Quick Takes: <i>News You May Have Missed</i>

Quick Takes: News You May Have Missed

By: Aaron Klein

Published: December 16th, 2009

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The Palestinian Authority has been negotiating an understanding with the Obama administration regarding a Palestinian threat to unilaterally ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state outside of negotiations with Israel, this column has learned.

According to a senior PA official, the PA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, headed a team that held a series of meetings the past few weeks with members of the Obama administration in Washington to discuss the U.S. response should the Palestinians bring to the UN Security Council a resolution to unilaterally create a Palestinian state.

“The U.S. position is less restrained than it appears in the media,” said the PA official, referring to media claims the U.S. would veto any such resolution.

The PA official said the Obama administration did not threaten to veto a unilateral resolution, which had been threatened by the Palestinians last month. The official also said the U.S. supports the creation of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders.

The report follows an interview last monthwith this reporter in which Ahmed Qurei, former PA prime minister and member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee, said the PA “reached an understanding with important elements within the [Obama] administration” to possibly bring to the resolution to the UN Security Council.

Hamas: We Do Not Dig Up Christian Graves

Hamas has strongly denied accusations it dug up the bodies of Christians because they were polluting the earth in the Gaza Strip.

“There is no truth to these claims. We will sue anyone who publishes them,” a spokesman for the office of senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told this column.

The spokesman pointed to a scheduled meeting this month between Hamas officials and local Christian leaders as evidence of dialogue and coexistence with Gaza’s tiny Christian community.

Over the weekend, Rev. Majed El Shafie, president of One Free World International, a human rights organization currently visiting Israel, accused Hamas of upsetting Christian burial sites.

“Hamas digs up the bodies of Christians from Christian burial sites in the Gaza Strip claiming that they pollute the earth,” Shafie charged.

His organization further charged that every three minutes a Christian is tortured in the Muslim world, and that this year more than 165,000 Christians will have been killed because of their faith, most of them in Muslim countries.

About 3,000 Christians live in the Gaza Strip, which has a population of over one million.

More Radicals In Obama’s Past

During President Obama’s recent West Point address in which he committed 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he referred to his opposition to the war in Iraq, which he first voiced at a 2002 anti-war rally said to have helped launch his political career.

That rally, which drew some 2,000 participants, was planned by socialist and Marxist activists associated with Weather Underground founder William Ayers, this column has learned.

The 2002 event, meant to protest the impending invasion of Iraq, was coordinated on behalf of a small group, Chicagoans Against War & Injustice, run by Marxist Carl Davidson and extremist activists Marilyn Katz and Bettylu Saltzman.

Davidson is a notorious far-left activist and former radical national leader in the anti-Vietnam movement. He served as national secretary for the infamous Students for a Democratic Society anti-war group, from which Ayers’s Weathermen later splintered.

Davidson, an outspoken Marxist, was a founder of the New Party, a controversial 1990s political party that sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda. This reporter previously exposed newspaper evidence showing Obama was a member of the New Party.

Katz, meanwhile, provided security for the Students for a Democratic Society and has known Ayers since the age of 17. During the SDS’ infamous Days of Rage riots in October 1969, Katz introduced protesters to a new weapon to deploy against the police: a cluster of nails sharpened at both ends and fastened in the center. Police later reported being hit by golf balls with nails through them, as well as by excrement. Katz would insist years later that her “guerrilla nails” were merely “a defensive weapon” to prevent “possible bad behavior by the police.”

Katz served on the finance committee of Obama’s presidential campaign. Obama initially met Katz through his first job at a law firm run by Judd Miner. The New York Times reported Katz “gave [Obama] entry into another activist network: the foot soldiers of the white student and black power movements that helped define Chicago in the 1960s.”

Fraud In Iraq Tied To Obama Ally

An American Iraqi at the center of recent fraud accusations that involve President Obama is running for upcoming parliamentary elections in Iraq.

Aiham Alsammarae previously served as Iraq’s U.S.-appointed electricity minister, a position he allegedly used to attempt to pass massive financial deals to Chicago bundler Tony Rezko, a convicted criminal who was a fundraiser and key point man over the years for Obama.

Obama’s senatorial office engaged in six months of negotiations with a company controlled by Rezko to lobby the U.S. government to push through a nixed $50 million contact to train Iraqi security personnel at a site in Chicago. The contract was awarded to Rezko’s company while Alsammarae, a long-time, close Rezko friend, served as Iraq’s electricity minister.

Alsammarae also awarded another Rezko-controlled operation as part of a $150 million contract to construct a 250-megawatt electricity plant in Iraq.

Alsammarae later was arrested by Iraqi authorities for bilking the coalition government out of some $650 million, including the attempted Rezko contracts. He was sprung from prison under questionable circumstances in 2006 and escaped from Iraq, where he was wanted until recently for questioning with regard to financial crimes.

Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.com. He appears throughout the week on leading U.S. radio programs and is the author of the book “The Late Great State of Israel.” Follow Klein on Twitter under the name “AaronKleinWND.”

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About the Author: Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief and senior reporter for WorldNetDaily.com. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York's 770-WABC Radio, the largest talk radio station in the U.S., every Sunday between 2-4 p.m (CHANGE TO 7-9 p.m.). His website is KleinOnline.com

Quick Takes: News You May Have Missed

Hamas: We Do Not Dig Up Christian Graves

More Radicals In Obama’s Past

Fraud In Iraq Tied To Obama Ally

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