were: (a) doing the bidding of the Israeli Likud party to which they paid an undeclared allegiance; (b) aiming "to make the Middle East safe not for democracy, but for Israeli hegemony"; and (c) acting upon their "racist view that Middle Easterners understand only force." "For these American Likudniks and their Israeli counterparts," wrote Khalidi, "sad to say, the tragedy of September 11 was a godsend: It enabled them to draft the United States to help fight Israel's enemies."
In March 2008 Khalidi called for the recompense of the Iraqi people for the suffering they had endured at the hands of the U.S. "We owe reparations to the Iraqi people," he told an audience at Columbia University. Also speaking at that event was the socialist writer Anthony Arnove. Both Khalidi and Arnove called for mass anti-war activism and demanded America's unilateral withdrawal from Iraq.
Khalidi similarly had opposed the first Gulf War in 1991, when he characterized public support for the U.S.-led defense of Kuwait as an "idiots' consensus."
Khalidi is longtime a friend of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. In the 1990s, Obama and his wife were regular dinner guests at Khalidi's Chicago home. During the 2000 election cycle, Mr. and Mrs. Khalidi organized a fundraiser for Barack Obama's unsuccessful congressional bid. In 2001 and again in 2002, the Woods Fund of Chicago, while Mr. Obama served on its board, made grants totaling $75,000 to Khalidi's Arab American Action Network. In 2003 Obama would attend a farewell party in Khalidi's honor when the latter was leaving the University of Chicago to embark on his new position at Columbia.
In a 2008 interview, Khalidi praised Obama effusively, stating that, if elected President, Obama would be more understanding of the Palestinian experience than other politicians. "He has family literally all over the world," Khalidi noted. "I feel a kindred spirit from that."
Barack Obama -- Rashid Khalidi
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