JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Last weekend an Emmy Award-winning actor, and this weekend it’s an Academy Award-nominated actress. The Obama campaign’s Jewish Community Leadership Committee in Washington, D.C. is using some well-known Jewish celebrities to fire up Jewish supporters in the hotly contested swing state of Virginia.

Actress Debra Winger will be appearing at Obama JCLC campaign events in McLean and Alexandria, as well as canvassing and phone-banking with a group of JCLC activists on Sunday. Winger, best known for her roles in “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Terms of Endearment,” was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, spent some time as a student on a kibbutz and was part of an Israel Defense Forces youth program.

Last weekend, actor and singer Mandy Patinkin was in Northern Virginia and, among other appearances, had Shabbat dinner with about 40 Obama Jewish supporters — and a few undecideds — at a JCLC-sponsored event in McLean. Known for his roles in “The Princess Bride” and “Chicago Hope,” Patinkin spoke to the group about why he backs Obama — and even sang a song.

Back a couple weeks ago, John McCain was directly asked in a “tele-town hall” meeting with Jewish leaders why he wasn’t bringing up Barack Obama’s 20-year association with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He said then that the “issue of Pastor Wright is pretty well known by the American people.” On the other hand, he said, “We need to know more about” the Ayers and ACORN matters.

Did McCain’s decision to not bring up Wright come with some sort of gag order for the rest of the campaign staff? Because that seems to be the best explanation for the strange exchange that took place Thursday afternoon on CNN between anchor Rick Sanchez and McCain-Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb.

The exchange began with a discussion about McCain’s chairmanship of the International Republican Institute’s and the $448,000 it gave to an organization co-founded by Rashid Khalidi — even though the campaign has been criticizing Obama’s relationship with Khalidi when the two were professors at the University of Chicago. But Goldfarb focused on the farewell party Obama attended for Khalidi, which the Los Angeles Times has reported included some speakers who harshly criticize Israel.

“You are missing the point again, Rick,” said Goldfarb. “The point is that Barack Obama has a long track record of being around anti-Semitic and anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric.”

So Sanchez challenged Goldfarb to “name one other person besides Khalidi” who Obama “hangs around that is anti-Semitic?”

After Goldfarb throws out the name of William Ayers and Sanchez rejects that answer and presses him to “name one person,” the campaign spokesman replies, “Rick, we both know who number two is.” That brought this exchange:

SANCHEZ: Who? Would you tell us?

GOLDFARB: No, Rick, I think we all know who we are talking about here.

SANCHEZ: Somebody who is anti-Semitic that he hangs around with.

GOLDFARB: I think we all know who we are talking about.

SANCHEZ: Say it.

GOLDFARB: I think we all know who we’re talking about, Rick.

There seems no other explanation for that bizarre exchange other than that Goldfarb was referring to Wright–and hoping that Sanchez would bring it up first.

Now the question of whether Wright should be called an anti-Semite is, at the least, arguable. (That’s leaving aside the dubious allegation that Khalidi is anti-Semitic, which you can read more about here.)

Wright has without question “palled around” with an anti-Semite, traveling to Libya in 1984 with Louis Farrakhan and honoring the Nation of Islam leader with his Trinity United Church of Christ’s top award. And he’s certainly been critical of Israeli policies — the church reprinted an Los Angeles Times op-ed by a top official of Hamas in its bulletin. But while his publicly released sermons and other media appearances may have contained plenty of anti-American rhetoric, they haven’t included anything that could be construed as anti-Semitic. And Wright has even worked with the American Jewish Committee in Chicago. In addition, the ADL has said that they have no evidence of anti-Semtism from the pastor.

So was Goldfarb referring to Wright, or some mysterious, unnamed anti-Semite? He wouldn’t say afterwards, telling JTA, “You watched the interview” and suggesting that viewers could draw their own conclusions.

• Norm Coleman files suit against Al Franken, accusing the Democrat of false campaign ads. The case won’t be heard until well after the election.
• We may not truly know how the Jews voted until next year, writes Brett Lieberman in the Forward.
• Akiva Eldar in Haaretz on what kind of change a new American president can bring to the Middle East.
• “The best American president for Israel is the leader whom the American voters decide to be the best president for them,” writes Uri Dromi in the Miami Herald.
• Also at the Herald, Frida Ghitis writes that the Muslim world isn’t as excited about Obama as they were a few months ago.
• Jon Stewart tries to get Obama to joke about Florida Jews and he doesn’t take the bait
• The Jerusalem Post’s Hilary Leila Krieger goes to Phoenix to profile John McCain.
• Georgetown University’s Jacques Berlinerblau suggests Sarah Palin needs a “religious imaging consultant” to help her in the Jewish community if she ends up running for president in the future, at the Washington Post’s In Faith blog.
• Five hundred clerics, including some rabbis, say they’ll pray this weekend that Obama will “repent” on his “federal sex policies.”
• Dennis Shulman and Scott Garrett use some humor in the final days of the campaign, according to Politicker NJ.
• Another video: “Oy, McCainia!” — sung to the tune of the old Yiddish folk song “Rumania, Rumania.”
• The New York Times has a look at the most controversial man in America right now — Rashid Khalidi.
• Jeffrey Goldberg rips Joe Klein (and defends Rashid Khalidi), with an argument that JTA’s Ron Kampeas also made yesterday.
• The New Republic on why the Jewish vote has turned towards Obama.
• The race to replace Jim Saxton between Jewish state legislator, and Democrat, John Adler and Republican Chris Myers is heating up — supporters are getting into fights before debates, according to the Asbury Park Press.
• The Washington Post editorializes that the McCain campaign’s treatment of Khalidi is “condemnable” and calls the campaign’s “ad hominem” attacks “increasingly reckless.

Martin Kramer claims my earlier post about Rashid Khalidi is a “tissue of errors.”

Martin notified me of his posting not long before “Life on Mars,” my new favorite guilty pleasure about a cop in 2008 who gets knocked back to 1973 (I indulged, hence the late posting.). The cop’s constantly caught between knowing what happens next and not really knowing.

Kind of like Martin’s fisking. The Oct. 23 1991 New York Times report he cites does indeed report concerns by the Israelis that a newly announced team of advisers, including Rashid Khalidi, might be unacceptable because it has not been vetted for PLO ties, among other reasons.

The problem with this is that evidently, the team, led by Faisal Husseini subsequently proved acceptable. I say “evidently” because they attended the Madrid talks, and by the time they were launched on Oct. 30, Khalidi is in Madrid speaking to the Jerusalem Post for the wider team. I can’t find any further Israeli objections to the team, except for Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi, but not because of the PLO affiliation.

Did Israeli intelligence vet the names of the advisers, too? It’s likely they did; the original 14 delegates were announced only on Oct. 21; by Oct. 23 Israel had cleared them. An additional vetting would not have taken much longer. Reading Dennis Ross’ account of the talks in “The Missing Peace,” it’s also clear that the Americans were also closely vetting all participants.

We know Israel objected to Husseini because of his murky relationship with the PLO, but that’s part of why the United States invited him: there was nothing to pin him directly to the organization.

We also know that the more serious objection Israel had to the advisers was that Husseini and Ashrawi were residents of east Jerusalem who did not have Jordanian citizenship; that posited a Palestinian claim to Jerusalem.

I found the Jerusalem Post article through the paid archives, but here’s what it quoted Khalidi as saying:

“There is, has been, and always will be constant consultation between the PLO in the occupied territories and outside the PLO; everyone knows this,” said Rashid Khalidi, an advisory committee member who teaches Middle East history at the University of Chicago.

However, Khalidi added that Palestinians would respect the ground rules of the peace conference which bar open contact with the PLO and its overt participation in the peace talks.

“The Palestinians don’t want to provoke a breakup of this process. We want this process to succeed and if doesn’t we don’t want it to be our fault.” he said.

Like I said in my earlier post, the ban on PLO participation was a nudge and a wink; yet clearly, under the rules Khalidi described, he was not and could not have been officially involved with the organization.

Martin also cites the 1982 Tom Friedman article and says that surely Khalidi would have corrected it, because the New York Times is the paper of record - except that Khalidi was quoted in Beirut on the third day of Israel’s invasion. The same chaotic conditions cited by Martin to prove that Khalidi MUST have sought an alliance, and furthermore he must have sought it with Fatah surely prevented him from calling home and finding out what the New York Times was saying. The detective in Life on Mars is constantly regretting the absence of the Internet in 1973; Martin apparently doesn’t realize it wasn’t readily available in 1982 either.

Maybe when Khalidi eventually got back to New York in 1983, he dropped by 43rd Street, thumbed through the archives, and thought “Well, Tom more or less got it right.”

Or maybe not. Here’s Friedman himself three years later reviewing Khalidi’s 1985 book, “Under Siege - P.L.O. Decisionmaking During the 1982 War”:

Rashid Khalidi witnessed this war at first hand. An Oxford-trained Palestinian historian with close contacts in the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership, he had both the academic background and the political sources needed to assess Palestinian decisionmaking during the weeks of siege. After having conducted additional interviews with members of both the P.L.O.’s leadership and the American Administration, and having sifted through the extensive archive of telexes and documents maintained by the P.L.O., Mr. Khalidi has produced an extremely valuable analysis of how and why the P.L.O. made the decisions it did during that fateful summer of 1982.

For students of the Middle East, his generally objective, lucid and incisive account of P.L.O. decisionmaking fills a critical void in the literature about the Israeli invasion - the Beirut side of which has been dominated by angry, and not particularly useful, accounts by journalists or memoirs in Arabic by P.L.O. officials. If Mr. Khalidi’s book is read alongside Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari’s excellent analysis of Israeli decisionmaking, ”Israel’s Lebanon War,” a reasonably complete picture of events can be drawn.

I’d like to hear from Friedman (does he read JTA?), but you’d think that if he knew Khalidi was a PLO staffer, it would merit mention in this description of the author. Yes, Khalidi “had close contacts in the PLO leadership;” I would hope that a historian of his discipline would. And Friedman contrasts Khalidi’s “objective” account with the self-interested tomes of - who? - actual PLO officials.