About 90 protestors demonstrated outside the Los Angeles Times building at 1st and Spring Street on Thursday morning, demanding that the newspaper release a videotape of a private going-away party Barack Obama attended in 2003 for Palestinian college professor Rashid Khalidi. One of the protestors, Michelle Baron, of Encino, CA, told me that the strong underlying theme of the protest was “the fact that we are being betrayed by our press.”
Baron, who describes herself as “a very concerned American Jew,” said she was a die-hard Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton both times, but now supports John McCain – as do many more of her Jewish friends than the media is reporting. And despite enormous social pressure against “coming out” as a Republican and “willful blindness” on the part of many Jewish voters, the coalition is growing, she added.
Baron believes the real reason the LA Times has not released the tape is that when it becomes clear to voters that “Obama associates with the Arab American action network and extremists like Khalidi, it will damage the Democrats’ one rock-solid constituency – American Jews – which is already cracking. And it will give sustenance and energy to another constituency Democrats can’t afford to offend: American Christians, who are the best supporters of Israel because they understand what is at stake, and they don’t want those forces unleashed here.”
Baron, who admits being caught up in the 1960s anti-war movement and engaging in guerilla theater herself as a young woman, now believes the younger generation is “brainwashed.”
“We have lost our way. We don’t know American history and we don’t understand our founders [even though] the entire world has benefited from our limited government and free populace.” She said. “We are in big trouble. George Bush has done such a good job of protecting America that we’ve forgotten we’re in an existential war for our survival and the survival of our democratic ideals.”
Fellow protestor Ellenis Tohdjojo of Glendale, CA was born in Indonesia, moved to the U.S. in 1980, became a U.S. citizen and converted from Islam to Christianity. Tohdjojo and her immediate family are now Seventh Day Adventists. “We’re the only ones,” she told me; her extended family back in Indonesia who are still Muslims “hate us.”
When I asked her why she was spending hours protesting in front of the LA Times, she asked me in return: “If there is nothing going on, why do they have to hide it? We want the truth. It’s that simple.”
But in the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign, asking for the simple truth may be asking too much of a once-respected newspaper that’s chosen to suppress it instead.
