Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Israel on Thursday against cutting off Palestinian banks and spoke about the need to increase aid to Gaza, that is, Hamas, even further. Yellen’s words gained little attention, as the Biden regime’s betrayal of Israel is now old news. It is now widely known that the regime, deeply afraid that it could lose Michigan in November, has brought a seventy-year-old alliance perilously close to rupture to gain the Arab vote. Yet the betrayal of Israel didn’t begin when the polls started looking bad for Old Joe. The seeds of it were planted long before Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.
Back during the 2020 campaign, Old Joe vowed: “My administration will look like America, Muslim Americans serving at every level.” Although his career is an appalling record of seven decades of lying, this is one promise he has kept. On May 15, I wrote here at PJM about Maher Bitar, Old Joe Biden’s new special counsel and director of intelligence and defense programs at the National Security Council. Bitar is a longtime foe of Israel and an alumnus of the viciously anti-Israel campus group Students for Justice in Palestine. Bitar, however, is not even close to being the sole foe of Israel at high levels among Biden apparatchiks.
The man to whom the Biden regime has given the responsibility of being its special representative for Palestinian affairs, a particularly important post during this war, has declared: “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” Hady Amr has also said that Palestinian Arabs 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.
Yet despite his obvious bias, Amr has been the regime’s point man for Israeli and Palestinian issues from the beginning. Before getting his present job, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs within the State Department.
When reading about the regime’s latest accusation that Israel is violating human rights norms, it’s useful to keep in mind that the State Department’s undersecretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights is Uzra Zeya. Zeya has “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.
Bihar, Amr, and Zeya had plenty of company, but some of the Israel-haters have now departed from the regime. Most notorious among them was Robert Malley, who served as the regime’s special envoy to Iran until June 29, 2023. He is not on the Biden team at the moment because his security clearance was revoked and he was put on leave over his alleged mishandling of classified information.
Malley’s support for Iran’s Islamic regime and pronounced distaste for Israel had raised eyebrows for years. 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 has made clear for years that he was hardly an unbiased mediator. 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.
Also now departed, as of July 28, 2023, is the former Biden regime Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman. Before her work with her Bidenite comrades, Sherman was the lead negotiator of Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Then there was Reema Dodin, who, until her resignation on June 16, 2023, was 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, Calif., 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.”
Related: Why Has Biden Betrayed Israel? Look at His New Special Counsel
Colin Kahl was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy until July 17, 2023. Like the others, Kahl had “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 the 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.”
It’s quite a rogue’s gallery of hacks, ideologues, and jihad enablers. With so many of them still in place, the only surprise is that the Biden regime didn’t betray Israel even sooner.