Obama's Ambassador Nominees Know Nothing About Their Proposed Posts, But Plenty about Fundraising

It's no secret that ambassador posts frequently go to heavyweight campaign donors. But those posts are usually limited to reasonably pleasant countries with limited strategic value, while the high profile posts in strategic countries go to experienced diplomats. Even the campaign donors almost always have at least some qualifications for the post or specific knowledge of the country they're being assigned to.

Welcome to the world of President Obama, where things are done differently.

Prolific Democratic campaign fundraiser Noah Mamet, who bundled over $1 million in campaign donations to President Obama's two presidential election campaigns had his confirmation hearings today for his new post as our Ambassador to Argentina, one of South America's most important countries. He admitted today that he's never been to Argentina, and knows very little about the country, its politics or its history.

In January, another Obama bundler, George Tsunis who's usual job is running a chain of hotels got the nod from the Obama Administration to be our ambassador to Norway. Under questioning, not only did he admit he had never been to Norway, but he revealed abysmal ignorance of the country itself, referring to Norway's 'president' (it's a constitutional monarchy with a king and a parliament, but no president) and referring to the Norwegian Progress Party, which wants curbs on immigration 'fringe elements' that 'spew their hatred.'

'Norway has been very quick to denounce them,' he said. It fell to Senator John McCain to correct him and clue him in that the Progress Party is an important part of Norway's new, more conservative coalition government with 7 cabinet ministers.



Hey, insulting the government you're going to be dealing with if you're confirmed as our ambassador as well as revealing you're a clueless buffoon..not bad for a day's work!

Oh, and Mr. Tunis' unique and special qualifications for an ambassadorship? He raised $1.3 million for Obama's re-election and that of a few other select Democrats. And yes, the Senate confirmed his appointment, which I'm sure will send an interesting message to Norway.

I've already written about retiring democrat Senator Max Baucus, who was nominated as our ambassador to China admitting he knew nothing about the country after a question on tensions between China and Japan:



He's already been confirmed too. Just a worthy Democrat member of the Senate club who knows where a few bodies are buried, now off to bungle an important diplomatic assignment.

Oh, and then there's Colleen Bell, a soap opera producer who was chosen to become our ambassador to Hungary based on the $800,000 she raised for the president. Asked a question about our strategic interests with one of the more important nations in Eastern Europe, she revealed she had absolutely no clue what they meant. She'll likely be confirmed too.

There's two things at work here that concern me.

First of all, if you think these countries aren't paying attention, you're mistaken. And so are some other countries, some of them not so friendly to America who now have additional evidence that we are no longer a serious world leader and can be discounted.The stories about these senate hearings are front page news overseas.

Second, there's President Obama's naked disrespect for the Senate and for his country. Normally, presidential nominees, especially ambassadors spend some time being intensely briefed before a senate confirmation hearing so they don't embarrass themselves or the president. That is, they're briefed and rehearsed when the president gives a damn and has the slightest respect for his country and the senate.

We're dealing here with a president who either doesn't care or whom can't be bothered.

Soccer Dad's Mideast Media Sampler, 1/8/13

Today's sampler and analysis of Mideast media content from my pal Soccer Dad:

1) Friends don't let friends drive Chuck

What's driving the nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense? According to Roger Cohen of the New York Times, it shows Israel's True Friends? (Are the people in the accompanying picture an example of Israel's True Friends according to Cohen?) The article is mostly incoherent ignorance. For an example of Cohen's argument there's this paragraph:

Five years on, that needed dialogue has scarcely advanced. Self-styled “true friends” of Israel now lining up against the Hagel nomination are in fact true friends only of the Israeli right that pays no more than lip service to a two-state peace (when it even does that); scoffs at Palestinian national aspirations and culture; dismisses the significant West Bank reforms that have prepared Palestine for statehood; continues with settlement construction on the very shrinking land where a Palestinian state is envisaged (and was granted nonmember observer status at the United Nations last November by 138 votes to 9 with 41 abstentions, including Germany); cannot find a valid Palestinian interlocutor on the face of the earth despite the moderate reformist leadership of Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad; ignores the grave implications for Israel of its unsustainable, corrosive dominion over another people and the question of how Israel can remain Jewish and democratic without a two-state solution (it cannot); bays for war with Iran despite the contrary opinions of many of Israel’s intelligence and military leaders; and propels Israel into repetitive miniwars of dubious strategic value.

Cohen writes of "reforms that have prepared Palestine for statehood," but this week Fayyad complained that Arab countries are not meeting their pledges to the Palestinian Authority. An entity prepared for statehood wouldn't require donations to function. Abbas, as anyone familiar with the Middle East knows, is no reformer, but an out-of-touch autocrat mostly interested in perpetuating his own rule. Since Israel withdrew from most of the West Bank in 1995 and all of Gaza ten years later Again, anyone paying attention also understands that no Israeli politician is "baying" for war with Iran, but rather pleading for tough sanctions that will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threat. As far as the "miniwars" that Cohen decries, they have little to do with Israel's supporters, but are the result of terrorist organizations using Israeli concessions to threaten Israeli citizens. Israel's supporters defend Israel's right to defend itself; a right that Cohen apparently feels is "dubious."

It's amazing how much ignorance Cohen packed into a single paragraph.

A New York Times editorial, Nominations for Defense and the C.I.A. assesses the Hagel nominations:

While a member of the Senate from Nebraska in 1998, Mr. Hagel criticized the nomination of James Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg because he was “openly, aggressively gay.” That was a repugnant reason to oppose anyone for public office. Last month, Mr. Hagel issued a statement in which he described his comments 14 years ago as “insensitive,” apologized to Mr. Hormel and insisted he was “fully supportive of ‘open service’ and committed to L.G.B.T. military families.” Some leading foreign policy professionals who are gay, including Mr. Hormel, have since said they could support Mr. Hagel’s candidacy. Still, it will be important to hear Mr. Hagel explain at his confirmation hearing how his views have changed and how he plans to make sure that all service members are treated equally and receive the same benefits regardless of sexual orientation. It would also help if he acknowledged that his past comments were not just insensitive but abhorrent. ... Mr. Hagel’s independence and willingness to challenge Republican orthodoxy on Iraq, sanctions on Iran and other issues — both in the Senate and later as an administration adviser — have so alarmed neocons, hard-line pro-Israel interest groups and some Republican senators that they unleashed a dishonest campaign to pre-emptively bury the nomination. It failed, but the confirmation process could be bruising. The opponents are worried that Mr. Hagel will not be sufficiently in lock step with the current Israeli government and cannot be counted on to go to war against Iran over its nuclear program if it comes to that.

Note what the priority of the New York Times is. That Hagel of the correct view of alternative lifestyles. But because Hagel has apologized, he's okay now. What about his more numerous noxious comments about Israel? That doesn't bother the editorial writers at the Times as they excuse him for not being in "lockstep" with the current Israeli government. Whew! At least he'll be American official not an Israeli one. Hagel's comments about Israel aren't offensive to the editors of the New York Times because they agree with them!

Alana Goodman does a good job of summarizing Hagel's (in)actions that were anti-Israel. (Since these actions also were in regard to anti-American elements, they also could be construed as anti-American.) Of course, Goodman didn't summarize the actions; she was just copying a statement from the NJDC, which now supports Hagel! My father pointed out that she missed a significant point of the NJDC's hypocrisy. The NJDC statement from 2007 ended with:

And here's what the anti-Israel group, CAIR wrote in praise of Hagel:

"Potential presidential candidates for 2008, like Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Joe Biden and Newt Gingrich, were falling all over themselves to express their support for Israel. The only exception to that rule was Senator Chuck Hagel …” [Council on American-Islamic Relations, 8/28/06]

CAIR is anti-Israel and it praised Hagel for that exact quality! How again is it that Hagel is a "true friend" of Israel?

2) "Occupation" is a relative term

Dore Gold writes in European settlements and double standards:

Yet in the case of Northern Cyprus, the U.N. did not qualify its demand for a Turkish withdrawal by allowing, for example, the Turkish military to remain in even part of the island. Looking at these different considerations, it appeared that the international community should have judged the dispute over Northern Cyprus far more severely than the way it viewed the dispute over the West Bank, where Israel had multiple rights that it could exercise if it decided to do so. However, in practice, that was not the case. As usual, on Dec. 10, the European Union declared yet again that it was "deeply dismayed by and strongly opposes Israeli plans to expand settlements in the West Bank, including in east Jerusalem." Its statement made wild charges that Israeli construction in E1 "could also entail forced transfer of civilian population." It finally added that "the European Union reiterates that settlements are illegal under international law and constitute an obstacle to peace." Ironically, while the EU releases harsh statements of this sort against Israel for any construction activity in West Bank settlements, it has nothing to say about tens of thousands of Turkish settlers that have moved into Northern Cyprus.

Eugene Kontorovich argues that there could be a practical benefit for Israel stemming from this hypocrisy:

Discussions of a potential ICC referral often focus on potential liability by Palestinians as a factor that would dissuade them (or the Court) from proceeding. But Israel’s best bet for heading off such a suit would be to advertise the implications for other non-member states that would clearly be on the settlement hook: Turkey and Russia. For the record, I think it quite unlikely that the ICC will indict Israeli leaders over settlements, but I’d bet the farm it wouldn’t indict Israel and Turkish leaders in this decade. Indeed, if I were the Israeli government, I’d spend less time preparing an ICC defense that working up a Cypriot case against Turkey, as a favor to its new bestie. By the way, the Europeans who are “settling” N. Cyprus do not themselves violate the Geneva Conventions, because i) only the “occupying power” can violate it, and ii) it only prohibits “transfer” of “nationals of the occupying power.” Assuming the Europeans are not Turkish citizens, they can’t be settlers. Similarly, American Jews who move to, say East Jerusalem as American citizens cannot be said to be “settlers,” though popular usage may vary.

This is just one more example of how ignorance and misinformation color the way many look at the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Obama UN Nominee Samantha Power Makes Deceptive Noises On Israel In Confirmation Hearings

President Obama's nominee for UN envoy Samantha Power is undergoing her confirmation hearing before the Senate, and like President Obama, she's making noises contrary to beliefs she's held for years in order to try and get the job.

Israel is the only member nation of the UN that is prohibited from ever holding one of the revolving seats on the UN Security Council, in violation of the body's own charter. Yes, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Pakistan and Zimbabwe are eligible, but not Israel.

So of course, Ms. Power came out with some pleasant sounding platitudes condemning what she called "unacceptable bias" by the UN against Israel. . And she's pledging to 'lobby hard' to get Israel one of those revolving seats on the Security Council.

That's nonsense, and Ms. Power knows it very well. Those revolving seats are doled out on a regional basis, and a number of states in Israel's region either don't recognize the country's existence or are actually in a formal state of war with Israel, so they refuse to allow it to be included as part of their region. There's no way the UN as it is now constituted would ever award Israel one of those seats, and she knows it.

But wait, there's more.

Expanding on her remarks, Power paid tribute in her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to America's "special relationship" with Israel, whose "legitimacy should be beyond dispute, and its security must be beyond doubt."

She added, "Within this (UN) organization built in the wake of the Holocaust... we also see unacceptable bias and attacks against the state of Israel."

If I were asking her a question, it would be to wonder out loud why she's suddenly voicing sentiments now that she's never before seen fit to utter in her entire career in public life!

This is the same woman whom called for the U.S. to unilaterally invade the region, force Israel into indefensible borders and engage in ethnic cleansing by throwing every Jew out of Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem, turn those areas over to 'Palestine' and establish a U.S. peacekeeping force there to keep Israel from retaliating against the inevitable terrorist attacks on its civilians that would result from the new borders. Notice the smirk when she talks about the necessity of "alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import''..by which she means American Jews:



“What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in service of helping the situation, and putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean sacrificing or investing literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israel’s military but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support what I think will have to be a mammoth protection force” .

You'll notice she also wants America to cut off military aid to Israel and invest billions in 'Palestine' instead. Like President Obama, she's dead set on creating 'daylight' between America and Israel and destroying that alliance, no matter what she says now.

Guess which RINO is leading the charge to get her confirmed? None other than Senator John McCain, who described her as capable and qualified.

On the other side are GOP Senators Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson, who've been asking pointed questions. Like exactly what she meant when she wrote in 2003 that America needs a "historical reckoning with crimes committed" by the U.S. government.

When she was asked exactly what 'crimes' those were, she refused to go into details, just mechanically repeating that she would she would never apologize for America, and that "I believe the United States is the greatest country on Earth.”

Remember that one of the first things President Obama did when he became president in 2009 was to take the position of UN Ambassador, which up until then had been part of the State Department and the Secretary of State and make it a cabinet level post that reports directly to him and him alone.

Samantha Power is an unrepentant Leftist from academia who is unworthy of representing the United States in any capacity whatsoever. I would not be surprised to see her confirmed, but it is a disgrace she was even nominated, let alone that she would actually hold office.

Obama Appoints Hamas Ally To Key National Security Post

The man pictured above is Robert Malley. Today, it was announced that President Obama has appointed him the senior director at the National Security Council (NSC).

The NSC is the key body that advises President Obama and helps make decisions on national security and foreign policy matters. Its members consist of,among others, the vice president, the Secretaries of State, Homeland Security and Defense, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of National Intelligence, the president's National Security Advisor and the deputy Adviser, the Attorney General and the president's UN Adviser.Other special assistants to the president also attend as required.

In other words, this is President Obama's 'inner cabinet' on national security, so to speak. The members, the top level members of the Obama Administrations, are privy to all of America's intelligence, planning and confidential data.

So who is Robert Malley?

Of Syrian descent,he was a Clinton-era National Security Council staffer known for his tirades against Israel and his championing of Yasser Arafat. He made waves by blaming the Israelis for the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit, thereby contradicting the words of President Bill Clinton and every other U.S. official present, and rationalizing and defending Arafat’s terrorist war on Israel's civilians.

Malley was a close crony of then presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama and a foreign policy adviser to the campaign back in 2008. Way back then, Candidate Obama still saw the necessity of getting clueless American Jews to vote for him, so when it surfaced that Robert Malley was meeting actively with the genocidal terrorist group Hamas, Obama took the opportunity to remove him from the campaign in 2008 as a gesture to prove his pro-Israel bonifides.

According to 18 U.S. Code § 2339B, providing material assistance to a designated terrorist group (which includes advice) is supposedly a federal offense, But Robert Malley had powerful friends (including Clinton NSA adviser Sandy Berger and Senator Barack Obama, whom he was pals with at Harvard) so he simply drifted back into the world of think tanks, where he could be relied on to write articles and make speeches demonizing Israel.

And actually, according to he Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat, Malley never really left Obama's circle. Al-Hayat reported that Hamas engaged in talks with Obama for months through Malley, which among other things resulted in their receiving almost a billion of your tax dollars from President Obama.

Robert Malley comes by this honestly. His father Simon was a very Marxist journalist who shilled for Algeria's terrorist FLN, Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdul Nasser, African Marxist dictators like Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sékou Touré, Fidel Castro, and of course, Yasser Arafat, of whom he was especially fond. Needless to say, Simon Malley also had an outspoken hatred towards Israel, and the apple definitely did not fall far from the tree.

Once Barack Obama became president, as we now know, he spent a great deal of time during his first term concentrating on bashing and attacking the Israel, giving the Arabs whom identify themselves as Palestinians more U.S. money than they'd ever seen in their lives and in general behaving like Mahmoud Abbas' own special community organizer.

That moderated a bit in 2012 when the president needed to fool people again for his re-election, but now that President Obama has no need to dissemble any longer, Malley will join the other members of the Obama Administration who have a long time record of hostility towards Israel.And he will be privy to America's most highly classified secrets.

Malley has some interesting ties with Islamists worth looking at. Among Malley's close associates is Wadah Khanfar, a Hamas activist based in the Middle East and South Africa (where he headed the International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations) and now a key figure with al-Jazeera, AKA Jihad TV. According to one of my sources, Malley also has a relationship with our old friend Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a foul genocidal maniac who is too dirty even to be allowed into the U.S.

Another Malley associate is Anwar Ibrahim, who heads the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Malaysia and at one time was on the board of Malley's International Crisis Group. Ibrahim was also one of the founders of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in America, a Muslim Brotherhood front that should ring a few bells to people familiar with Islamist terrorism. The IIIT also has an important connection to President Obama's Brotherhood friendly ambassador to the anti-Semitic and Islamist Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), while  the co-founder and president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, Shaykh Taha Jabir al-Awani, was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Sami al-Arian terrorism case.

Malley is also on good terms with Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh, whom he worked with to get Hamas aid from President Obama and with Hamas Politbureau chief Khalid Mesha'al, and he has strong ties with the now outlawed Brotherhood in Egypt because of his father and his own assistance to the movement.

Needless to say, since this is a presidential appointee and not a cabinet post, there will be no confirmation hearing and no one is going to be questioning why someone like this is going to be in such a sensitive position.

So, what does all this mean?

Malley's official responsibility according to the White House is to oversee relations between the U.S. and its Persian Gulf allies. Because of the the falling out between the Brotherhood and the GCC countries including Saudi Arabia, putting a Brotherhood proponent in charge of relations sends a message that the Obama Administration is choosing to distance itself from these countries. And not just the GCC countries,but Jordan, struggling against a Muslim Brotherhood takeover and Egypt, who just outlawed the Brotherhood and whom the Saudis are now supporting financially.

And Malley's appoint also signals that the U.S. will continue to back President Obama's favorite Islamist leader, Turkey's Tayyip Erdoğan as he continues to push Turkey into an Islamist autocracy.

It also sends Israel a message that the Obama Administration intends to double down on the pressure to force Israel into major strategic concessions and indefensible borders.

But most importantly,it signals that President Obama is going to double down on his support for Islamists and that they will continue to have major access to policy making and to the very core of our intelligence and security secrets.

This is exactly how the Soviets operated in penetrating the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.