In this official White House photo by Pete Souza, President Barack Obama confers with Samantha Power, left, and Susan E. Rice, U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, before they attended a wreath laying ceremony at the U.N. headquarters in New York, N.Y.
I came across this video a while ago but it has resurfaced with America’s military participation in Libya. Samantha Power has always been an outspoken critic of Israel and its right to exist. She has also alluded to the Jewish Lobby in the America as problematic at best. She had to resign during Obama’s campaign when she called Hillary Clinton a monster. She now sits on Obama’s National Security Council. With friends like her who needs enemies.Listen for yourself and you decide.
Pamela Geller has more to say about Ms. Power.
My book has the whole story:
Samantha Power
Some say, of course, that Barack Hussein Obama should not be held responsible for associations he made years or even decades ago. It’s unclear why that should be if he has never adequately renounced or repudiated these associations. But even if he has in some cases, as a candidate and as president he has surrounded himself with advisers who have distinguished themselves by their anti-Israel positions.
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.[i]
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.”
Many observers quite reasonably concluded that in this Power meant that the United States should invade Israel in order to secure the creation and protection of a Palestinian state. Confronted about this during the Obama presidential campaign, Power made no attempt to explain or excuse her statement: “Even I don’t understand it…This makes no sense to me….The quote seems so weird.” She assured supporters of Israel that she did not believe in “imposing a settlement.”[ii]
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.”[iii]
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?”’”[iv]
She didn’t explain what she found wrong with that question.
Yet despite all this, Barack Obama hired her first for his campaign team and then rehired her in November 2008 as part of his transition team for the State Department; then once in office, he appointed her to the National Security Council as Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. And August 2009 he demonstrated his confidence in Samantha Power yet again. The White House announced that she would “coordinate the efforts of the many parts of the U.S. government on Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), including the Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Defense.”[v]
[i] “Obama advisor calls for a military invasion of Israel,” YouTube, September 7, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oFkmcZt4OQ.
[ii] Shmuel Rosner, “Obama`s top adviser says does not believe in imposing a peace settlement, Haaretz, August 27, 2008.
[iii] Michael Rubin, “Obama Adviser Samantha Power on Israel, ‘Jenin Massacre,’” National Review’s The Corner, February 11, 2008.
[iv] Sholto Byrnes, “Interview: Samantha Power,” New Statesman, March 6, 2008.
[v] “Statement by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the Appointment of Two Senior Officials Responsible for Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons,” WhiteHouse press release, August 14, 2009. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Statement-by-Press-Secretary-Robert-Gibbs-on-the-Appointment-of-Two-Senior-Officials-Responsible-for-Iraqi-Refugees-and-Internally-Displaced-Persons
