Obama and the Jews Jerusalem Post
Heaven forbid the leftists address the legitimate concerns raised by those of us who care deeply about America and the future direction of this country. CHANGE can be bad. For example, CHANGING to a sharia compliant, terror aligning, socialist state would be a bad CHANGE. Obama would not be the first Democrat recognizing Islamic terrorists, Kerry, Biden & Hagel hung out with the Islamist Party in Pakistan. But it is bad for America and not what we want.
Obama's foreign policy adviser's give freedom lovers great pause.
I am appalled at the attacks on those investigative journalists exposing the truth about Obama's true agenda. Check out this asshat's Orwellian editorial in the Jewish JTA. He mendaciously smears the inestimable Ed Lasky. Kampeas is JTA's Jerusalem bureau chief (collective oyish).
Ed Lasky has done extensive research on Obama's advisers as have many others but Ron Kampeas, Goebbels lite, goes after Lasky merely for doing us the great service of exposing the backgrounds of Obama's advisers.
Kampeas is a self hating Jew and a leftist - morally ambivalent at best. He has been doing Obama's bidding for some time. Does Kampeas even care to fact-check? Just read the advisers own writings, read how other media characterize them. The JTA accepts tax-deductible contributions-does this political activity raise questions about their tax status?
Obama's advisers drawing scrutiny Ron Kampeas
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Even as U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) solidifies his status as the Democratic front-runner with victories Tuesday in Wisconsin and Hawaii, he is facing a new line of attack from some Jewish circles regarding his advisers on foreign policy.
In recent weeks, writers associated with several right-wing media outlets have taken aim at what they describe as anti-Israel voices advising Obama on Middle East issues, spurring a rash of mass e-mails voicing similar concerns.
Among those cited by critics are Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration; Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University; Robert Malley, an adviser on Israeli-Arab affairs during the Clinton administration; and George Soros, an international financier who has funded pro-democracy efforts throughout Europe and in recent years became a major supporter of the Democratic Party in the United States.
Fairly or unfairly, each has been on the receiving end of criticism from some pro-Israel activists or Jewish groups over positions viewed as being hostile to the Jewish state.
The Obama campaign acknowledges that it has received advice from the people named in the negative e-mail campaign, describing the meetings with these individuals as a product of Obama's "one America" philosophy of reaching out to all Americans.
But, in the end, campaign officials say, the candidate should be assessed according to his own votes and statements. Besides, they add, the personalities in question do not play any formal role in advising Obama on Middle East issues. That task, they say, falls to a collection of policy experts in good standing with the pro-Israel lobby.
Unlike the Internet attacks falsely painting Obama as a secret radical Muslim, the "adviser" e-mails appear to have struck a chord among some Jewish organizational leaders, in addition to worrying some grassroots voters.
No one has said he is a secret radical Muslim. We .... I said he is Muslim by birth. His father was a Muslim and his stepfather was a Muslim and he attended a madrassah in Indonesia from the ages of 6 to 10. FACT.
This week, in an interview with Shalom TV, a Web-based Jewish channel, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder said that "if you have an adviser that is not sympathetic to Israel -- not sympathetic to some Jewish concerns -- you have a potential problem."
"If you only have one or two close advisers and they're both anti-Israel," Lauder said, then "it's only a matter of time before the president becomes anti-Israel."
Lauder made no specific reference to Obama, but the comments come at a time when the Illinois senator appears to be the only candidate facing major questions about his advisers on Israel-related issues.
Lauder's speech, a rarity for him to speak out so strongly, is a must listen here.
Last week, Malcolm Hoenlein, the professional head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, reportedly told Israeli reporters that the "change" mantra in the current U.S. election -- mostly associated with Obama -- was worrying.
Thank Gd someone is speaking out in the public forum.
Ha'aretz framed Hoenlein's comments as an expression of concern about Obama's camp, but the Jewish communal leader told JTA that he was speaking generally about this campaign season and the calls for change coming from supporters of several of the candidates in both parties.
In an effort to counter various attacks against Obama going back several months, his campaign has responded with several long e-mails to Jewish supporters. Insiders say response has been positive -- a perception borne out by primary elections exit polls that show Jews trending toward Obama more than other whites in some states.
Even with minimal impact, attacks can still cross the line and are cause for concern, said Dennis Ross, the Clinton administration's top Middle East envoy.
"When you're in the political season, every difference tends to be magnified," said Ross, who has given the Obama campaign advice and who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank. "We can have political differences, but it can't lead to demonization."
Much, if not the vast majority, of the material targeting Obama's advisers is distorted and even false.
Check the URLs and all their op-eds,etc
The campaign notes that its Middle East policy is strictly the province of four individuals, each of them perceived as pro-Israel and three of them Jewish: Dan Shapiro, a longtime activist and bridge between the Jewish organizational leadership and Democratic Party; Anthony Lake, a Clinton administration national security adviser; Eric Lynn, the Obama campaign's Jewish liaison who has lived in Israel; and Dennis McDonough, once the foreign policy adviser to former U.S. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who had impeccable pro-Israel credentials during his time in office.
Lasky hardly barely mentioned Lake and certainly did not fault him for his attachment to the Berkshires. He only quoted Peretz who had pointed out that he had been out of the big picture for some time, living in the Berkshires.
Of the four regular advisers, only Lake has taken shots from Obama's critics. In an article in the American Thinker -- the online conservative magazine that has been the principle redoubt of Obama-Israel skepticism -- Ed Lasky faults Lake, who recently converted to Judaism, for having worked for the Carter administration and for living in the Berkshires.
Much of the material appearing in a number of Lasky articles and circulating in e-mails is similarly flimsy, especially his attacks on Malley
Read the URLs, read the NY Sun, read Martin Peretz, read Commentary), according to Obama supporters and some former U.S. diplomats.
Like Ross, Malley was a senior adviser to the Clinton administration at the U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian talks at Camp David in the summer of 2000.
Malley has differed with Ross and others over the degree of blame to be assigned over the talks' breakdown -- Ross singles out the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat -- but he does not solely blame Israel. And in public talks in Washington, he emphasizes Israel's security as a critical element in formulating policy.
"He is not anti-Israeli, he is not a fanatic anti-Israeli," Ross told JTA. "To use these tacks is just wrong."
The targeting of Malley led Ross and four other Clinton-era officials to publish an open letter last week defending his record.
"Whatever differences do exist, there is no disagreement among us on one core issue that transcends partisan or other divides: that the U.S. should not and will not do anything to undermine Israel’s safety or the special relationship between our two nations," the letter said. "We have worked with Rob closely over the years and have no doubt he shares this view and has acted consistent with it."
Soros, the billionaire philanthropist, has donated to Obama's campaign. He has also been critical of Israel and of pro-Israel orthodoxies, but the Holocaust survivor has cast his criticisms as mindful of Israel's security.
Right-he admits in a NYT magazine article that he is harsh on Israel, and funds a a variety of anti-Israel groups
Read Peretz and listen to his 60 Minutes interview. Check out this Atlas post. He was a nazi collaborator in rounding up the wealth of Jews, he never was in a concentration camp. He was a kapo not a survivor.
Soros vigorously opposes the pro-Israel lobby in America and has unsuccessfully tried to create a pro-Palestinian anti-Israel l alternative to it.
Recently, he considered funding an alternative pro-Israel lobby, one that would more aggressively advocate for a two-state solution, while also maintaining Israel's security needs. Lasky links to a Soros article last year in the New York Review of Books to show that the financier is a "fierce foe" of Israel. In it, Soros describes his thesis as follows: "Military superiority is necessary for Israel's national security, but it is not sufficient."
Talk about selective quotations-read his article-his animosity shines through-as it does in other statements he has made, other articles he has written, groups that he funds.
Despite what Obama supporters and some observers say are distortions and falsehoods, there's enough that would worry parts of the pro-Israel community, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its allies.
Brzezinski's time as Carter's national security adviser left a bitter taste among Israelis and pro-Israel activists. They perceived Brzezinski as creating a false dichotomy between Israel's needs and the effort to recruit Middle Eastern states to America's side in the Cold War -- a key point given that his overriding concern in the Carter administration was containing the Soviets.
It didn’t help that Brzezinski initially endorsed the views of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, academics who promulgated the thesis that the pro-Israel lobby fundamentally distorts U.S. foreign policy. He later backtracked to a degree, suggesting that their book overstated its case.
The Obama campaign says it does not take advice from Brzezinski, but has accepted his endorsement as a senior U.S. statesman, who says the Illinois senator has the best policy for extricating the United States from Iraq.
Again, all the media outlets describe him as a foreign policy adviser.
Power, the lecturer from Harvard, is a more sensitive problem for the campaign. An expert on genocide who has worked with Jewish activists who press the case that the United States should have done more to stop the Holocaust during World War II, she served for two years on Obama's Senate staff and is a permanent adviser -- but not, the campaign says, on Middle East-related issues.
The Obama campaign has rejected efforts to paint her as anti-Israel, although notably, it does not address her writings related to Israel."Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a book about the evil of genocide, which includes an extensive discussion of the Holocaust, so for this smear e-mail to paint her as anti-Israel is outrageous," said a statement from the campaign that first appeared in the Palm Beach Post in Florida.
Even as they defend Power, Obama campaign officials say she has little say on Middle East issues, confining her advice to issues such as the genocide in Darfur.
U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), who is arguably Obama's top congressional backer in Florida, told the Palm Beach Post that the e-mail campaign criticizing the candidate's advisers was a "lie."
"I wouldn't be involved with any candidate," Wexler was quoted as saying, "that didn't recognize Israel as a Jewish state, that didn't reject the Palestinian right of return, and that didn't demand that Hamas reject terror as a condition for talks with the Palestinians."
Kampeas also ignores the criticism from other, more prestigious people. Many have been mining the anti-Israel rich histories of Obama's advisers. Eric Trager over at Commentary blog recently wrote of Obama's adviser Robert Malley;
In the ongoing debate regarding Barack Obama’s stance on Israel, Obama foreign policy adviser Robert Malley has emerged as a divisive figure.
Malley’s supporters and critics agree that he embraces a pro-Palestinian narrative in his approach towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As President Bill Clinton’s special adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs from 1998-2001, Malley was the only American official to blame the United States and Israel—rather than Yasser Arafat—for the failure to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace at Camp David in 2000. Since leaving government, Malley has further developed his pro-Palestinian credentials: he has gushed over Arafat; partnered with Arafat adviser Hussein Agha in promoting his revisionist account of Camp David; and blamed the Bush administration overwhelmingly for continued Israeli-Palestinian strife.
Given Malley’s unabashed bias, supporters of Israel have questioned his true motives, with Martin Peretz’s determination that Malley is a “rabid hater of Israel” representative of the debate’s deteriorating tenor. Last week, Malley’s fellow peace processors shot back, calling the attacks “an effort to undermine the credibility of a talented public servant who has worked tirelessly over the years to promote Arab-Israeli peace and US national interests.” Malley’s former colleagues further wrote that he neither harbors an anti-Israel agenda nor has sought to undermine Israeli security.
Yet the very question of whether or not Malley is a “anti-Israel” is a red herring. Rather than psychoanalyzing Malley to uncover his true motivations, we should assess Malley’s policy prescriptions as to whether they have advanced Israeli-Palestinian peace—the cause for which Malley was employed. It is within this framework that Malley’s insufficiency as a presidential foreign policy adviser is most profoundly exposed.
Consider, for example, Malley’s address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in September 2005. While debating U.S. policy towards Islamist parties, Malley argued that the U.S. should allow Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to permit Hamas’ participation in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Malley said:
[Abbas] thinks that it’s the only way that he can restore political stability; that he can regenerate his own political party; and that he can sustain the ceasefire. . . . We should not be second-guessing that assessment.
Of course, Malley’s policy of not “second-guessing” Abbas on Hamas was an unambiguous disaster, with Hamas’ subsequent election dashing all hopes that the post-Arafat era could yield peaceful compromise.
And Noah Pollak wrote of close pal and Obama advisor, Samantha Power;
Samantha Power: the Salon Interview
It might be time that I downgraded my opinion of Samantha Power from someone who I believe holds naive and mischievous opinions on the Middle East to someone who for the most part simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She gave a must-read interview yesterday to Salon.com.
What is the biggest foreign policy challenge for the next president?
The next president is really going to have to walk and chew gum at the same time, because no long-term peace in the Middle East is possible until we get some kind of modus vivendi in the Arab-Israeli situation.
Remarkable. Neither the Iraq war, nor the Iranian nuclear program, nor North Korean nuclear proliferation, nor the situation in Pakistan, nor the ascendant Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, in Power’s assessment, is comparable to “the Arab-Israeli situation.” This is, of course, the view of the world one gets from watching too many Christiane Amanpour specials on CNN; but it is also one that has virtually no currency among serious people.
You recently wrote in Time magazine that the U.S. needs to “rethink Iran.” What did you mean?
…To neutralize the support Ahmadinejad has domestically, we need to stop threatening and to get in a room with him — if only to convey grave displeasure about his tactics regionally and internationally — and then try to build international support for measures to prevent him from supporting terrorism and pursuing a nuclear program. If we’re ever going to actually put in place multilateral measures to contain Iran, the only way we’re going to do that is if we do it in a more united way with our allies.
To this, one can only reply: “Donny, you’re out of your element.” For starters, Ahmadinejad essentially has no domestic popularity in Iran. He is aggressively detested by everyone in the country with a reformist cast of mind, and he is widely blamed for crippling the Iranian economy through his imposition of some of the most half-baked centralized planning that exists in the world today. This Washington Post piece delves into Ahamadinejad’s domestic unpopularity; this piece from the Asia Times discusses his abysmal poll ratings. If Power thinks that we’re going to get anywhere with Iran by undermining Ahmadinejad’s “domestic support,” let me be the first to inform her: he doesn’t have any domestic support to begin with.
But that’s just a nitpick. The real swindle here is Power’s implication that the U.S. has yet to pursue a multilateral strategy for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, a fascinating rewriting of history. Between 2002 and 2006, the Bush administration delegated Iran diplomacy to the EU-3 (France, Germany, and the UK), specifically in pursuit of the cultivation of an international consensus against Iran’s nuclear program. The EU-3, working extensively through the IAEA — another of those international bodies that Power believes has been sidelined by the Bush administration — demonstrated nothing more than the ease with which it could be repeatedly manipulated and thwarted.
And over at Michael Totten's blog;
Lebanese journalist Michael Young and Iraqi blogger Iraqpundit have expressed their reservations about one of Obama's foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power. The self-described “Genocide Chick” seems to them insufficiently concerned that an American withdrawal from Iraq will lead to genocide. Her solution? Move people from one area to another and give money to Iraq's neighbors to stabilize the country. You can't blame her for basically parroting the egregiously cynical recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, but in reality this means that US forces should be complicit in the sectarian cleansing of Iraq and pay off countries like Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia that have themselves funded and supported death squads targeting Iraqi Shias, Kurds and Sunnis as well as US troops.
There's a good deal more superior and fact based journalists and writes I could cite and will in future posts, but for now ................
Former Israel Ambassador to America Daniel Ayalon (Who Are You Barack Obama?) wherein the Ambassador expressed concern
regarding Obama's approach toward Iran and also, based on his own personal
experience with Obama dealing on issues concerning the American-Israel
relationship, stating that he was left with an "impression that he was not
entirely forthright with his thinking";
Jerusalem
Post columnist Caroline Glick, who also took on Mike Huckabee
and Ron Paul in this column;
Jerusalem Post Editorial Page editor Saul
Singer (Obama's Mixed Record on Iran );
The New York Post;
Writer Hillel Halkin (Obama Gets Israel
Wrong);
An
American Jewish Committee internal memo questioned Obama's potential approach to Middle East
policy;
Commentary Magazine writer Noah Pollak criticized Obama's appointment of Robert Malley and Samantha Power as
foreign policy advisers. Pollak
notes in a recent post
that Power (a key and very public foreign adviser to Senator Obama) echoes the
views of Zbigniew Brezenski in calling for "special interest groups" influence
over foreign policy to be abolished. Power has also called for the elimination
of foreign aid to Israel and its redirection to "Palestine", as well as the
massive imposition of US military forces in the area to bring about and enforce
a settlement (where, of course, they could find themselves easy targets and be
subject to propaganda attacks as another imperial foray into the Middle East).
Slate magazine writer Mickey Kaus has long wondered why Obama and his close relationship with Pastor Wright has all but escaped any media scrutiny and has pointed out that Wright's racial divisiveness is in sharp contrast to Obama's campaign mantra of unity. Many other very credible commentators have raised these issues and others. Yet critics of Lasky's articles have all but ignored the criticism arising from these quarters.
UPDATE: Check out wikipedia and see what a pro jihadi Kampeas is. Shame on the JTA. Jerusalem bureau chief, my infidel eye. They have Jewish blood on their hands.
Kampeas covers news pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the peace process relating to it, and he has spoken publicly about this subject in educational programs sponsored jointly by organizations like The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development, at The Palestine Center.[4]
Politics and Perceptions of Peace: A Palestinian and Israeli Perspective": Summary of a Lecture by Journalists Said Arikat and Ron Kampeas, presented on June 14, 2005 at The Palestine Center summer educational program for interns sponsored by The Jerusalem Fund, For the Record, No. 228 (2nd of 4 in Series), 26 July 2005, accessed March 26, 2007.
Look at his
presentation. Un-freakin-believable. It's no wonder he is willing to lie about what Lasky and
others write. He is a Pali tool, the quintessential dhimmi, and that is who defending Hussein Obama - an apologist for the jihad. What does that say about Hussein Obama?
Kampeas, who serves as the Washington, D.C. bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, explained that in many ways the failure of the Oslo peace process can be traced to the refusal of the Israeli leadership at the time to listen to what Palestinians were saying about their own affairs and about Israel. Kampeas believed this manifested itself with the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who said that Palestinian affairs were best left to the Palestinians and whatever the Palestinian leadership said about Israel was beside the point.
Arikat and Kampeas addressed the Palestinian and Israeli politics and perceptions of peace on 19 July 2005 at the D.C.-based Palestine Center, the second of four lectures in the 2005 Intern Lecture Series, "In Pursuit of Peace: Dialogues on Final Status."
According to Kampeas,
Israeli Prime Minister and Likud leader Ariel Sharon "explicitly sees the
withdrawal from Gaza as a way to consolidate Israel's hold over the settlement
blocks that were supposedly agreed upon at Camp David" in July 2000. Labor, on
the other hand, which also backs the Gaza plan, believes "once you actually shut
down the settlements, once you manage to get the settlers out of Gaza, then the
floodgates are open [and] the Israelis will see that [withdrawal] can happen,"
said Kampeas.
However, Arikat pointed out that from a
Palestinian perspective, only the complete withdrawal from the lands occupied in
1967 would meet Palestinian national objectives and create an environment in
which a just and sustainable peace could be achieved.
