Samantha Power hates the Jews. Power wants to spend billions on bolstering Palestinian military strength, instead of spending it on helping the Israelis to defend themselves.

Bear in mind that this interview below takes place about seven months after 9/11, when people supposedly still knew how dangerous radical Islamist groups like Hamas and al-Qaeda were. Power wanted to send them money and stop funding Israeli efforts to fight them.

This should give us some insight into the foreign-policy objectives of Barack Hussein Obama, who had Samantha Power as an adviser from 2005 until she referred to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” in March of this year.  This newsworthy item should also be of much interest to many that Barack Hussein Obama didn’t bounce her from his team over her views on Israel.  Via HotAir:

Samantha Power left the Barack Obama campaign in March of this year, after a somewhat overblown kerfuffle over her reference to Hillary Clinton as a “monster”. Power advised Obama on foreign policy, having spent her career detailing genocides and international responses to them, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the subject. Power had some interesting ideas about how to resolve one particular instance of what she sees as a genocide in this April 2002 interview at Berkeley with Harry Kreisler:

AmericanThinker has this to say about Samantha Power:

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 by TIME 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.

Also of note is a recent opinion 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 her inclination 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 the New 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 NYT reports this as its headline; and Power thinks the headline still should have been: Israel guilty of war crimes!

Leave a Reply