I’ve been switching off Fox News whenever they start one of their silly reports on Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the couple who crashed a state dinner the other day. They’ve been treating it like gossip, with perhaps some questions about security. But now I’m paying attention after reading a post from Gateway Pundit on various connections of these gatecrashers. First comes a 2005 photo of the couple at an event for the polo cup, with President Obama at the center of the group. Then comes a link to American Power, which has this to say:
Tareq Salahi, the polo-playing intruder, is a Palestinian nationalist with ties to the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) , a pro-Palestine lobby demanding the “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The “right of return” has long been considered the backdoor to Israel’s destruction. But not only that: ATFP President Ziad Asali is an America-basher who blamed 9/11 on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Asali was a lead U.S. official to PLO terrorist Yassir Arafat’s funeral in 2004. And in a position paper in 2007, the ATFP called for a power-sharing agreement at the Palestinian Authority, which would have included the State Department’s designated-terrorist group, Hamas.
Gateway Pundit goes on to cite the Canada Free Press saying that the ATFP has removed references to Salahi’s membership from its website. And Discover the Networks says Rashid Khalidi, Middle East Studies professor at Columbia and a militant Palestinian rights activist was vice president of ATFP. Khalidi is an old friend of Barack Obama’s.
So there are two links to President Obama. It looks as if there is more to this than just a case of uninvited guests crashing a White House dinner. My first thought when I read about the links to radical Palestinian rights people was that perhaps they were testing White House security with an eye to something bigger. But the connections with Obama don’t fit in. Very puzzling, and probably very significant.
Note from Ann: Here is a post I wrote last fall about that 2003 dinner when Rahshid Khalidi was leaving for Columbia University—you know the dinner that was filmed and the Los Angeles Times is still sitting on the film. We know that Khalidi and Obama knew each other well and we know that the dinner was put on by the Arab American Action Network. Someone should check with the Los Angeles Times and see if the Salahis “crashed” that dinner too!