According to NR (below), Obama is considering Chuck Hagel to replace Panetta at the DoD. Who is Chuck Hagel? He is one of the many, many antisemites that Barack Obama has gathered around himself. I profiled many of them in my book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America, including Hagel:
Like Brzezinski, [Rosa] 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.”[i]
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.”[ii]
Yet Hagel himself doesn’t seem to have been particularly intimidated. In the Senate he amassed a significant track record as one of a hardline 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 Yaser Arafat as long as the Palestinian groups under his control continued to pursue violence against Israel. In 2005, Hagel, along with 26 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 U.S. in classifying Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, Hagel was once again one of the few.[iii]
Hagel wasn’t intimidated, and Barack Hussein Obama wasn’t either. In late October 2009 he appointed Hagel co-chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board.[iv] And in a particularly piquant symbolic move, the appointment was announced at J Street’s first annual conference – by Steve Clemons of George Soros’s New America Foundation.[v]
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.
[i] Rosa Brooks, “Criticize Israel? You’re an Anti-Semite!,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2006.
[ii] “Obama names Israel critic to intelligence board,” Jerusalem Post, October 29, 2009.
[iii] “Indecisive Senator Hagel has Questionable Israel Record,” National Jewish Democratic Council, March 12, 2007. http://njdc.typepad.com/njdcs_blog/2007/03/indecisive_sena.html
[iv] “Obama names Israel critic to intelligence board,” Jerusalem Post, October 29, 2009.
[v] Sammy Benoit, “Obama Appoints Another Israel-Hating Adviser: Chuck Hagel,” The Lid, October 28, 2009. http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2009/10/obama-appoints-another-israel-hating.html
Hagel for Defense? By Eliana Johnson National Review, December 13
Former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel
Republican Chuck Hagel, a former Nebraska senator, is supposedly on the short list to succeed Secretary Leon Panetta at the Department of Defense, and he is reportedly being vetted by the Obama administration. This should be no surprise: Hagel has been putting himself in position for a top cabinet post and has warmed noticeably to the Democratic party over the past four years.On November 1, just five days before this fall’s election, Hagel flew to Omaha, Neb., where he endorsed Democrat Bob Kerrey over Republican Deb Fischer in their narrowing Senate race. “There are a number of Hagel loyalists for whom that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Sam Fischer, a Nebraska Republican operative (Sam is Deb Fischer’s nephew).
“He doesn’t do much or have much connection with Nebraska anymore,” says another prominent Republican operative in the state. In fact, Hagel, now a Virginia resident and a professor at Georgetown University, is no longer registered to vote in his home state. Nebraska Republican party chairman Mark Fahleson says he considers Hagel’s endorsement “an attempt to curry favor with the Obama administration.” He points out that Hagel, on the morning he flew to Omaha to throw his weight behind Kerrey, had a phone conversation with Vice President Joe Biden. “We have no idea what they talked about,” Fahleson says suggestively....
Since 2009, Hagel has served as co-chairman of Obama’s Presidential Intelligence Advisory Board, which offers the president feedback on U.S. intelligence operations. While Hagel’s courtship of the Obama administration seems to be paying off, sources tell NRO that his nomination would signal the direction of the administration’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to Iran. Hagel has promoted unconditional engagement with the regime since 2001, and he voted against designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. “This is someone who will be extremely skeptical of the idea that, if push comes to shove, we should use military force against Iran,” a senior congressional aide says. “Fairly or not,” he says, “if Senator Hagel is nominated by the president to be secretary of defense, it will be broadly viewed as a signal that the United States is not going to use military force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”
