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Opinion

Joe Biden’s Putting That Old Anti-Israel Band Back Together

By: Jeff Dunetz
This piece was originally published on The Lid and is reprinted with permission.

Joe Biden’s been saying he will appoint a staff representing diversity, and in a way, he has.  Some of his appointees are anti-Israel. Others are both anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. Biden’s been announced who will be on his team if he ends up in the Oval Office, and sadly, just as I predicted, his team is as anti-Israel as is much of his track record and the sentiments of the Democratic Party base.

The team he’s announced so far includes Obama and Clinton retreads unfriendly to the Jewish state. The Joe Biden anti-Israel team includes Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, Reema Dodin Deputy Director White House Office of Legislative Affairs,  Avril Haines DNI, John Kerry Climate Czar,  Karine Jean Pierre Deputy Press Secretary, and Neera Tanden OMB Director.

Tony Blinken, Secretary of State,  was deputy secretary of state during the last two years of the anti-Israel Obama administration. He was part of a team negotiating the JCPOA that put the U.S., Israel, and the Sunni Muslim states in danger of an Iranian nuclear attack, and deputy director of the state department that gave the Jewish State a going away smack down in the UN Security Council. He is one of the leading voices pushing Biden to get back into the JCPOA.

  • Blinken opposed designating the IRGC Terror Organization:  In a 2017 CNN appearance, Blinken opposed sanctioning and designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization – even though terror is what IRGC’s mission. The Iranian constitution established the IRGC to perpetrate terror against “enemies of Allah” (meaning, the U.S., Israel, and Sunni states) and expand Iranian Islamic sovereignty throughout the world. The IRGC’s terror involvement include murdering hundreds of American troops in Iraq; Iranian nuclear proliferation and weapons delivery systems development; plotting to set off a bomb in a Georgetown restaurant (to murder a Saudi diplomat and innocent American diners); providing weapons, training, funding, and logistical support to Iranian terrorist proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraq-based militias, the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and numerous other major terror attacks, including on the Buenos Aires Jewish Center. 
  • Blinken believes in the myth that continued Israeli control of Judea and Samaria will lead to the Israeli Arab population growing larger than the Jewish population.
  • During a speech at the J Street Conference in 2012, Blinken praised the anti-Israel J Street as a “ constructive force.”
  • After anti-Semite Linda Sarsour spoke at the DNC, a Biden staffer sent an email disavowing her hatred.  After the email went public, Blinken apologized to  Arab and Muslim Democrats about Sarsour during a private phone call, “My apologies for what we did and what happened,” acknowledging the “hurt and disappointment.” Adding that “Historically, Republicans and Democrats have been quick to dismiss Muslim, Arab-American and especially Palestinian-American voices, and I want to reiterate on behalf of all of us our support for your communities.”

Reema Dodin, Deputy Director White House Office of Legislative Affairs. Reema Dodin has excused Palestinian Terrorism and opposed U.S. support of Israel.  Of Palestinian descent, Dodin joined with Palestinians and their supporters who used to routinely and openly justify the most heinous terror attacks, blowing up buses and pizza shops, and Passover seders. In 2002, during the height of the murderous Palestinian terror spree that was killing Jews daily, she spoke at a church in Lodi, CA, condoning the terrorism saying, “The suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people. During that same speech, Dodin falsely claimed that the Israeli government cuts off water supplies “to coerce the Palestinian population.” In fact, Israel provides abundant water to the Palestinian Arabs – far more than specified in the Oslo accords.  Dodin also falsely portrayed Palestinian Arabs (the recipients of the most generous aid in the world) as malnourished and denied medical care.

  • That Lodi speech was given a few weeks after one of the most violent of Palestinian terror attacks. A Palestinian homicide bomber blew up the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel, during a Passover seder. Thirty innocent civilians were killed in the attack, and 140 were injured.
  • The book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” by former federal agent and counterterrorism expert P. David Gaubatz and Paul E. Sperry, revealed that Dodin justified the 9/11 attacks as a reaction to U.S. support of Israel:

  • As a staffer for Senator Dick Durbin, Dodin recommended an anti-American witness for a Senate “Muslim Rights Hearing.”  San Francisco-area activist Farhana Khera. He is the founder of Muslim Advocates, an organization that sued the Department of Justice to force it to disclose the FBI’s undercover operations to disrupt terrorist activities inside radical mosques and advise Muslim witnesses or suspects to not talk to the FBI.
  • Muslim Mafia also outed Dodin as one of CAIR’s cultivated contacts inside key Democrat leaders’ offices. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)  was tied to international terrorism and Hamas during the Holy Land Foundation in 2008. And in a 2010 letter to Congress, then Assistant AG Welch reported that CAIR and Hamas are offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and should be avoided.
  • Dodin condemned U.S. strikes against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, complaining that the military was ‘just going to hit innocent civilians.’”  (pages 181-182 of Muslim Mafia).

Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence (DNI). An Obama loyalist and a John Brennan acolyte. Ms. Haines’ appointment was endorsed by the anti-Israel group J-Street.  She signed their letter to the DNC berating them for being “silent on the rights of Palestinians and on Israeli actions that undermine those rights.’  As Daniel Greenfield noted in Front Page, the purpose of the letter that Haines signed was a sell-out of the pro-Israel community.

  • Greenfield also noted:

“Currently, Avril Haines heads up Columbia World Projects. A big part of the university’s internationalization effort is the Obama Foundation Scholars initiative. Being a Foundation Scholar requires “a proven commitment to service and leadership within a community, region or country outside the United States,” and, it ought to go without saying, the right set of political agendas.

The Obama “Scholars” at Columbia World Projects she manages include Mor Efrat, the head of the Occupied Palestinian Territories Department for PHR-I. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I), despite its name, isn’t really about medicine. It’s an anti-Israel organization whose founder promotes BDS and seeks to try Israeli soldiers for war crimes. PHR-I’s founder had urged a move to “integrate BDS in every struggle for justice and human rights by adopting wide, context-sensitive and sustainable boycotts of Israeli products, companies, academic and cultural institutions, and sports groups.”

Even while at Columbia, Haines continued her political work as the co-chair of Foreign Policy for America. The board of Foreign Policy for America includes Jeremy Ben Ami, the head of J Street. In contrast, the Advisory Board includes Joseph Cirincione, the head of Ploughshares, a key Iran nuclear legalization pressure group, alongside Haines, and Rob Malley, the Obama adviser initially forced out for his Hamas contacts (and his father was a close friend of Arafat). He now heads Soros’ International Crisis Group. Malley is also an advisor at Columbia.

Read the rest at The Lid.

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