The Audacity Of Hopefully Strangling More Palestinians

Here's an excerpt of Barack Obama's letter on Gaza to US Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad:

Dear Ambassador Khalilzad,

I urge you to ensure that the Security Council issue no statement and pass no resolution on this matter that does not fully condemn the rocket assault Hamas has been conducting on civilians in southern Israel...

All of us are concerned about the impact of closed border crossings on Palestinian families. However, we have to understand why Israel is forced to do this... Israel has the right to respond while seeking to minimize any impact on civilians...

Sincerely,
Barack Obama

Ali Abunimah has some pictures of Obama and his wife with Edward Said at a 1999 event in Chicago, along with this:

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood...As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front."

And here's a section about Zalmay Khalilzad from the book Leo Strauss and the American Empire:

At [the University of] Chicago, one pursued the life of the mind. There was nothing higher, there was nothing else...

Albert Wohlstetter belonged to another world: the world of the policymaking coasts: the world of Washington and Rand. He flew between Chicago and Washington, between Chicago and various think tanks...

Wohlstetter invited the class to a reception at his house. He didn't live, as most of the professors did, in Hyde Park, an old, integrated neighborhood of four-flats and apartments. He lived at the edge of Lincoln Park in an elegant and lavish apartment, where we drank champagne and ate strawberries. This wasn't the life of the mind. This was the life of the privileged and powerful. I don't know why Paul Wolfowitz entered it. I do know how and why Zalmay Khalilzad did.

He is a protege of Wolfowitz, who worked with him on the war with Iraq and the occupation...When I knew him, he was an Afghani graduate student and a radical. He boasted of the demonstrations he had organized in Beirut, of the fedayin he knew and had worked with, and of his friends who regularly visited Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi. He went to pro-Palestinian meetings. His room had a poster of Nasser in tears. He and I had taken Wohlstetter's course on nuclear war together. He didn't seem, at the time, particularly interested in the course. He was, however, enthralled by Wohlstetter's party. In the elevator, in the apartment, he kept saying how much it all cost, how expensive it was, how much money Wohlstetter must have. Later, he borrowed my copy of Kojeve's Lectures on Hegel. When he returned it, one sentence was underlined. "The bourgeois intellectual neither fights nor works." The next summer, Wohlstetter got Khalilzad a job at Rand. I don't know what happened to the poster of Nasser.

(Obama letter via IOZ)

—Jonathan Schwarz