Obama Selects Woman Who Wanted to Invade Israel As Chair of Genocide Panel

Only Barack Obama! Today the President tried to show he was a friend of the Jews with a beautifully crafted speech Holocaust Museum. Showing his words mean nothing, also today Samantha Power began work today as chair of  President Barack Obama's new Atrocities Prevention Board. If you don't remember Ms Power she once called for a US force to invade Israel and force through a "peace settlement." Powers also had some unflattering things to say about about America's Jewish population during the 2008 campaign

How long do you think it will be before Powers uses that board as tool to de-legitimize Israel?

Power was a foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign in 2008 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?'"

In 2002 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. 

The video of the interview is below.

Samantha Power has a history of blaming Israel, even when she knows charges against her are false. 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!

Today President Obama spoke at the US Holocaust Museum, his words were pretty but it is his actions that tell the tale.

In her own words Samantha Powers has attacked Israel when it had done no wrong, and blamed the Jews for Obama's campaign troubles. The appointment of Samantha Power to head up the new Atrocities Prevention Board, which under her tutelage is sure to become a forum for false attacks against Israel, is just one more example of Obama's  actions not matching his words.