Former Obama Adviser on Israel
Samantha Power was forced to resign as prominent adviser to Barack Obama on all things foreign policy after she called Hillary Clinton a “monster.” The controversy which broke out after her remark, caused her to resign, even though she would have liked to remain in place and even though she played an important role in shaping Obama’s foreign policy views.
Now a video has surfaced of this lady’s take on Israel. The video should make those who consider voting for Obama in November aware that he chose this person to advise him and that she was not fired for these anti-Israel remarks, but for insulting Hillary Clinton. It is quite safe to assume that Power and Obama agree quite a bit on foreign policy, especially considering the fact that quite some of Obama’s other foreign policy advisers agree with Power as well.
“Let me give you a thought experiment here,” the interviewer asked, “lets say you were an adviser to the president of the United States, how would - in response to current events - you advise him to put structure in place to monitor that situation in which at least one party or another might be moving towards genocide?”
“I don’t think that in any of the cases shortage of information,” Power replied. “I actually think that in the Israel - Palestine situation there is an abundance of information. What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there. What we do need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in service of helping the situation. And putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import,” she went on to say in a clear reference to Jewish voters.
“It may more crucially meaning sacrificing or investing literally billions of dollars not in serving Israel’s military but actually investing in the new state of Palestine; investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support a mammoth protection force, not of the old Srebrenica or Rwanda kind but a meaningful military presence,” she went on to say. “Because it seems to me… that you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line, and unfortunately in position of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful - I mean it’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic - but sadly, you know, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy; there are certain sets of principles that guide our policy or that are meant to anyway - and it’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark rather than the deference to people who are fundamentally politically destined to the lives of their own people - and by that I mean people who Tom Friedman has called sharafat.”
“It requires external intervention” in Israel, she said. This even though “any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism but we have to think about lesser evils.”
Whether Obama agrees with Power that the United States should have sent forces into Israel so as to ‘protect’ Palestinians against Israeli ‘aggression’ is, of course, not know. What we do know, however, is that he has allied himself purposefully with those who do.
