The Senate Armed Services Committee this afternoon approved Chuck Hagel's nomination to be secretary of Defense on a party-line vote, 14-11. The nomination now goes to the full Senate for a final confirmation vote.
- In August 2006, Hagel was one of only 12 Senators who refused to write the EU asking them to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
- In October 2000, Hagel was one of only 4 Senators who refused to sign a Senate letter in support of Israel.
- In November 2001, Hagel was one of only 11 Senators who refused to sign a letter urging President Bush not to meet with the late Yassir Arafat until his forces ended the violence against Israel.
- In December 2005, Hagel was one of only 27 who refused to sign a letter to President Bush to pressure the Palestinian Authroity to ban terrorist groups from participating in Palestinian legislative elections.
- In June 2004, Hagel refused to sign a letter urging President Bush to highlight Iran’s nuclear program at the G-8 summit.
From my book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America:
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.
