Samantha Power; President Obama's Anti-Israel Rising Star

One of the side stories of Obama's action in Libya is the "comeback" of Samantha Power,  Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the Staff of the National Security Council. That should frighten any American who supports the strong friendship between the United States and Israel.

Power was a foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign when she blamed the Jews for the criticism of then Candidate Obama's foreign policy platform.

"There will be situations where the priority is self-defence," she says, indicating that a preference for multilateralism only goes so far. "President Obama, like every other leader on earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don't cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president." But it is politically impossible for Obama to talk to Hamas, even if he wants to. She can't say that, though, especially when vicious internet smears are making lurid allegations about his "Muslim past"...."So much of it is about: 'Is he going to be good for the Jews?'"

Right after blaming the Jews she had  an  interview with The Scotsman, and said:

"We fucked up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win" She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything... if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

She resigned the next day and went to work for the The International Crisis Group (ICG) a George Soros controlled "think-tank." She was on the board with fellow Israel haters connected to the Obama campaign, Robert Malley and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

But despite her trashing of his future Secretary of State, Power was removed from political purgatory a year into the Obama administration,  and was appointed to her present position.

No longer an administration newbie, Power now has the ear of the president to the point that she was a key voice in persuading President Obama to start bombing Libya over the objections of her own boss.

Power and a few others took the position that the United States couldn’t stay on the sidelines as Moammar Khadafy murdered his own people and snuffed out the people-power revolt in the Middle East in its infancy.

In speaking this way, Power was, in effect, speaking for Clinton.

Three years after the “monster” remark, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power find themselves on the same side in a profound debate over American interests and American values as they serve an opaque president whose foreign policy has now achieved a new level of incomprehensibility.

They were opposed by Power’s own boss, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

As Power's influence grows, the Obama administration, already not a great "friend of Israel" is bound to move even further toward an anti-Israel stance because Power is Anti-Israel and believes that it is the "Jewish lobby" who controls American foreign policy.

The Video below is from 2002 when she sat for an interview with Harry Kreisler, the director of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley. Kreisler asked her the following question:

Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine - Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?

Power's response seen in the video below is her advice to the President would be

• “Alienate” the American Jewish community, and indeed all Americans, such as evangelical Christians, who support the state of Israel, because Israeli leaders are “destroying the lives of their own people.” 

•  Pour billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money into “the new state of Palestine”

• Stage an American ground invasion of Israel and the Palestinian territories — what else can she mean by a “mammoth protection force” and a “military presence” that will be “imposed” by “external intervention”? — Interestingly she considers the exact same thing the height of arrogance and foolishness when it was done in Iraq.

If you cannot see video below (click here)



In 2004 Power reviewed Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival, Power agreed with many of Chomsky’s criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and expressed her own concerns about what she called the “sins of our allies in the war on terror,” lumping Israel together with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, and Uzbekistan. She called Chomsky’s work “sobering and instructive.”


Power is an advocate of the Walt-Mearsheimer view of the American relationship with Israel. In a  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 all Jews 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.

Those special interests she is alluding to is the infamous "Jewish Lobby," which controls the US government among its other nefarious roles in the world.

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 2nd 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?

Here we have another look into the mind of Power.  Israel is accused in sensational press reports of a massacre in Jenin, and is subjected to severe international condemnation; HRW finally gets out a report and says OOPs there was no massacre; even the NYT reports this as its headline; but Power thinks the headline still should have been: Israel guilty of war crimes!

Samantha Power is the "mind" behind President Obama's policy of  Responsibility to Protect which drove him to the "kinetic military action" [war] in Libya.  As her influence continues to grow, the Obama administration which has already backed off from the US/Israel friendship, might very well accelerate its move away from the only democracy in the Middle East.  I shudder to think what she may convince the president to do should he win a second term and will no longer need to worry about what Ms. Power calls alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [the Jews].