The controversy surrounding Senator Barack Obama's friendship with Rashid Khalidi, and the tape being suppressed by the Los Angeles Times, is overshadowing the important fact that Khalidi is just one of many Israel-hating Islamic characters that Obama has allied himself with.

For example, these people are connected directly to his Senate office or campaign:

• Cynthia K. Miller, treasurer of his Senate campaign, is a member of a member Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

• Jennifer Mason, Obama's Director of Constituent Services, is also a member of the Nation of Islam.

• Other Nation of Islam members, including consultant Shakir Muhammad, held important roles in the Obama state Senate campaign.

And they had their influence. When Obama first ran for the US Senate, he gave militant responses to the Chicago Jewish News about Israel. Obama denounced Israel's fence, which he called a "wall" and "barrier to peace." He favored working with Yasser Arafat. When members of the Chicago Jewish community circulated his responses, Obama said that the answers were not his positions, but the work of a low-level intern. He submitted new answers. But that was a lie, an insider says. In fact, they were the work of Obama's Policy Director, Audra Wilson. Moreover, Obama told the insider that he blamed the Mideast conflict on the Jews: "Barack told me that he felt that the Jewish community was too inflexible, and that was why the situation in the Mideast could not be resolved." (Source: Debbie Schlussel)

There are also some "bigger fish" in Obama's Crew of Anti-Israel Friends:

• The Khalid al-Mansour connection: According to former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton, Mansour "was raising money for" Obama's expenses at Harvard Law School. Mansour, a Black American (né Don Warden), became adviser to Saudi prince Al-Walid Bin-Talal, CAIR's largest individual donor. Mansour holds standard Islamist views: he absolves the Islamist government in Sudan of sponsoring slavery; he denies a Jewish tie to Jerusalem; and he wrote a booklet titled "Americans Beware! The Zionist Plot Against S. Arabia." (Both Obama and Mansour deny Sutton's account.)

• The Kenny Gamble (also known as Luqman Abdul-Haqq) connection: Gamble, a once-prominent pop music producer, cut the ribbon to the Obama campaign headquarters housed in a South Philadelphia building he owns. Gamble is an Islamist who buys large swaths of real estate to create Muslim-only residential areas. Also, as the self-styled "emir" of the United Muslim Movement, he has many links to Islamist organizations, including CAIR and the Muslim Alliance in North America. (MANA's "emir" is Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.)

• The Mazen Asbahi connection: The Obama campaign's first Muslim outreach coordinator resigned after it came to light that he had served on the board of a subsidiary of the Saudi-sponsored North American Islamic Trust with Jamal Said, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Hamas funding trial. Asbahi has ties to CAIR's Chicago and Detroit offices, to the Islamic Society of North America, yet another unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas funding trial, and to other Islamist organizations.

• The Minha Husaini connection: The campaign's second Muslim outreach coordinator has an Islamist background, having served as an intern in the Muslim Public Service Network. Immediately upon her appointment by Obama, she met with a group of about 30 Muslims, including such notorious figures as CAIR's Nihad Awad, the Muslim American Society's Mahdi Bray, who has publicly supported Hamas and Hizbullah, and Johari Abdul Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah Mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, who has advised American Muslims: "You can blow up bridges, but you cannot kill people who are innocent on their way to work." (Source: Daniel Pipes)
  One prominent Palestinian-American will tell you that Obama is hiding his true feelings toward the Jewish State.
  

So, how can Senator Obama be pro-Israel and have so many anti-Israel buddies? Well, one prominent Palestinian-American will tell you that Obama is hiding his true feelings toward the Jewish State.

Ali Abunimah is a pro-Arab journalist and founder of the Electronic Intifada website. He will tell you that Senator Obama is full of crap when he says that he is pro-Israel: "If disappointing, given his historically close relations to Palestinian-Americans, Obama's about-face is not surprising. He is merely doing what he thinks is necessary to get elected."

Abunimah says that Obama has long been a friend of the Palestinian community, but he knows where the money is. He has changed his position because those in the pro-Israel camp (American Jews?) have the money to get him elected.

So, folks, you see you really don't need the LA Times video to figure out what Senator Obama said at that dinner. It was probably something horribly anti-Israel, like, "Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine" or that there's been "genocide against the Palestinian people by Israelis." Either way, it is clear that those who love the Jewish State should not be voting for him next Tuesday.