The Power To Change

From BabbaZee:

Obama's friend Ali Abunimahsez: End of Israel within reach 

Obviously this man does not own a Bible...

Ali Abunimah sez: Obama Hiding Anti-Israel Stance

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing."As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, 'Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.' He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy [and said:] 'Keep up the good work!'"

And, of course, Obama has had the audacity to rehire Samantha Power, to make ensure that the Middle East situation will change:

As if king President Hussein couldn't make a scarier appointment. She was removed from his campaign team back in March because she was radioactive - but now the king answers to no one. Ain't no stopping him now.

Israel-Hating Samantha Power Named Key Obama Adviser 

Here's a note to the 78% of American Jews that voted for Barack Obama. The "Other Shoe" has been thrown at Israel. The President is naming Samantha Power to a senior foreign policy/national security position ...
Friends of Israel may remember Power for a different reason. She is a strong believer in the anti-Semitic notion that Jews Control foreign policy. She has also said that she would recommend that the US SHOULD SEND IN TROOPS TO IMPOSE A SOLUTION ON ISRAEL.

Previous Atlas Samantha Power Posts:
Atlas Shrugs: SAMANTHA POWER RETURNS: I TOLD YOU SO

Atlas Shrugs: Obama chief advisor calls for a military invasion of Israel ...

Powers: Obama's Foreign Policy Appease Team UPDATE: POWERS RESIGNS!

Ed Lasky and Richard Baehr wrote the best piece on Samantha Power back in February 2008, when it became clear that President Hussein was surrounding himself with classic Jew haters.

Samantha Power and Obama's Foreign Policy Team

Samantha Power

Senator Obama's supporters have uniformly ignored the role and the views of Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Samantha Power, who is very problematic regarding Israel, Iran, and for that matter, American supporters of Israel (see below). Power left her position at Harvard to work for Obama for a year after his election to the US Senate.  She is now identified as a "senior foreign policy advisor.". 

In the case of Power, it was Senator Obama who made the initial contact with her after reading her book on genocide. Power is now actively working for the campaign.  She cannot be casually dismissed as one of Obama's many advisors, with no particular assigned role.

It is not at all hard to imagine her having a senior foreign policy role in an Obama administration, perhaps as US Ambassador to the United Nations, an organization she views warmly. The problem for those who favor a strong US-Israel relationship is that Power seems obsessed with Israel, and in a negative way.  Much like the authors of the Baker-Hamilton report, she believes resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to solving other problems in the Middle East. And it is clear that her approach to addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be for the US to behave in a  more "even handed" fashion, which of course means withdrawing US support for Israel, and instead applying more pressure on Israel for concessions. 

Commentary Magazine, and in particular Noah Pollack, have done a superb job of investigative reporting regarding Power's record and views.  She is a headliner for Senator Obama -- a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a professor at Harvard.  Power has a column carried byTIME and she writes frequently. Indeed, it is her writing that reveals reasons to be concerned. From Commentary:

Power is an advocate of the Walt-Mearsheimer view of the American relationship with Israel. In a recent interview published on the Harvard Kennedy School's website, Power was asked to explain "long-standing structural and conceptual problems in U.S. foreign policy." She gave a two-part answer: the first problem, she said, is "the US historic predisposition to go it alone." A standard reply, of course. The second problem, though, should give us pause:

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued....  America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.

So greater regard for international institutions along with less automatic deference to special interests -- especially when it comes to matters of life and death and war and peace -- seem to be two take-aways from the war in Iraq.

Power is not just assenting to the Walt-Mearsheimer view of American foreign policy, but is also arguing that Israel had something to do with the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003: an appalling slander, and a telling one.

piece Power wrote for TIME, titled "Rethinking Iran," the thrust of which rethinking involves the need to engage diplomatically the mullahs and pretend that the Iranian nuclear program is a figment of the paranoid imagination of the Bush administration. She writes:

The war scare that wasn't [the recent incident between Iranian speedboats and the U.S. Navy in the Straight of Hormuz] stands as a metaphor for the incoherence of our policy toward Iran: the Bush Administration attempts to gin up international outrage by making a claim of imminent danger, only to be met with international eye rolling when the claim is disproved. Sound familiar? The speedboat episode bore an uncanny resemblance to the Administration's allegations about the advanced state of Iran's weapons program-allegations refuted in December by the National Intelligence Estimate.

Does Power actually believe that the NIE put to rest concerns about the Iranian nuclear program? If she actually thinks that -- and it appears she does -- she deserves voluminous ridicule from thinking people everywhere.

Power also advocates that America send armed military forces, "a mammoth protection force" and an "external intervention", to impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. This directly contradicts her criticism of the invasion and "occupation" of Iraq and her call for the removal of American forces from that nation. On the one hand, Power abhors American efforts to remake an Arab nation, but takes the contrary view when it comes to inserting American forces in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to impose a settlement. These troops, if sent, would be seen as occupiers and be sitting targets for Arab extremists. The colonial image of America and charges of imperial overstretch would echo throughout the Arab world.

If America sought to avoid being so tarnished -- which is presumably what Samantha Power would desire -- then the alternative would be for the United States to take a confrontational attitude toward Israel, so as to be seen as standing up for the Palestinians. Given herinclination to view Israel as guilty of war crimes  she would probably look favorably on such an approach towards the Israelis and Palestinians.

Power's views on the problems caused by the US-Israel relationship also place her in the same camp as Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Soros (an influential supporter of Barack Obama's), who also oppose the so-called "Israel lobby" and reject the participation of American supporters of Israel, including Christians, in the foreign policy discussion. Power writes of her willingness to

"alienat[e] a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing...billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel's military, but actually investing in the state of Palestine."

Power appears to support slashing, if not eliminating, military aid to our ally (surrounded by 300 million people who wish to destroy her) and giving it to the Palestinians, whose charters (whether the Hamas or Fatah version) advocate the destruction of Israel. The PA has used aid dollars to teach hate and sponsor terror, and Palestinian society has devolved into an internationally-supported welfare state characterized by enormous corruption. Why is there any reason to believe that massive amounts of additional aid be used any differently and more constructively?

Power also showed her animus toward Israel in another instance, appearing to argue with the New York Times for more negative coverage of Israel in the paper.  As Noah Pollak writes: 

"Martin Kramer points us to an interesting quote from the 2003 book Ethnic Violence and Justice, in which Samantha Power, one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisers, asks a question of David Rohde, a reporter who covered the intifada for theNew York Times. The quote is as follows:

Samantha Power: I have a question for David about working for the New York Times. I was struck by a headline that accompanied a news story on the publication of the Human Rights Watch report. The headline was, I believe: "Human Rights Report 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?

(The article to which Power refers is here and its headline is: "MIDEAST TURMOIL: INQUIRY; Rights Group Doubts Mass Deaths in Jenin, but Sees Signs of War Crimes." Obviously, Power has misremembered the headline.)

Here we have another window into the thinking of Power: Israel is accused in sensational press reports of a massacre in Jenin, and is subjected to severe international condemnation; Human Rights Watch finally gets out a report and says there was no massacre; the NYTreports this as its headline; and Power thinks the headline still should have been: Israel guilty of war crimes!"

 

Revelations regarding Power's views of Israel can be found in her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira De Mello and the Fight to Save the World, a biography of the UN official killed in Baghdad in a 2003 terrorist bombing.  A series of terrorist attacks emanating from the mini-terror state created in Southern Lebanon by the PLO had led to an Israeli occupation of the southern portion of Lebanon. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon had been inserted to quell the conflict, but was proving ineffectual. Israeli forces remained in place.

Power wrote:

" Israeli forces refused to comply with the spirit of international demands to withdraw and the major powers on the Security Council were not prepared to deal with the gnarly issues that had sparked the Israelis invasion in the first place: dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity".

The "spirit of international demands" to withdraw? Aside from wondering what that means and the enforceability of such a spirit, how about that phrase "dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity"? The dispossessed Palestinians had left Palestine mostly at the behest of calls by their Arab brethren to step out of the way as armed forces invaded Israel upon its founding. They and their descendants were denied rights by Lebanon and were unable to assimilate -- unlike the 600,000 Jews who were stripped of their possessions in Arab lands and whom Israel welcomed. The term "Israeli insecurity" makes it seem as if the Israelis were suffering from an emotional or psychological condition. In fact, it was not insecurity, per se, that the Israelis suffered from. It was Palestinian terrorism that the Lebanese government refused to prevent.

There is more from Ms. Power. Israel warned UNIFIL of its upcoming move into Southern Lebanon. Power talked of this move as a "ploy" and then wrote of "humiliation" that was to come as Israel ignored UN efforts to stop them. She wrote:

"Israel had thumbed its nose at the Security Council resolutions that demanded that Israel stay out of Lebanon, and in the course of invading a neighbor, its forces had trampled on the UN peacekeepers in its way".

She quotes the subject of her book -- really a hagiography -- calling the Israelis "bastards". She writes that the degradations suffered by UNIFIL before the Israeli invasion was felt far worse after the Israelis came into Lebanon. She writes that the Israeli authorities "threatened the peacekeepers and regularly denigrated them".

And now she is a senior foreign policy adviser to Presidential candidate Barack Obama, as well as occupying the Anna Lindh Professorship of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy  How appropriate: Anna Lindh, the late Swedish Foreign Minister, was a dedicated opponent of Israel.