Replies

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=74231

Khalid al-Mansour had other friends of influence in the literary and publishing world, foremost among them the late, literary leftist superstar and terrorist suck-up, Edward Said.

Said and Obama knew each other. A photo floating around the blogosphere shows the pair engaged in intimate discussion at an Arab-American community dinner
in Chicago 1998.

Bloggers ask how a then obscure state senator managed to wangle a seat next to the evening’s keynote speaker, a man the Nation would describe as “probably the best-known intellectual in the world.”

The answer can be traced back to Obama’s two-year stint at Columbia University in the early 1980s, where Said taught as a distinguished professor of comparative literature.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Obama took at least one course from Said. The intimacy of their 1998 conversation suggests a deeper relationship.

Obama, however, will not talk at all about Said, his New York years or his trip to Pakistan during those years despite numerous requests from the New York Times.

Like Obama, Said made his deracinated childhood the central, compelling metaphor for his significant life work. His identity as a Palestinian and a refugee, driven from his homeland by Israeli violence, would inform everything he wrote.

Said did not shy from using his grief and his influence to advance his cause. For 14 years, he served on the Palestine National Conference, a kind of parliament-in-exile alongside the likes of the PLO’s Yassir Arafat and still harder core radicals from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the terrorist group that hijacked the Achille Lauro.

Unfortunately for Said, an Israeli scholar named Justus Reid Weiner did two years of hard-nosed, boots-on-the-ground background research on Said’s life and published his findings in Commentary.

Weiner had proved beyond all doubt that America’s most celebrated Palestinian refugee was not a Palestinian or a refugee, let alone a Muslim.

In reality, Said was a Christian and an American citizen from birth, who grew up not in Palestine but in Cairo, where he attended the best British schools before leaving for a pricey American prep school as a teenager.

Although the New York Times reluctantly confirmed Weiner’s findings, the major media had no more interest in exposing the fraud of Said’s life any more than they do Muhammad Ali’s or Obama’s.

Among Said’s friends and allies on the American-hating, Arafat-loving left were none other than Khalid al-Mansour and – drum roll, please – William Ayers.

Radical turned actor Peter Coyote suggests as much in his diary written for the 1996 Democratic National Convention.

“After that,” Coyote writes, “I inform Martha that I’m dragging her to the apartment of old friends, ex-Weathermen, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, hosting a party for Senator Leahy. Perhaps Edward Said will be there.”