Biden Tries, Fails to Appoint Yet Another Anti-Semite
Biden Tries, Fails to Appoint Yet Another Anti-Semite
His nominee to be ambassador to Brazil is sunk by her Jew-hatred.
By Robert Spencer
Old Joe Biden recently nominated Elizabeth Frawley Bagley to be U.S. ambassador to Brazil, and she was expected to sail to confirmation; the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, however, voted 11-11 on the question of whether or not to send her nomination to the Senate floor, in the tie means that it dies there. Bagley’s trip to Brasilia was derailed by venomously anti-Semitic statements she made that were too much even for the Democrats, although Bagley certainly would have fit in quite well with Biden’s anti-Semitic team.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Bagley “spoke at length about the influence of Jewish money in politics, claiming the ‘Jewish lobby’ exerts undue influence over the Democratic Party with its ‘major money.’” Back in 1998, Bagley was interviewed by a historian at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and took the opportunity to lament “the influence of the Jewish lobby because there is major money involved.” She claimed that “the Democrats always tend to go with the Jewish constituency on Israel and say stupid things, like moving the capital to Jerusalem always comes up. Things that we shouldn’t even touch.” American supporters of Israel, she said, were motivated by “the Jewish factor, it’s money.”
When she was asked about all this during her confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bagley gave the predictable response. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) said: “The language you used in regard to the Jewish community, Israel’s influence on our election, and Jewish money have me concerned. The choice of words was fit into the traditional tropes of anti-Semitism.” Bagley suggested that this was Cardin’s fault: “I regret that you would think that it was a problem. I certainly didn’t mean anything by it. It was a poor choice of words, but it was something that the interviewer had asked me, prompted by something about politics.” She added that she was “very sorry about that choice of words.”
Why didn’t Biden’s handlers step in and defend Bagley, rather than let her nomination go down in flames? That’s a mystery. After all, in late May, the putative president’s handlers announced plans to promote Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr to the job of special envoy to the Palestinians. Amr is an indefatigable supporter of the genocidal Palestinian Arab jihad against Israel.
Back in 2002, Amr declared: “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” He said that Palestinians would “never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military, and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents.” He did not, of course, say a word about Hamas’ long-established practice of launching jihad attacks from civilian areas, so that retaliatory fire could be used for propaganda purposes. Of course, that was a long time ago, but Amr went on to a long career in the Obama administration and elsewhere, and never showed any sign that he had moderated his positions.
Anyone who is surprised that Biden’s handlers would send a jihad supporter to be special envoy to the Palestinians hasn’t been paying attention. Just days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, pro-Erdogan Turkish journalist Hakkı Öcal, according to Ahval News, “highlighted a report on the strong presence of Jews in the cabinet of U.S. President Joe Biden.” The report claimed that there was an “over 50 percent Jewish presence in the new U.S. cabinet,” and pointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Deputy Director David Cohen, among others. But Öcal was off base: among Biden’s handlers, Jewish and non-Jewish, there are few, if any, staunch friends of Israel. After just a few months in office, it was clear that Joe Biden’s handlers’ administration was shaping up to be the most anti-Israel presidency since the founding of the modern State of Israel. That is clear from the appointments Biden’s handlers have made. A sampling:
Robert Malley, special envoy to Iran, has become notorious over the years for his support for Iran’s Islamic regime and pronounced distaste for Israel. The Washington Times revealed in February 2021 that back in July 2019, “Iran’s smooth, English-speaking foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, met with Robert Malley, who was President Obama’s Middle East adviser, in an apparent bid to undermine the Trump team and lay the groundwork for post-Trump relations.”
Malley was a good choice for such an assignment. An Israeli security official noted in February 2008 that Malley “has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hizbullah and offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.” Obama dropped Malley in May 2008 after it came to light that he had met with representatives of Hamas, but six months later sent him as an envoy to Egypt and Syria.
Meanwhile, Reema Dodin is a deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. According to the Jerusalem Post, “during the Second Intifada, in 2002, Dodin spoke about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with residents of Lodi, California, saying that ‘suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people.’” Also, “in 2001, Dodin took part in a demonstration at UC Berkeley calling for the university to divest from Israel….The demonstrators compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.”
In a similar vein, Biden’s handlers appointed Maher Bitar the senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council. In 2006, while a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was a member of the executive board of the viciously pro-jihad, anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine, and was seen dancing in front of a banner that said: “Divest from Israel Apartheid.”
The deputy secretary of state is Wendy Sherman, who was the lead negotiator of Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. The State Department’s undersecretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights is Uzra Zeya. According to the Jewish News Service, Zeya “worked for the magazine Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and its publishing group, American Educational Trust. The Washington Report has questioned the loyalty American Jews have to the United States; published accusations against the ‘Jewish lobby’; claimed American Jews control the media; and accused the Mossad of perpetrating the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.”
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy is Colin Kahl, according to Israel Hayom, “has quite the anti-Israel record. He thinks the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq was 1981 was a mistake. In 2012, he acted to remove recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital from the Democratic party’s platform. In 2015, he was among those to formulate the Iran nuclear deal. In 2016, at the end of his term, then-US President Barack Obama tasked him with enlisting support for the anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334 that determined Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria were a violation of international law.”
Having assembled this team of Israel-haters and jihad supporters, it was odd that Biden’s handlers left Elizabeth Frawley Bagley to twist in the wind. But of course there is no honor among thieves.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.