Robinson also displayed a thoroughgoing pro-Palestinian bias and tendency to demonize Israel while serving as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. And her Medal of Freedom was no mistake, no oversight—for when Obama started looking for a Jewish group with which he could talk, he sought one out that held views about the Palestinians and Israel that were virtually identical to those of Mary Robinson.
J STREET
Obama kept finding new ways to go from bad to worse. He gave his official sanction to one Jewish group—J Street. J Street was unique among Jewish groups in being anti-Israel. Isi Liebler, former chairman of the Governing Board of the World Jewish Congress, challenged J Street’s “duplicity in trying to masquerade as a Jewish mainstream ‘pro-Israel’ organisation while consistently campaigning against the Jewish state.”49
Philip Klein, The American Spectator’s Washington correspondent, says that “while the group bills itself as the ‘pro Israel’ and ‘pro peace’ alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in reality it is a liberal organization actively campaigning against Israel’s right to defend itself.”50
Just how extreme and anti-Israel is J Street? According to Liebler, as of October 2009 “Arab and pro-Iranian elements were providing approximately 10% of J Street funding, a somewhat bizarre situation for a genuinely ‘pro-Israel’ organisation.”51 Federal Election Commission records showed that tens of thousands of dollars flowed into J Street from Arabs and Muslims, including some donations from groups involved in agitating for the Palestinian cause.52
Liebler pointed out that J Street seemed to attract support from groups that have always opposed Israel. Genevieve Lynch, a lobbyist for the National Iranian American Council, which has numerous ties to the bloody Iranian government, is a member of J Street’s finance committee. Judith Barnett, whom Liebler calls “a former registered agent for Saudi Arabia,” donates to J Street and is a member of its advisory council. Another donor to J Street is Nancy Dutton, a former lawyer for the Saudi Arabian embassy.53
In no other era would this radical group of self-hating Jewish sellouts have been anything but a fringe group.
But in Barack Obama’s America, this transparent front group became a darling of the White House. James Jones, the national security adviser, was the keynote speaker at the group’s very first annual convention in 2009. Other speakers included the former director of the hard-left group MoveOn.org, as well as Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), who in the aftermath of 9/11 accused Israel of complicity in the attacks.
“If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.”54
J Street was inevitable in the hostile climate for Israel that Obama has created in Washington. Once Obama was elected president, it was only a matter of time before a leftist Jewish group associated with anti-Semitic ideologies would emerge—particularly when those were the people the administration would meet with when choosing “Jewish groups” with which to confer.
As president, Obama could have chosen to meet and work with any Jewish group in the United States. He didn’t choose the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). He didn’t even choose AIPAC.
Instead, Obama decided to work with J Street.
THE MISSING CZAR
During Obama’s first six months in office, his administration appointed upward of forty “czars.” But there was one czar appointment on which Obama dragged his feet for months—and it was an omission that spoke volumes. While he worked with relentless energy to create and fill new positions by the dozens, he suddenly seemed overcome with lassitude when it came to appointing an Anti-Semitism Czar—and this was one appointment that was actually called for by law. The Jerusalem Post reported on July 30, 2009, that ‘the Obama administration has failed to name an envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism around the world, as mandated by US law, since the previous ambassador was relieved of his duties at the start of the president’s term more than six months ago.’ Rafael Medoff, director of the Washington D.C.–based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, explained: ‘Foot-dragging on the selection sends a message that anti-Semitism is not of great importance to the United States.’”55
Obama finally filled the position in mid-November 2009, but his choice was hardly comforting. For Obama’s new anti-Semitism czar was Hannah Rosenthal, former chief of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and a current board member of none other than J Street. In April 2008 Rosenthal recalled the National Israel Solidarity Rally in Washington in 2002: “I recall much of that day with fondness and pride. I also recall the many rally attendees who pulled me aside to ask why the word ‘peace’ was so absent from the proceedings. How could we talk security without talking peace?… How did we arrive at a place where pro-Israel events had come to be dominated by narrow, ultra-conservative views of what it means to be pro-Israel?”56
Abraham H. Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, shot back at Rosenthal: My memory of what happened at the event that day is quite different from yours. I remember many of the speakers delivering “pro-peace” messages. There was Rep. Richard Gephardt (“We must not waver in our commitment to those—Israelis and Arabs alike—who have chosen the path of peace”), as well as Sen. Harry Reid (“I call on all who share our vision and hopes to continue to spread a message of peace: shalom, salaam, peace”). There was also Paul Wolfowitz, representing the Bush administration (“Peace in the Middle East is the only way to end the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis, of Arabs and Jews”), as well as Natan Sharansky (“Real peace, dear friends, depends on us”). And there was Mayor Rudy Giuliani (“All of us, all of you good people who have come here today, all of us wish for peace. We pray for it.”). I remember you introducing Hugh Price, then president of the National Urban League, and I remember Mr. Price closing his remarks with a call to world leaders “to give lasting peace a chance in the Middle East.”57
Apparently Rosenthal heard only what she wanted to hear: that defenders of Israel were “narrow, ultra-conservative” warmongers. Journalist Ed Lasky observed of her appointment as anti-Semitism czar: “This is just one more pick by the president that has led many (especially the Israelis) to wonder about his claim to be pro-Israel. It is also one more step forward by J Street, a group with ties to George Soros, in their reach for power in Washington, D.C.”58
Other constituencies appeared to be more important to the post-American president. While extremely slow to appoint an envoy to monitor anti-Semitism, Obama swiftly instructed the State Department to create a Muslim outreach czar—a U.S. special representative for Muslim (Ummah) outreach, who reports directly to the secretary of state. This was at the urging of the head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. According to CNS News, when Ihsanoglu visited the White House on June 23, 2009, he “urged the US to quickly appoint an envoy to the Islamic bloc.” Obama promptly created the “new office that is responsible for outreach with Muslims around the world.”59
Priorities are priorities.
“THE MOST RADICAL ANTI-ISRAEL SPEECH I CAN RECALL ANY PRESIDENT MAKING”
Cozying up to Hamas domestically and internationally, and leaving a pro-Israel position unfilled for months, were the least of it.
The Obama administration from its first days began to press Israel for concessions, while making no corresponding demands upon the Palestinians. Obama demanded that Israelis withdraw from “settlements”—which were in reality often established communities—in “occupied Palestinian territory.” No other president had ever made such harsh demands. He never took note of the fact that the “Palestinian territory” in question was ruled by Jordan from 1948 to 1967, during which time there was never a single compla
int from Palestinians about “occupation.”
The “settlements,” moreover, were on land to which Israel had a perfectly legitimate historical and legal claim. “Settler” was a derogatory term for a Jew in the Jewish homeland. But Obama made the “settlements” the latest concession that the Israelis had to make for a promise of peace with the Palestinians that never seemed to materialize after earlier territorial concessions in the Sinai and Gaza and elsewhere.
Thus, on September 23, 2009, Barack Obama declared at the UN: “We continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.” He called for the establishment of a “viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people.”60
When, three weeks later, not much progress had been made on this front, it was reported that officials leaked the news that Obama was “disgusted” with Israel for not moving more quickly to dismantle the settlements.61 A few weeks after this, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a somewhat softer line than that of her boss when she praised Israeli concessions on the construction of new settlements as “unprecedented.”62 By contrast, Obama, like the Palestinians, had never publicly acknowledged that Israel had taken any steps toward peace at all.
Former UN ambassador John Bolton pointed out that Obama didn’t say that “new Israeli settlements” were illegitimate, but that “continued Israeli settlements” were illegitimate and unacceptable. Said Bolton: “That calls into question in my mind all Israeli settlements.”
And a “contiguous” Palestinian state would cut Israel in two. Bolton commented: “Do you think that matters to the Palestinians? That is the kind of approach to an issue that is attempting to decide the outcome to the negotiations, before the negotiations, that’s why I think that the Israelis should be worried. He’s laid it out where he wants it to end up.”
Bolton added: “The important thing is, when you have the Palestinians in as weak a position as they are now, and to have Barack Obama be their lawyer, in effect, puts them in a very strong bargaining place.” And Obama, said Bolton, has “made it very clear how much he wants to do through the UN.” How much? “An overwhelming percentage of our policy.”63
Around the same time, the results of Obama’s policies toward Israel began to appear.
STRANGE FRUIT
Obama’s policies toward Israel began to bear poisonous fruit around the same time that Jones declared that the United States wanted to give the Palestinians a state “without preconditions.”
Late in September 2009, an Israeli was shot in his car while traveling north of Jerusalem. A local Israeli leader, Avi Roeh, commented: “This attack is a direct result of the removal of roadblocks. It’s only by some miracle that the outcome of these attacks has been no worse than injuries, but you cannot base security policies on miracles.”64
Maybe Israelis really were expecting miracles in September 2009, when the Israeli army began removing one hundred roadblocks in Judea and Samaria. The Jerusalem Post said this was “an effort to make life easier for Palestinians.”65 They were all gone by the week before the shooting took place north of Jerusalem.
The official line was that the roadblock removal wasn’t related to Obama envoy George Mitchell’s meeting with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which took place around the same time, but the Post said, “While Israeli sources said there was no direct link with Mitchell’s visit, they added there was an indirect connection because an improved West Bank economy was good for the diplomatic process.”
This attempt to show goodwill was met only with increased pressure on Israel from the United States. The same day that the shooting took place, U.S. assistant secretary of state Michael Posner said that Israel should investigate war-crimes charges that the Palestinians (in reality the world’s worst human-rights violators) had made in the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone Report, prepared by the head of the UN fact finding mission, Justice Richard Goldstone: “We encourage Israel to utilise appropriate domestic (judicial) review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow-up on credible allegations. If undertaken properly and fairly, these reviews can serve as important confidence-building measures that will support the larger essential objective which is a shared quest for justice and lasting peace.”66
So the United States had put itself into the position of pressuring Israel to plead guilty to something it did not do, so as to “build confidence” with the jihadis in Gaza.
That same day, at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Anne Bayefsky delivered a statement on behalf of both the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the Hudson Institute. She said: “The Goldstone mission will go down in history as the 21st century’s equivalent to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a notorious work of fiction which spun a conspiratorial web of deceit and distortion that has fueled hatred of Jews ever since. At its core, the Goldstone report repeats the ancient blood libel against the Jewish people—the allegation of bloodthirsty Jews intent on butchering the innocent.”67
It came as no surprise, then, in October 2009, when the secretary-general of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, revealed that his organization was the driving force behind the Goldstone Report. Speaking of the Goldstone Report in an interview with Al-Jazeera, Ihsanoglu said: “What I would like to put on record is that the OIC was the initiator of this process.” He explained that the whole idea of such a report was hatched during a meeting of the OIC’s executive committee at the time of the Israeli defensive incursion into Gaza of January 2009.68
The OIC is one of the principal enemies of the freedom of speech internationally today—and it is no friend of Israel. On November 1, 2009, the fifty-seven-member organization issued a stern warning to Israel over unrest at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount that had broken out in October: “Al-Aqsa represents the red line… Causing any harm to this mosque will have dangerous consequences”—although the idea that Israel had any plans to tamper with the Al-Aqsa was overheated rumor in the first place. The OIC’s communiqué also called for the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, action by the UN Security Council against Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and elsewhere, and for an end to Israel’s “policy of ethnic cleansing.”69
THE NEW GOAL OF AMERICAN POLICY
After all this it came as no surprise in November 2009 when William J. Burns, the State Department’s undersecretary for political affairs, announced: “Our goal in the region is clear: two states living side by side in peace and security; a Jewish state of Israel, with which America retains unbreakable bonds, and with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, that ends the daily humiliations of Palestinians under occupation, and that realizes the full and remarkable potential of the Palestinian people.”
How would all this be accomplished? Why, by pressuring the Israelis for more concessions, of course. “We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” declared Burns. “We consider the Israeli offer to restrain settlement activity to be a potentially important step, but it obviously falls short of the continuing Roadmap obligation for a full settlement freeze.”70
And what would the Palestinians have to do in order to get free from these “daily humiliations” and claim their “viable, independent” state “with contiguous territory”? Nothing at all. True to the continued pattern of the Obama administration, he made no demands upon the Palestinians at all.
The Palestinians seemed to be well aware of this, and reacted by making no secret of their ultimate intentions. After all, what did they have to lose? Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayad met in August 2009 with over fifty senators and representatives, telling them that the new Palestinian state would be an Islamic state, devoted to “developing and implementing programs of Shari’a education as derived from the science of the Holy Q
ur’an and Prophet’s heritage.”71
A Palestinian Islamic state would not be a democracy, it would be Gaza tenfold, a terror state—and Obama wanted to set it up.
Significantly, in September 2009 on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, Obama sent greetings—to Muslims on the occasion of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan. He sent Jews Rosh Hashana greetings also, including a veiled jab reflecting his acceptance of Palestinian propaganda: “Let’s reject the impulse to harden ourselves to others’ suffering.”72
Obama apparently thought that the trouble between Israel and the Palestinians stemmed entirely from the alleged evils committed by Israel against the Palestinians; it mirrored his diagnosis of the causes of the conflict between the West and the Islamic world. At Cairo in June 2009, he identified several root causes of the Islamic world’s hatred of the West and America in particular; all were the West’s fault. It never seemed to enter his mind—much less influence his policy—that possibly Israel and the United States were facing foes who hated them for their own reasons, and were not just passively reacting to the evils perpetrated upon them by the Western powers.
And so he was determined to make the Israelis give, and give, and give, in exchange for nothing more than airy promises.
The Israelis began to notice—and to act. In July 2009, for the first time in decades, there was an anti-U.S., pro-Israel rally in the heart of Jerusalem. Knesset member Yaakov Katz, chairman of the National Union party, explained: “Not since the days of Kissinger has there been such a protest against American policies. The pressure that Barack Hussein Obama is exerting against us to simply stop growing and stop living will not work.”73
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