One of the top stories of the day is the Los Angeles Times’s refusal to make public a video of Barack Obama addressing a 2003 farewell dinner for Rashid Khalidi, who was departing Chicago for New York City, where he was to occupy the Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies at Columbia University. Also at the dinner were professor Bill Ayers and his wife, professor Bernardine Dohrn, former bomb-planting members of the Weathermen.

As Gabriel Schoenfeld notes, professor Khalidi has been:

a longtime Palestinian activist, who has built his career disseminating Arab-nationalist propaganda. He calls Israel an “apartheid system in creation.” He’s been a fierce detractor of the “Zionist lobby” here in the United States.
In the late 1980s, Khalidi served in Lebanon as director of WAFA, a Palestinian news agency under de facto control of Yasser Arafat’s PLO. He has called attacks on Israeli soldiers by Palestinian civilians legitimate “resistance.”

The sagacious Schoenfeld poses the right questions about this videotape, to which voters urgently need access:

What exactly did Obama say [in his address before the group]? What did others say? According to the LA Times, along with speeches condemning Israeli “terrorism,” poetry denouncing the Jewish state was read at the event. How did Obama react? Did he applaud? Did he walk out? Or did he sit impassively?

In the end, Obama’s comportment at this celebration could foreshadow his decisions, in an Obama presidency, in matters relating to our fundamental security and that of the free world.