John McCain says he's sure The Los Angeles Times would be
quick to produce a tape that purported to show him or his
running mate at a neo-Nazi event, so he can't understand
why it won't show Barack Obama in the company of a former
PLO mouthpiece. John McCain slammed The Los Angeles Times Wednesday for
refusing to release a videotape that the newspaper's editors
say shows Barack Obama praising a Chicago professor who
served as a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation
Organization when it was a U.S.-designated terror group.
Speaking to two Florida radio stations, the Republican
presidential candidate suggested a double standard in
reporting by the newspaper and said if he were hanging
out with neo-Nazis he'd bet the tape would be made public.
The Times says it is standing by its promise not to show
the tape, which it got from an anonymous source. The
newspaper also has not provided a transcript of the 2003
farewell party for University of Chicago professor Rashid
Khalidi. Among others in attendance at the soiree were
former Weather Underground founders William Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn.
"Apparently this is a tape with a dinner that Mr. Ayers,
the former, and now still, unrepentant terrorist, who was
at, and also the, one of the leading spokespersons for
the PLO. Now, why that should not be made public is
beyond me," McCain told La Kalle radio.
"I guarantee you, if there was a tape with me and Sarah
Palin and some neo-Nazi or one of those, you think that
that tape wouldn't be made public? Of course, Americans
need to know, particularly about Ayers, and also about
the PLO. So hopefully there will be enough pressure on
the L.A. Times that it'll come out, but its really
unfortunate that we have to go through this," McCain
continued.
Palin too lambasted the newspaper for its inaction.
"If there's a Pulitzer Prize category for excelling in
cow-towing, then the LA Times, you're winning," she said.
The LA Times told FOXNews.com that it won't reveal how it
obtained the tape of Khalidi's farewell party, nor will the
newspaper release it. Spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said the
paper is not interested in revisiting the story. "As far as
we're concerned, the story speaks for itself," she said.
The newspaper reported Tuesday evening in a story on its Web
site that the tape was from a confidential source.
"The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because
it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on
the condition that we not release it," the Times' editor,
Russ Stanton, said. "The Times keeps its promises to sources."
Asked about the party and his relationship with Obama, Khalidi
refused Wednesday to discuss the matter.
"I am not speaking to the press at this time, and do not speak
to Fox in any case, as I just wrote one of your colleagues,"
Khalidi wrote in an e-mail statement to FOXNews.com.
The Obama campaign called the impasse "just another recycled,
manufactured controversy from the McCain campaign to distract
voters’ attention from John McCain’s lock-step support for
George Bush’s economic policies."
"Barack Obama has been clear and consistent on his support for
Israel, and has been clear that Rasheed Khalidi is not an
adviser to him or his campaign and that he does not share
Khalidi’s views. Instead of giving lectures on media bias,
John McCain should answer why, under his own chairmanship, the
International Republican Institute repeatedly funded an
organization Khalidi founded, the Center for Palestine Research
and Studies, over the course of many years," said spokesman
Tommy Vietor.
The L.A. Times first reported on the relationship between Obama
and Khalidi in April.
In the article, it quoted Obama at Khalidi's going-away party,
calling Khalidi his "friend and frequent dinner companion." At
the time, Obama reminisced about dinners at the home of Khalidi
and his wife Mona, who were leaving Chicago and heading to New
York for Khalidi's new job at Columbia University.
The dinner talks 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,"
the Times wrote, quoting Obama on the purported videotape.
The article went on to describe how Obama offered new hope to
Palestinian Americans for a new U.S. policy on the Middle East
and mentioned that one guest at the party compared "Zionist
settlers on the West Bank" to Usama bin Laden because both had
been "blinded by ideology."
Palin said she wants to know how Obama responded to derogatory
comments said about Israel and America's support for its ally
during the party.
"Israel was described there as the perpetrator of terrorism
instead of the victim. What we don't know, what we don't know,
is how Barack Obama responded to these slurs on a country that
he now professes to support, and the reason is the newspaper
that has the tape, The Los Angeles Times, refuses to release
it," she said. "It must be nice for a candidate to have major
news organizations looking after his best interests like that.
The original article pointed out that the party, in which Khalidi
encouraged guests to support Obama's run for the U.S. Senate, was
videotaped and a copy had been obtained by The Times. It did not
mention that the Times reporter and editors had vowed not to show
the tape to anyone.
Sullivan said she would not give details of what else may be on
the tape, adding that anyone interested in the video should read
the newspaper's report, which was its final account.
"This is a story that we reported on six months ago, so any
suggestion that we're suppressing the tape is absurd -- we're
the ones that brought the existence of the tape to light,"
Sullivan said.
Khalidi, who from 1976 to1982 was reportedly a director of the
official Palestinian press agency, WAFA, which was operating in
exile from Beirut with the PLO, is currently the Edwards Said
professor of Arab Studies at Columbia.
When Columbia hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a
guest speaker last year, Khalidi told The New York Times after
the appearance that he was "embarrassed" that university president
Lee Bollinger wasn't nicer to the head of the Islamic Republic
during his visit.
A pro-Palestinian activist, Khalidi has been a fierce critic of
American foreign policy and of Israel, which he has accused of
establishing an "apartheid system" of government. The PLO advocate
helped facilitate negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians
in the early '90s, but he has denied he was ever an employee of
the group, contradicting accounts in The New York Times and
Washington Times.
Khalidi, who has a new book coming out in February titled "Sowing
Crisis: The Cold War and American Hegemony in the Middle East,"
has been called "the foremost U.S. historian of the modern Middle
East." That description appeared in a 2004 book review from University
of Maryland professor Warren I. Cohen that appeared in the The Los
Angeles Times.
The L.A. Times article in April noted that Khalidi was a professor
at the University of Beirut at the time he was a mouthpiece for
the PLO.
Obama in recent months has distanced himself from the man the Times
says he once called a friend. "He is not one of my advisers. He's
not one of my foreign policy people," Obama said at a campaign event
in May. "He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees
with a lot of Israel's policy."
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