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The list keeps growing: Biden appoints another anti-Israel official to his cabinet

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by

Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz
in


The list keeps growing: Biden appoints another anti-Israel official to his cabinet

As the Biden administration fills up with former Obama staffers, the anti-Israel agenda seems clearer than ever before.

Yet another enemy of Israel at the UN

The Biden administration nominated Gay McDougall, a law professor at Fordham, as the US representative to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).

CERD consists of 18 independent human rights experts, elected for four-year terms. Once elected, the representatives are considered “independent experts” who do not have to adhere to their country’s policies. 

McDougall was first elected to serve on CERD in 1998 and did so until the end of her term in 2001. She was elected again from 2016-2020, serving as Vice-chairperson of the Committee. The Biden administration has nominated her to serve another four years.

 

But her career on CERD was highlighted by anti-Israel bias.

The “State of Palestine” became a member of CERD in 2014. In 2018, “Palestine” filed an inter-state complaint against Israel. When the Palestinian case against Israel came up in 2019, the CERD Committee asked the UN Office of Legal Affairs for an opinion about whether or not it had jurisdiction in this case. The UN’s own Office of Legal Affairs responded in writing by stating that the CERD Committee did not have jurisdiction to take up the “State of Palestine” complaint.

CERD ignored the legal advice it sought and decided it did have jurisdiction. Some of the other committee members questioned the validity of the complaint, noting rampant antisemitism, particularly in the Palestinian educational system, discrimination against other minorities, the status of women, and oppression of the LGBT community. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded by alleging bias by the committee members, noting that their “blatant anti-Israel posture, and reckless disregard for the welfare of Israelis, is a shocking neglect of the duties of the CERD Committee to act with impartiality and objectivity.” 

Six of the sixteen Committee members dissented, opposing this decision. McDougal voted to uphold the charges against Israel.

It should be noted that China is also a member of CERD.

McDougal has a history of being anti-Israel. She wrote a paper for the UN Human Rights Council in 2008 about citizenship rights, criticizing Israel for not allowing Palestinians to become citizens despite the Oslo Accords establishing the Arabs in Judea and Samaria as citizens of the Palestinian Authority.

She supported the 2009 UN World Conference Against Racism which became an Israel bashing fest. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the conference, condemning Israel as “totally racist” and accusing the West of using the Holocaust as a “pretext” for aggression against Palestinians. The distributed English version of the speech referred to the Holocaust as an “ambiguous and dubious question”. 

Wall of shame

The Biden administration has appointed a shocking number of anti-Israel staffers. Listed below are some of the more egregious examples:

John Kerry: As Obama’s Secretary of State and his role in orchestrating the JCPOA, John Kerry earns the number one spot on this list. Currently serving as the first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, Kerry’s title of “Israel-hater” was cemented when Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, revealed that Kerry communicated sensitive intel to Iran about Israeli military operations in Syria. Kerry overlooked Palestinians violence, voicing instead that the obstacle to peace between the Palestinians and Israel was Jews living in Judea and Samaria. While secretary of state, he notoriously predicted that there could be no peace in the region without an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians based on the two-state solution. This was proved inaccurate when President Trump negotiated the Abraham Accords. Though not considered Jewish under Torah law, Kerry has tried to reject accusations of anti-Semitism based on his grandfather’s Jewish identity.

Thomas Nides:  The most recent shameful nomination was that of  Thomas Nides as the US ambassador to Israel. Despite being raised in a Jewish family, Nides has a history of being anti-Israel. While serving as the deputy secretary of state under former US President Obama, Nides was abusive towards the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren. Oren also expressed shock at Nides’  support for ex-Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government.

Maher Bitar: Biden’s senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council was, one of the executive board members of the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine. At a Palestine Solidarity Movement conference in 2006 n Georgetown, Bitar ran a session describing how to best demonize Israel. Next year, he facilitated a Palestinian Student Society summit addressed by Joseph Massad, who had called Israel a “Jewish supremacist state” and praised terrorism. Bitar went to work for UNRWA, interned at the misnamed and militantly anti-Israel Foundation for Middle East Peace and studied at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, writing papers on the so-called “Nakba” and on “Palestinian” activism. 

Israel’s “political existence as a state is the cause for Palestinian dispossession and statelessness,” Bitar wrote in one paper. “Israel’s rejection of their right to return remains the main obstacle to finding a durable solution.”

Robert Malley: Malley, born to Jewish parents, is the newly appointed special envoy to Iran.  Malley is an advocate for the resumption of harmonious relations with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Like many Biden appointees, Malley served in the Obama administration but while still campaigning in 2008, the Obama organization severed ties with Malley after it was revealed that he had been in direct dialogue with Hamas, designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization. After winning the election, Obama appointed Malley to the National Security Council and he was the lead negotiator on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Malley advocates for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria and a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.

Avril Haines: Yet another former Obama staffer who is Jewish, Haines is currently serving as the Director of National Intelligence. Haines has voiced her opposition to Israel annexing Judea and Samaria and advocated for the creation of a “Palestinian state” with its capital in Jerusalem. Haines has sat on several think tanks such as the Columbia World Projects which oversees the Obama Foundation that attracts huge donations from foreign sources, many of which are openly anti-Israel. Haines is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, which is heavily funded by Qatar, a sponsor of terrorist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Reema Dodin:  Hailed as the highest-ranking Palestinian-American woman to serve in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, Dodin was appointed by Biden to be his Deputy Director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. In a speech she gave at a church in Lodi, California in 2002, Dodin justified suicide bombings against Jews as “the last resort of a desperate people.” She has also described Israel as an “apartheid state”.

Hady Amr: Biden’s  Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in the State Department. As the founding director of the Brookings Institution in Doha, Amr advocated for legitimizing the Iranian-sponsored Muslim Brotherhood terror group and integrating Hamas into the PLO, making it part of the Palestinian Authority government.

Kristen Clarke: The new Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice has a history of antisemitism and racism. As the head of the university’s Black Students Association, Clarke invited the late Wellesley College professor Tony Martin, who self-published a book called The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront, in 1994. His address garnered criticism from the students for its explicitly antisemitic statements. In defending Martin, Clarke told Harvard’s student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, that “Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed black intellectual who bases his information of indisputable fact.”

In 1994, she wrote a letter in The Harvard Crimson citing neuroscientist Carol Barnes, saying black people had “superior physical and mental abilities,” and that the skin pigment melanin “endows blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities–something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

Jake Sullivan: Sullivan is the new National Security adviser. While working for then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, Sullivan was involved in initiating secret talks with the Iranians.

 


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