It seems that Barack Obama has yet another scary, obnoxious friend. His name is Rashid Khalidi, currently the head of the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia. Khalidi, to put it succinctly, is an apologist for terrorism and virulently anti Israel.
Barack Obama's relationship with Rashid Khalidi dates back to at least 2001, when the Woods Fund, of which Barack Obama was a director along with William Ayers, gave a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network (AAAN). Rashid Khalidi's wife, Mona, is President of AAAN. The Wood Fund gave AAAN a second grant , for $35,000, in 2002, according to World Net Daily. AAAN is a controversial community organizing group that refers to the establishment of the State of Israel as a "catastrophe" and supports radical immigration reform.
Rashid Khalidi taught in Beruit and worked for the Palestinian news agency WAFA and was a spokesman for Yassir Arafat during the late 1970s. Rashid Khalidi was reported to have been an advisor to the PLO in the 1980s and was a professor at the University of Chicago at the same time Barack Obama taught there. Rashid Khalid has called Israel an "apartheid system in creation" and a destructive "racist" state.
According to a story in World Net Daily:
"He has multiple times expressed support for Palestinian terror, calling suicide bombings response to 'Israeli aggression.' He dedicated his 1986 book, '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."
Khalidi supports a "one state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the State of Israel would be abolished in favor of a Palestinian state,
The LA Times has an account of a farewell dinner for Rashid Khalidi, held by AAAN, which Barack and Michelle Obama attended, along with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Khalidi was leaving his University of Chicago teaching job to join the faculty of Columbia University.