Obama's Buddy, Rashid Khalidi, Couldn't Be An Anti-Semite!

Jeffrey Goldberg responds to Joe Klein's claim that Rashid Khalidi cannot be an anti-Semite because he is a Palestinian Arab. Goldberg writes:

As I said, the only people who insult Jews by denying the meaning of the term are, in my experience, anti-Semitic. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, told me in an interview once that his organization could not be anti-Semitic, because Arabs were the true Semites, while Jews were simply European impostors. This interview occurred at a time when Yassin's suicide bombers were systematically seeking out large groups of Jews in order to murder them for the crime of being Jewish. By Joe's dangerous new standard, the World War II-era Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a Nazi fellow traveler and a frank advocate of total Jewish extermination, could not be called an anti-Semite because he was Arab.

Read the whole thing.

Actually, Goldberg claims that Rashid Khalidi is not an anti-Semite:

I see that his sympathies frequently cause him to distort Middle East history. But an anti-Semite? I don't think so. In fact, Rashid Khalidi is one of the rare Palestinian advocates who argues, as he has with me, that Arabs must study Jewish history, including and especially the history of Jew-hatred, in order to better understand Israel, and to reach a compromise with it.

It's awfully open minded of Goldberg to take Khalidi at his word. Paul Mirengoff of Powerline notes however:

According to Fox News, in 1991 Khalidi wrote an obituary for Salah Khalaf, a founding member of the terrorist Black September organization which, among other things, carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Khalaf was known as Israel's most-wanted terrorist. Fox News reports that in the obituary Khalidi praised Khalaf and said he would be "sorely missed by the Palestinian people to whom he devoted his life."

His co-blogger, John Hinderaker, expands on this in the same post:

This strikes me as a major story. Salah Khalaf, better known as Abu Iyad, masterminded the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. By his own account in his memoirs, he personally selected the terrorists who carried out the attack and delivered weapons to them. So the fact that he was a leading terrorist was anything but a secret. Nevertheless, when Khalaf was murdered in 1991, Obama's close friend Rashid Khalidi praised him and said that he would be "sorely missed." He was, no doubt, missed by those who approve of terrorist mass murders. It is fair to say that Khalidi, a representative of the PLO, was among that number.

Khalidi has a soft spot for terrorists who kills Jews--does that count as anti-Semitism?

Technorati Tag: Anti-Semitism and Rashid Khalidi.