For a true friend, Obama also chose peculiar associates. He was quite friendly with Rashid Khalidi, a former director of the official press agency for the Palestine Liberation Organization (and now a professor at Columbia). Khalidi, who has called Israel an "apartheid" state and who defends the right of Palestinians to use violence against Israel, founded a group called the Arab American Action Network. When Obama served as a director of the Woods Fund in 2001 and 2002, the foundation donated $75,000 to the AAAN, for projects like an "oral history" project on the "Nakbah," which translates as "catastrophe," and is the name Palestinians use for the birth of Israel. Khalidi held a fundraiser for Obama when the latter ran for Congress in 2000, and according to a recent LA Times story, Obama has fond memories of time spent with Khalidi and his wife. Those conversations, he said, served as "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."
Speaking to AIPAC, Obama reframed his position on Iran. Whereas he had been one of only 22 senators to say he would vote against a 2007 resolution declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guards to be a terrorist force, he allowed in his speech that the guards "have rightly been labeled a terrorist organization." But of course, it would be much trickier for Obama to back away from his better known declaration that he would meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Obama's protestations of friendship for Israel notwithstanding, it just might make Israel's supporters a tad uncomfortable to reflect that Obama believes that the reason Iran is a threat (and he once called it a "tiny" threat) is because we have failed to be nice enough to them. "And the fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons, funding Hamas, funding Hezbollah."
At the AIPAC conference, Obama was a veritable Curtis LeMay, promising huge amounts of military hardware for Israel. Will the AIPAC members really not see through to the heart of the problem? Without a strong United States, Israel cannot hope to survive. And Obama's record as the most left-wing American senator strongly suggests that he believes in weakness.