Post-American Presidency (14 page)

The brothers were vocal in their “love” for Obama—which in itself spoke volumes to Obama’s campaign. The media showed no interest, but Obama pricked up his ears. He smelled trouble; even though no reporters asked him about these contributions, he answered anyway. The Obama campaign contended in the summer of 2008 that they had returned $33,500 in illegal contributions from Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza—despite the fact that records do not show that it was returned, and the brothers said they did not receive any money. And indeed, Obama’s refunds and redesignations on file with the FEC show no refund to Osama, Hosam, or Monir Edwan in the Rafah refugee camp.

One of the Gazan brothers, Monir Edwan, claimed that he bought “Obama for President” T-shirts off Obama’s Web site, and then sold the shirts in Gaza for a profit. All purchases on the Barack Obama Web site are considered contributions. The brothers allegedly claimed that they were American citizens—so said the Obama camp. They listed their address with the zip code 972 (ironically, the area code for Israel) and entered “GA,” the state abbreviation for Georgia, as their location, while actually living, as we have seen, in a Hamas-controlled refugee camp. If Obama’s people thought they were dealing with American citizens from Georgia, why did they ship the T-shirts that
Monir Edwan ordered to the correct address in Gaza? Shipping overseas to a Gaza refugee camp is vastly different from sending a package to the state next door.

On Watchdog.net, a site that monitors campaign contributions, Monir Edwan is listed as Barack Obama’s Top Contributor, giving $24,313 between October 27, 2007, and November 11, 2007.
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Intriguingly, however, although it gives zip codes and other details for the other four of Obama’s top five individual contributors, it provides no additional information at all for Monir Edwan—and Edwan’s link is the only dead one on the Watchdog page.

Why did Palestinians in a Gaza refugee camp have such love for Obama in the summer of 2008? Did they know he was going to run a jihad presidency?

Did Jamal M. Barzinji know the same thing?

Jamal M. Barzinji gave the Obama campaign $1,000.

Dr. Jamal M. al-Barzinji is a noted American businessman and political operative. He has most recently been associated with, notably, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). The IIIT is linked to the international Islamic organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood. In a May 22, 1991, document entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” the Brotherhood lays out a plan to do nothing less than conquer and Islamize the United States. The Brotherhood’s success in America would ultimately further the even larger goal of establishing “the global Islamic state.”
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The Brotherhood memorandum includes “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends,” with the appended note: “Imagine if they all march according to one plan!!!” Among these organizations are some of the most prominent “moderate Muslim” organizations in the United States today, including the IIIT as well as the Islamic
Society of North America (ISNA); the Muslim Students Association (MSA); the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT); the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA); the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), out of which emerged in 1994 the most prominent Muslim group in the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); and many others.

The memorandum also explains that Muslim Brotherhood operatives “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
³³

According to
The
Wall Street Journal,
Jamal Barzinji also has business ties to a Muslim Brotherhood activist, Youssef Nada.
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And the destruction of Israel is high on the jihadist agenda. After 9/11, federal agents raided Barzinji’s office and home. An affidavit filed in federal court charges that “Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ (as evidenced by ties to al-Arian, including documents seized in Tampa), but also with Hamas.”
³⁵

PIJ is the jihad terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Just as disturbing were the phone banks in Gaza campaigning for Obama. Muslims in Gaza methodically worked the phones in Internet cafes, calling Americans and doing everything they could to influence the vote.
³⁶

When New York congressman Jerrold Nadler was confronted with the Gaza phone banks issue while campaigning for Obama in South Florida in early November 2008 he said that if there “really were phone banks in Gaza, that would be a major campaign issue.” He said it would be all over the media and be a major problem for the campaign. And he laughed at the idea that Obama was receiving campaign
contributions from Gaza. The mainstream media laughed along with him, continuing its refusal to cover this explosive story.

If there had been just one questionable tie, one link to jihadist entities, one link to groups advocating the destruction of Israel, Barack Obama might have merited the free pass he got from the mainstream media about this. But there were so many.

And to this day they have never been explained.

SAMANTHA POWER

Some say, of course, that Barack Hussein Obama should not be held responsible for associations he made years or even decades ago. It’s unclear why that should be if he has never adequately renounced or repudiated these associations. But even if he has in some cases, as a candidate and as president he has surrounded himself with advisers who have distinguished themselves by their anti-Israel positions.

One Obama foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, resigned from the Obama campaign team under fire in March 2008 after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” Obama never seemed fazed by her calling, in a 2002 interview with Harry Kreisler of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley, for military action against Israel to secure the creation of a Palestinian state.
³⁷

Power said that establishing a Palestinian state would mean “sacrificing—or investing, I think, more than sacrificing—billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence.” She said that this would “require external intervention.”

Many observers quite reasonably concluded that in this Power
meant that the United States should invade Israel in order to secure the creation and protection of a Palestinian state. Confronted about this during the Obama presidential campaign, Power made no attempt to explain or excuse her statement: “Even I don’t understand it.… This makes no sense to me.… The quote seems so weird.” She assured supporters of Israel that she did not believe in “imposing a settlement.”
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Power’s anti-Israel bias was not limited to that one statement. When the much-hyped “Jenin Massacre” of 2002 turned out to have been a Palestinian propaganda operation rather than an actual massacre, Power remained skeptical, saying at a conference funded by George Soros: “I was struck by a [
New York Times
] headline that accompanied a news story on the publication of the Human Rights Watch report. The headline was, I believe: ‘Human Rights Reports Finds Massacre Did Not Occur in Jenin.’ The second paragraph said, ‘Oh, but lots of war crimes did.’ Why wouldn’t they make the war crimes the headline and the non-massacre the second paragraph?”
National Review
’s Michael Rubin commented: “It is questionable whether any war crimes occurred in Jenin, except of course the war crimes associated with Palestinian assembly of suicide bombs which Palestinian terrorists—not uniformed officials—used to target civilians on buses and elderly in hotels. But, that does not seem to be what Samantha Power means.”
³⁹

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”