First the good news: In a May 18 WorldNetDaily article, Aaron Klein correctly stated that Barack Obama “term[ed] the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a “constant sore” last week.” If you’ll recall, an unbylined WND article took Obama’s words out of context to falsely claim that he called Israel a “constant sore.”
Will WND issue a correction and apology for its previous article, now that Klein has gotten it right? Probably not — not even after publishing two articles with conflicting, irreconcilable claims. But we’ll watch for one anyway.
Now the bad news: The rest of Klein’s article is another desperate guilt-by-association smear of Obama, suggesting that using the term “constant sore” means that Obama “borrow[ed] the phraseology of a pro-Palestinian activist and harsh critic of Israel who has been described as a friend of the senator.”
Klein repeated a claim from a previous article that Khalidi “dedicated his 1986 book, ‘Under Siege,’ to ‘those who gave their lives … in defense of the cause of Palestine and independence of Lebanon.’ Critics assailed the book as excusing Palestinian terrorism and claim the dedication is in reference to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which at that time committed scores of anti-Western attacks and was labeled by the U.S. as a terror group[.]” Klein does not identify who these purported “critics” are.
Klein also delves into the murky anonymous-source pool, citing “a professor at the University of Chicago who said he has known Obama for 12 years” who “spoke on condition of anonymity” and other never-identified “sources at the University.”
UPDATE: In a previous article, Klein referred to William Ayers, not Khalidi, as a “confessed domestic terrorist.” This item has been edited to conform.