Free Post-American Presidency by Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller Page A

interest in a promising but anonymous law school aspirant? That crucial part of the story Sutton left unexplained, and al-Mansour himself declined to elucidate; how and why Obama caught his eye and became the object of his patronage remains mysterious.
    Not mysterious at all, however, is al-Mansour’s fervent anti-Semitism. “Today,” he once declared in a speech in South Africa, “the Palestinians are being brutalized like savages. If you protest you will go to jail, and you may be killed. And they say they are the only democratic country in the Middle East.… They are lying on God.” The Jews, he said, were “stealing the land the same way the Christians stole the land from the Indians in America.” 18 He is the author of a nineteen-page booklet entitled “Americans Beware! The Zionist Plot Against Saudi Arabia.”
    Khalid al-Mansour is also featured in a DVD with a title that foreshadowed the internationalism of the Obama administration:
Will the West Rule Forever?
    RASHID KHALIDI

    In 2005, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi taught a fifteen-week course on Middle Eastern politics at Columbia’s Middle East Institute.
The
New York Sun
reported that the Saudis “funneled tens of thousands of dollars” into the institute’s programs. 19 However, New York City’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, removed Khalidi from the program after it came to light that Khalidi had justified jihad terror attacks against Israeli civilians: “Killing civilians is a war crime, whoever does it. But resistance to occupation is legitimate in international law.” 20 Martin Kramer, a trenchant critic of the anti-Israel and pro-jihad bias that prevails in American academia, explained: “If you’re a Saudi, it’s very convenient for Rashid Khalidi to claim that the source of America’s problems in the region is not their special relationship with Saudi Arabia, but their special relationship with Israel. All he has to do is say it’s Palestine, stupid.” 21
    That wasn’t all. Reports indicate that Khalidi was a director of WAFA, the official press agency of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in Beirut from 1976 to 1982. According to journalist Aaron Klein, “Rashid Khalidi at times has denied working directly for the PLO but Palestinian diplomatic sources in Ramallah told
WorldNetDaily
he indeed worked on behalf of WAFA. Khalidi also advised the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference in 1991.” What’s more, “during documented speeches and public events, Khalidi has called Israel an ‘apartheid system in creation’ and a destructive ‘racist’ state. He has multiple times expressed support for Palestinian terror, calling suicide bombings a response to ‘Israeli aggression.’ He dedicated his 1986book, ‘Under Siege,’ to ‘those who gave their lives… in defense of the cause of Palestine and independence of Lebanon.’ Critics assailed the book as excusing Palestinian terrorism.” 22
    In 2001 and 2002, the fiercely anti-Israeli Arab American Action Network (AAAN), headed by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, received $110,000 in grants from the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization. 23 One of the members of the Woods Fund board of directors at that time was Barack Obama, Khalidi’s former colleague back in the 1990s, when they both taught at the University of Chicago. Like Ayers, Khalidi also took a financial interest in Obama’s political career: in 2000, he held a fund-raiser for Obama’s unsuccessful run for a seat in the House of Representatives. 24 In October 2008, the
Los Angeles Times
obtained a video of a 2003 AAAN dinner attended by Obama, Ayers, Dohrn, and Khalidi. The
Times
refused to release the video, leading to angry accusations of journalistic bias from the McCain campaign, since it was widely rumored that the video showed Obama making or at very least assenting to anti-Israel statements. 25
    One thing that the
Times
did reveal was that Obama spoke warmly at the banquet