McCain Funds PLO?

John “Yahya” McCain

Senator John McCain has funded PLO terrorists! Well, okay, they’re not called “terrorists” anymore, otherwise Condi Rice couldn’t meet with them, but they’re called terrorists in South Florida, right? And Sarah Palin can see the Golan Heights from her house. She said:

It seems that there is yet another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama going back several years. This is important because his associate, Rashid Khalidi, he in addition to being a political ally of Barack Obama, he’s a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Of course, Governor Palin can’t really pronounce “Khalidi.” And Dr. Rashid Khalidi, born in New York, is a professor in the History Department of Columbia University, where he holds the Edward Said Chair of Modern Arab Studies in the Middle East Institute of the School of International and Public Affairs. The late Dr. Edward Said, after whom the position is named, was a member of the Palestinian National Council or PNC for a few years, not the PLO, but, hey, close enough a week before the election.

And Dr. Khalidi taught at Chicago when Barack Obama did, their kids went ot the same school, and Obama was at the goodbye party when Khalidi left Chicago for his current job in New York. And Barack Obama took an undergrad literature course from Said himself. OMG!

But wait!

Dr. Khalidi ran the Center for Palestine Research and Studies in the 1990s, which conducted research in the West Bank, funded in part by the International Republican Institute. These IRI grants were sizable; they could have kept Governor Palin in designer clothes for a couple of months. One grant in 1998 was for $448,873.

And the Chairman of the International Republican Institute since 1993? John Sidney McCain III.

Oh, that Professor Rashid Khalidi. Surely IRI Chairman McCain will recall him now and agree that Dr. Khalidi is an eminent American scholar.

Actually, since Governor Palin and Senator McCain have decided all Palestinians and Palestinian Americans have cooties, the IRI is petrified, and denies working closely with the Center for Palestine Research and Studies. The truth is still up on the web. 

The Center was a member of the CIPE Center for Private Enterprise Reform Network, run by the Center for International Private Enterprise, affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce  and one of the four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy, with funding from the Heritage Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development, so what’s the big deal?

Oh, the elderly Jewish vote in South Florida. Right.

Oy vey. We can’t wait until Tuesday is over.

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

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