Indeed not. The New Statesman noted in March 2008 that Power “has been fiercely attacked by bloggers objecting to her questioning the US’s axiomatic support for Israel on security matters. ‘So much of it is about: “Is he going to be good for the Jews?’”40
She didn’t explain what she found wrong with that question.
Yet despite all this, Barack Obama hired her first for his campaign team and then rehired her in November 2008 as part of his transition team for the State Department; then once in office, he appointed her to the National Security Council as senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights. And in August 2009 he demonstrated his confidence in Samantha Power yet again. The White House announced that she would “coordinate the efforts of the many parts of the U.S. government on Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), including the Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Defense.”41
ROBERT MALLEY
The anti-Israel statements of Robert Malley, whom Obama tabbed for an important mission right after he was elected president, were even worse than Power’s.
Early on in his campaign, Obama named Robert Malley one of his primary foreign policy advisers—to the immediate consternation of Israeli officials. One Israeli security official noted in February 2008: “We are noting with concern some of Obama’s picks as advisers, particularly Robert Malley, who has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hizbullah and offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.”42
Malley’s sympathy was too much for the dancing Obama of the presidential campaign: he dropped Malley in May 2008 after it came to light that he had met with representatives of the jihad terror group Hamas.43
However, this turned out to be only a trial separation, not a divorce. Meeting with an Islamic terrorist group was not a disqualifying résumé item for Barack Hussein Obama. Only six months after Obama had dismissed him, the now-President Obama sent Malley to Egypt and Syria. “The tenor of the messages,” explained an aide to Malley, “was that the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests.”44
Malley was a good choice to convey such a message. He has coauthored opinion pieces with a former adviser to Yasir Arafat and has repeatedly called upon the United States to hold talks with Hamas. His anti-Israel record was perfect; he even blamed Israel for the failure of the Camp David talks of 2000, when Arafat shocked the world by rejecting an offer to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem and beginning another bloody intifada instead. When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in the winter of 2006, Malley explained the result as stemming from “anger at years of humiliation and loss of self-respect because of Israeli settlement expansion, Arafat’s imprisonment, Israel’s incursions, Western lecturing and, most recently and tellingly, the threat of an aid cut off in the event of an Islamist success.”
Jihadist intransigence and Islamic anti-Semitism? Malley had nothing to say about either.
Malley has continued to defend Hamas and call for its acceptance by the United States, saying that “a renewed national compact and the return of Hamas to the political fold would upset Israel’s strategy of perpetuating Palestinian geographic and political division.”45
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI
In devising plans to frustrate Israel’s self-defense, however, Malley had nothing on Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser during the Carter administration. Obama consulted Brzezinski for advice during his campaign, calling the octogenarian Brzezinski “one of our most outstanding scholars and thinkers” and saying that he was “someone I have learned an immense amount from.”
This came at a time when Brzezinski raised eyebrows with his claim that the “Jewish lobby” in the United States was “too powerful.” Brzezinski complained that “there is a McCarthy-ite tendency among some people in the Jewish community. They operate not by arguing but by slandering, vilifying, demonising. They very promptly wheel out anti-Semitism. There is an element of paranoia in this inclination to view any serious attempt at a compromised peace as somehow directed against Israel.”46
Yet Brzezinski himself was not an unwavering advocate of a “compromised peace”—he recognized the need for force under some circumstances. But he envisioned that force being used not in Israel’s defense, but against Israel. Bizarrely, he even called for the United States to protect Iran from an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. “We are not exactly impotent little babies,” he declared in a September 2009 interview. If the Israelis struck Iran, he said, “they have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?” Brzezinski advocated military action against Israel to stop it from striking Iran: “If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not.”47
Brzezinski, of course, holds no official position in the Obama administration, and there was no indication in the fall of 2009 that Obama was contemplating calling out the Air Force against Israel if it tried to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. But Brzezinski’s was not the only anti-Israel voice associated with Obama. There was Power. There was Malley. Before that, there were Wright and al-Mansour and the rest.
There was no comparable group of defenders of Israel around Obama.
ROSA BROOKS
As if Power, Malley, and Brzezinski weren’t enough, there were more haters of Israel on the Obama team as well.
Obama named Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks as an adviser to the undersecretary of defense for policy. Brooks is venomously anti-Israel. During Israel’s defensive action in Gaza in January 2009, Brooks wrote an op-ed in the Times entitled “Israel can’t bomb its way to peace.”48 Stephen A. Silver of the media watchdog Com-mittee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America pointed out that while Brooks gave the number of Palestinian casualties in this conflict, she didn’t mention that most of these were combatants, not innocent civilians. “She also takes no interest,” noted Silver, “in the fact that Hamas fires missiles at Israeli civilians from the midst of Palestinian population centers—a double war crime specifically intended by Hamas to manufacture Palestinian civilian casualties for public relations purposes whenever Israel tries to defend itself from Hamas terror.”
Silver also observed that “Brooks does not bother to note that Israel goes to such lengths to avoid civilian casualties that it often gives up the element of surprise in order to warn Palestinian civilians who may be in harm’s way before Israel targets nearby Hamas terrorists.”
Like Brzezinski, Brooks also indulged in the familiar anti-Semite’s complaint: that a few simple criticisms of Israel got one slapped with accusations of… anti-Semitism. (Neither, of course, seemed inclined to own up to how they had prejudged the case and stacked the deck against Israel.) Brooks enunciated this complaint in this way in 2006: “Publish something sharply critical of Israeli government policies and you’ll find out. If you’re lucky, you’ll merely discover that you’ve been uninvited to some dinner parties. If you’re less lucky, you’ll be the subject of an all-out attack by neoconservative pundits and accused of rabid anti-Semitism.”49
CHUCK HAGEL
Former senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) would probably have agreed with Brooks. According to The Jerusalem Post, he was “one of a handful of senators who frequently didn’t sign AIPAC-backed letters related to Israel and the peace process during his time in the Senate and opposed additional sanctions on Iran.”
Apparently, like Brooks, he has faced criticism for these anti-Israel stances—and has complained that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people.”50
Yet Hagel himself doesn’t seem to have been particularly intimidated. In the Senate he amassed a significant track record as one of a hard-line hater of Israel who would not affix his name even to the most innocuous pro-Israel initiative. When all but four senators signed a pro-Israel statement in 2000, Hagel was one of the holdouts.
The next year, he was again among the few senators—eleven this time—who refused to add their names to a statement urging George W. Bush not to meet with Yasir Arafat as long as the Palestinian groups under his control continued to pursue violence against Israel. In 2005, Hagel, along with twenty-six other senators, opposed a call to the Palestinian Authority to disqualify terror groups from participating in elections. And when twelve senators wrote to the European Union in 2006 asking that the EU join the United States in classifying Hizbullah as a terrorist organization, Hagel was once again one of the few.51
Hagel wasn’t intimidated, and Barack Hussein Obama wasn’t either. In late October 2009 he appointed Hagel cochair of his Intelligence Advisory Board.52 And in a particularly piquant symbolic move, the appointment was announced at the anti-Israel Jewish group J Street’s first annual conference—by Steve Clemons of George Soros’s New America Foundation.53
And the effect of all this showed in his policies, beginning almost immediately when he took office.
It bodes ill for Jews just how comfortable and at ease Obama obviously is with proud anti-Semites and Israel haters. Obama has appointed all these people, but has concealed their true natures.
THEN THERE IS OBAMA HIMSELF
During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s Web site, Organizing for America, hosted a series of vile anti-American, Jew-hating posts and pieces.
The anti-Semitic onslaught was overwhelming. It included numerous heinous calls for Jewish genocide and incitement to hatred. And it continued after the election, into the fall of 2009—on the official Web site of the man who supposedly is the leader of the free world, and who has editorial control over the Web site.
The site was and is policed closely. It now cautions, “Content posted on our Website by our users is not guaranteed by us as to accuracy, completeness, or usefulness, and we do not endorse any content posted by our users.” However, the Web site operators say that they “reserve the right, in our sole discretion,” to “discontinue, change, improve or correct” material on the site.54
On what basis would they make such judgments? During the campaign, the site moderators said that they removed material they considered to be “disrespectful to our other users” and to “detract from a welcoming community where all people can engage in positive discourse.”55
What they found disrespectful and removed, and what they allowed to stay on the site, were interesting. Once during the campaign a conservative blogger, Bill Levinson, posted a blog on Obama’s Web site consisting entirely of a series of quotations from Obama’s own book, Dreams from My Father. Obama’s people did not approve of their standard-bearer’s words, so Levinson’s blog and account were deleted from the Obama site in less than forty-eight hours.56
That’s right: Barack Obama’s Web site banned Obama’s own words.
But the most disgusting anti-Semitic ravings remained on the site—along with blogs advocating anarchy and the overthrow of the United States Congress.
In April 2008 a post appeared claiming that “Jews owe Africa and Africans everything they have today because if Africa did not shelter them when they were homeless and starving, they would not be here today.”57
When such things went up on Obama’s Web site (and often stayed there for long periods), the Jewish lay leadership in this country said nothing, did nothing, and supported this man. When he became president of the United States, there was even more ugly Jew hatred and incitement to kill Jews on Obama’s Web site.
It harked back to Jewish blood libels. Obama’s Web site became a hub for Islamic anti-Semitism.
On October 5, 2009, a post went up on Obama’s Web site entitled “Nazi Israel… Indeed.” It quoted a Princeton professor, Richard Falk, referring to Israel’s “war crimes,” “genocidal tendencies,” “holocaust implications,” and “holocaust-in-the-making.” It spoke about Israel’s “Nazi-like crimes and human rights violation.”
It claimed: “Comparing the present-day Israel with Nazi Germany one discovers that the majority of the Israeli policies are the exact copies of the Nazi policies. Nazi Germany had invaded its European neighbors extending from England to Russia. Israel had also invaded all its neighboring countries: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. It is also heavily involved in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Its tentacles had also reached African countries as far as South Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, and Sierra Leone.”
Continuing the lies and blood libels, the post also asserted: “Worse than the Nazis Israeli forces used to invade peaceful Palestinian towns, execute men, women and children in cold blood everywhere and anywhere they encounter them, dynamite their homes on top of their residents, and finally demolish the whole town making room for new Israeli colonies.” It charged that Israel pursued “a pre-meditated genocidal plan” against the Palestinian Arabs.58
Suffice to say that this entry passed muster with Obama’s moderators and was clearly acceptable to Obama for America: it was not taken down.
There appeared to be a campaign of sorts to normalize this hatred, as if it were not so bad. Otherwise, why did this poison go up and stay up at Obama’s Web site under his name for months? Why didn’t Obama stop the terrible hate speech he was hosting on his site?
He must have known that anti-Semites were posting these blood libels on his Web site. So why did he retain the platform as president of the United States?
Why did he encourage it with his silence? By creating an Obama-sanctioned forum that continued to be updated and maintained after his election, a state-sanctioned Web site for such incitement to hate, Obama gave his silent assent to those sentiments.
It is increasingly clear that the Islamic anti-Semitism taught in the Qur’anic classes of Obama’s youth in Indonesia and the subsequent adult years he spent with the likes of demagogues and Jew haters like Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Louis Farrakhan have made him the man he is.
One Israeli intelligence official summed up Obama’s policy toward his country in a nutshell: “Obama wants to make friends with our worst enemies and until now the worst enemies of the United States. Under this policy, we are more than irrelevant. We have become an obstacle.”59
An obstacle… but to what goal?
FOUR
OBAMA AND ISRAEL
THE OBAMA POLICY TOWARD ISRAEL SEEMED TO PROCEED FROM THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONFLICT BETWEEN Israel and the Palestinians lay entirely with Israel. It was only three weeks after Barack Hussein Obama took office when Israeli pundit Caroline Glick noted that “since it came into office a month ago, every single Middle East policy the Obama administration has announced has been antithetical to Israel’s national security interests.” She listed them:
From President Barack Obama’s intense desire to appease Iran’s mullahs in open discussions; to his stated commitment to establish a Palestinian state as quickly as possible despite the Palestinians’ open rejection of Israel’s right to exist and support for terrorism; to his expressed support for the so-called Saudi peace plan, which would require Israel to commit national suicide by contracting to within indefensible borders and accepting millions of hostile, foreign-born Arabs as citizens and residents of the rump Jewish state; to his decision to end US sanctions against Syria and return the US ambassador to Damascus; to his plan to withdraw US forces from Iraq and so give Iran an arc of uninterrupted control extending from Iran to Lebanon, every single concrete policy Obama has enunciated harms Israel.1
Glick could have added the 900 million dollars that the Obama administration announced in February 2009 that it would be giving to the Palestinians in Gaza in order to help them rebuild after the Israeli action in Gaza that winter. “None of the money will go to Hamas, it will be funneled through NGOs and U.N. groups,” an administration official insisted.2
Reality was not so easy. This bestowal of American largesse came only weeks after the UN Relief and Works Agency announced that it was suspending aid to the Palestinians because Hamas kept hijacking
the aid packages.3 What safeguards did the United States put into place to make sure that this $900 million would not likewise find its way into Hamas coffers?
None.
Three months after Obama took office, his administration launched what Glick termed “its harshest onslaught against Israel to date.”4 Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, stated that “the new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush.”5
“More forceful” in what way?
Glick reported that that same week, “acting on behalf of Obama, Jordanian King Abdullah II urged the Arab League to update the so-called Arab peace plan from 2002. That plan, which calls for Israel to withdraw from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights and accept millions of foreign Arabs as citizens as part of the so-called ‘right of return’ in exchange for ‘natural’ relations with the Arab world, has been rejected by successive Israeli governments as a diplomatic subterfuge whose goal is Israel’s destruction.”
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