Ken Berwitz

Something smells about this story.  Badly

I was driving home last night and tuned in to John Batchelor's radio show (the first time I ever did).  He was interviewing Aaron Klein of www.worldnetdaily.com. 

Klein was talking about the fact that state-dinner-crasher Tariq Salahi, was a close confidante of the virulently anti-Israel Khalid Rashidi - a close friend of President Obama's.  And that Salahi had been Vice President of  a virulently anti-Israel group called the Task Force on Palestine, but his involvement was scrubbed from the group's web site the day before.

FYI, the Task Force on Palestine is one of these phony "we want a two-state solution" groups which, in reality, will accept Israel only if it allows the "right of return" for all Arabs who claim descendency from those who left the land that is now Israel in 1948 (even if they never lived in Israel a day of their lives).  If that were to happen, Israel would immediately cease to be a Jewish state, and the Arab majority (those millions, plus the 1.4 or so million Arabs already living in Israel) would presumably turn Jews into what they are in every other Arab land - refugees or corpses.

Not surprisingly, this group was a valued participant in the J Street conference last month. 

But there's even more.  Today I read this, from the Washington Post:

A top Defense Department official corresponded with Tareq and Michaele Salahi in an effort to get them into last week's White House state dinner, according to sources familiar with an investigation into the security breach. On Friday the couple turned over copies of the email exchange to the Secret Service investigators.

 

Sources said the e-mails were sent from Michele S. Jones, the special assistant to the Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon-based liaison to the White House, who lists the Salahis' lawyer, Paul W. Gardner, as one of her 50 friends on the Facebook social networking site.

 

Several people familiar with the Jones-Salahi correspondence argued the e-mails support the Salahis' case that they were cleared to attend Tuesday night's gala.

Bottom line:  The claim that Tariq and Michaele Sahalhi just pranced into the White House without some kind of invitation does not - repeat, does not - hold water.

There is more to this story than a couple of publicity hounds who got lucky.  The smell of it is that these two - especially him - were people who were invited, but someone (maybe Mr. Obama himself) belatedly realized what a disaster it would be, especially among Jewish supporters, if it got out that they were welcome guests.

Stay tuned. 

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UPDATE:  The Salahis were on the Today Show this morning, and stated unequivocally that they were invited guests.  But Baghdad Bob Gibbons, President Obama's stumbling, bumbling press secretary (who reminds me a lot of the characters Grady Sutton used to play many years ago) states unequivocally that they were not invited at all.

The plot sickens.  And there is bound to be more coming.