Hagel, Kerry, Brennan — apparently Obama didn’t think there were enough foes of Israel in his Administration. So here come two more. They also want the U.S. to aid the jihad in Syria, and Rice, of course, was instrumental in the cover-up of the fact that the Benghazi attack was a jihad, and in blaming a Muhammad video for the attack — in other words, blaming our freedom of speech. “Obama names Susan Rice, Samantha Power to key positions,” by Christi Parsons and Kathleen Hennessey for the Los Angeles Times, June 5:
WASHINGTON — Praising “their integrity and their heart,” President Obama on Wednesday announced a shuffling of his top national security aides, including the departure of National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, the elevation of United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice to Donilon’s position and the nomination of longtime advisor Samantha Power to lead the U.S. mission to the UN.
During their years of service in his White House, Obama said, the three players have made “America’s values live in corners of the world that are crying out for our support and our leadership.”
Appearing in the Rose Garden with all three, Obama lauded them one by one for their ability to push not just for U.S. interests but also for such American values as democracy and human rights.
In doing so, Obama acknowledged the basic tension in his foreign policy team right now. The civil war in Syria grows more bloody by the day and yet Obama has not arrived at a strategically advantageous way to intervene that, for him, justifies the American risk involved.
Rice and Power are among those in the administration who lean toward intervention and have advocated for it in internal discussions. As Obama was preparing to make his official announcement, though, aides hastened to say that their appointments do not mean changes are in the works on the president’s policy on Syria.
Underscoring the point as he introduced Rice, who will become his top advisor on foreign policy, Obama called her a “fierce champion for justice and human dignity” who is “also mindful that we have to exercise our power wisely and deliberately.”
Rice, 48, is set to take over this summer. Her position does not require confirmation by the Senate. Rice has come under intense fire from Republicans for her role in the controversy over the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
GOP critics contend that she intentionally downplayed the role of terrorist groups during an initial round of interviews after the attack last year.
Key Republicans threatened to block her expected nomination to serve as secretary of State, but she withdrew her name from consideration. She has been an advisor to Obama since his 2008 run for the White House.
Power, 42, is also a longtime advisor. After serving in Obama’s Senate office she went on to be a special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights….
From The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, by Pamela Geller with Robert Spencer:
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.
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.”…
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.”
Indeed not. 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?”’”
She didn’t explain what she found wrong with that question.
And Rice is no better.
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