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Social networks can be tricky things, as John McCain found out this week.

The Republican presidential nominee and his team have lately been hammering Barack Obama for his association with Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate of Palestinian rights.

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In the past couple of days, McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have likened Khalidi, the director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute, to a neo-Nazi; called him “a PLO spokesman”; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is keeping something sinister from voters by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner for Khalidi at which Obama spoke.

The effort to paint Khaladi – and by association, Obama – as a friend of terrorists is clearly aimed at fanning the anxieties of Jewish voters in the swing state of Florida. But in this case, the game of guilt-by-association circles back to McCain himself, who is also part of Khalidi’s extended network.

As first reported by Huffington Post, McCain chairs a nonprofit group called the International Republican Institute which has given almost a half million dollars to a Palestinian research center that Khalidi co-founded.

In 1998, the Institute gave a $448,873 grant for research in the West Bank to the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, according to its tax filing.

If Khalidi is such an unsavory character, why would a group dedicated to advancing “freedom and democracy worldwide by developing political parties, civic institutions, open elections, good governance and the rule of law,” donate money to him and his associates?

The Center for Palestine Research and Studies was founded in 1993 by Khalidi and six others as an independent think tank for Palestinian policy and strategy. Khalidi has also served as a founding trustee.

According to its web site, “The Center does not adopt political positions other than advocating free, democratic exchange and expression. It is fully committed to information exchange and to publishing research according to professional standards. CPRS encourages outstanding scholars in Palestinian political, strategic, and economic issues to actively participate in the current dialogue regarding the formulation of Palestinian priorities and options and to gather a range of perspectives.”

Obama’s relationship to Khalidi, meanwhile, dates to the 1990s when the two men taught at the University of Chicago, lived in the same neighborhood and had children attending the same school. During the 1990s, Khalidi was the director of both the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago.

At the 2003 dinner celebrating Khalidi’s departure from Chicago to go to Columbia, then-state senator Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking, according to an April story by Peter Wallsten at the Los Angeles Times.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, 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.”

Editors at the Los Angeles Times have refused to release the videotape citing a promise made to the source who supplied it.

In that same story, Obama is described as a “stalwart” supporter of Israel and its security needs, who endorses a two-state solution in which Jewish and Palestinian nations co-exist – consistent with current U.S. policy.

Khalidi traces his roots to New York, as well as the Middle East. He was born in Manhattan in 1948. His father, a Palestinian Muslim born in Jerusalem, worked for the United Nations, and his mother a Lebanese-American Christian, was an interior decorator.

After graduating from the United Nations International School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1970 and a doctorate from Oxford University in 1974. Before coming to Chicago, he had taught at universities in Lebanon.

Khalidi denies he was ever a spokesman for the PLO. He was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation during Middle East peace talks from 1991 to 1993, and often talked to reporters about the Palestinian cause, which he said led some to erroneously identify him as a spokesman.

In an article published this spring in the Nation magazine, Khalidi denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy, but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Obama) is “deeply flawed,” but conceded there were also “flaws in the alternatives.”

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