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John McCain slammed The Los Angeles Times Wednesday for refusing to release a videotape that the newspaper's editors say shows Barack Obama praising a Chicago professor who served as a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was a U.S.-designated terror group.
Speaking to two Florida radio stations, the Republican presidential candidate suggested a double standard in reporting by the newspaper and said if he were hanging out with neo-Nazis he'd bet the tape would be made public.
The Times says it is standing by its promise not to show the tape, which it got from an anonymous source. The newspaper also has not provided a transcript of the 2003 farewell party for University of Chicago professor Rashid Khalidi. Among others in attendance at the soiree were former Weather Underground founders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
"Apparently this is a tape with a dinner that Mr. Ayers ... was at, and also ... one of the leading spokespersons for the PLO. Now, why that should not be made public is beyond me," McCain told La Kalle radio.
"I guarantee you, if there was a tape with me and Sarah Palin and some neo-Nazi or one of those, you think that that tape wouldn't be made public? Of course, Americans need to know, particularly about Ayers, and also about the PLO. So hopefully there will be enough pressure on the L.A. Times that it'll come out, but its really unfortunate that we have to go through this," McCain continued.
Palin too lambasted the newspaper for its inaction.
"If there's a Pulitzer Prize category for excelling in cow-towing, then the LA Times, you're winning," she said.
The LA Times told FOXNews.com that it won't reveal how it obtained the tape of Khalidi's farewell party, nor will the newspaper release it. Spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said the paper is not interested in revisiting the story. "As far as we're concerned, the story speaks for itself," she said.
The newspaper reported Tuesday evening in a story on its Web site that the tape was from a confidential source.
"The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it," the Times' editor, Russ Stanton, said. "The Times keeps its promises to sources."
Asked about the party and his relationship with Obama, Khalidi refused Wednesday to discuss the matter.
"I am not speaking to the press at this time, and do not speak to Fox in any case, as I just wrote one of your colleagues," Khalidi wrote in an e-mail statement to FOXNews.com.
The Obama campaign called the impasse "just another recycled, manufactured controversy from the McCain campaign to distract voters' attention from John McCain's lock-step support for George Bush's economic policies."
"Barack Obama has been clear and consistent on his support for Israel, and has been clear that Rasheed Khalidi is not an adviser to him or his campaign and that he does not share Khalidi's views. Instead of giving lectures on media bias, John McCain should answer why, under his own chairmanship, the International Republican Institute repeatedly funded an organization Khalidi founded, the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, over the course of many years," said spokesman Tommy Vietor.
Referring to the polling company used in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1990s and hired by IRI, the nonprofit, nonpartisan democratic advocacy organization s overseen by Congress, the McCain camp said Vietor's allegation doesn't compare.
"Funding polling by a relatively well-respected organization that may or may not have had Khalidi on its board at the time does not come close to equating to hours of dinnertime conversations and glowing testimonials at a farewell dinner," retorted McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb.
The L.A. Times first reported on the relationship between Obama and Khalidi in April.
Click here to read the original LA Times story: 'Palestinians See a Friend in Barack Obama.'
In the article, it quoted Obama at Khalidi's going-away party, calling Khalidi his "friend and frequent dinner companion." At the time, Obama reminisced about dinners at the home of Khalidi and his wife Mona, who were leaving Chicago and heading to New York for Khalidi's new job at Columbia University.
The dinner talks had been "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It's for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table," but around "this entire world," the Times wrote, quoting Obama on the purported videotape.
The article went on to describe how Obama offered new hope to Palestinian Americans for a new U.S. policy on the Middle East and mentioned that one guest at the party compared "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Usama bin Laden because both had been "blinded by ideology."
Palin said she wants to know how Obama responded to derogatory comments said about Israel and America's support for its ally during the party.
"Israel was described there as the perpetrator of terrorism instead of the victim. What we don't know, what we don't know, is how Barack Obama responded to these slurs on a country that he now professes to support, and the reason is the newspaper that has the tape, The Los Angeles Times, refuses to release it," she said. "It must be nice for a candidate to have major news organizations looking after his best interests like that.
The original article pointed out that the party, in which Khalidi encouraged guests to support Obama's run for the U.S. Senate, was videotaped and a copy had been obtained by The Times. It did not mention that the Times reporter and editors had vowed not to show the tape to anyone.
Sullivan said she would not give details of what else may be on the tape, adding that anyone interested in the video should read the newspaper's report, which was its final account.
"This is a story that we reported on six months ago, so any suggestion that we're suppressing the tape is absurd -- we're the ones that brought the existence of the tape to light," Sullivan said.
Khalidi, who from 1976 to1982 was reportedly a director of the official Palestinian press agency, WAFA, which was operating in exile from Beirut with the PLO, is currently the Edwards Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia.
When Columbia hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a guest speaker last year, Khalidi told The New York Times after the appearance that he was "embarrassed" that university president Lee Bollinger wasn't nicer to the head of the Islamic Republic during his visit.
A pro-Palestinian activist, Khalidi has been a fierce critic of American foreign policy and of Israel, which he has accused of establishing an "apartheid system" of government. The PLO advocate helped facilitate negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in the early '90s, but he has denied he was ever an employee of the group, contradicting accounts in The New York Times and Washington Times.
Khalidi, who has a new book coming out in February titled "Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Hegemony in the Middle East," has been called "the foremost U.S. historian of the modern Middle East." That description appeared in a 2004 book review from University of Maryland professor Warren I. Cohen that appeared in the The Los Angeles Times.
The L.A. Times article in April noted that Khalidi was a professor at the University of Beirut at the time he was a mouthpiece for the PLO.
Obama in recent months has distanced himself from the man the Times says he once called a friend. "He is not one of my advisers. He's not one of my foreign policy people," Obama said at a campaign event in May. "He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel's policy."
The Los Angeles Times endorsed Obama for president on Oct. 19.
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