We tried to tell you. From The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America, by Pamela Geller with Robert Spencer:
Early on in his campaign, Obama named Robert Malley one of his primary foreign policy advisers – to the immediate consternation of Israeli officials. One Israeli security official noted in February 2008: “We are noting with concern some of Obama’s picks as advisers, particularly Robert Malley, who has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hizbullah and offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.”
Malley’s sympathy was too much for the dancing Obama of the presidential campaign: he dropped Malley in May 2008 after it came to light that he had met with representatives of the jihad terror group Hamas.
However, this turned out to be only a trial separation, not a divorce. Meeting with an Islamic terrorist group was not a disqualifying resume item for Barack Hussein Obama. Only six months after Obama had dismissed him, the now-President Obama sent Malley to Egypt and Syria. “The tenor of the messages,” explained an aide to Malley, “was that the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests.”
Malley was a good choice to convey such a message. He has coauthored opinion pieces with a former adviser to Yasir Arafat and has repeatedly called upon the U.S. to hold talks with Hamas. His anti-Israel record was perfect; he even blamed Israel for the failure of the Camp David talks of 2000, when Arafat shocked the world by rejecting an offer to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem and beginning another bloody intifada instead. When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in the winter of 2006, Malley explained the result as stemming from “anger at years of humiliation and loss of self-respect because of Israeli settlement expansion, Arafat’s imprisonment, Israel’s incursions, Western lecturing and, most recently and tellingly, the threat of an aid cut off in the event of an Islamist success.”
Jihadist intransigence and Islamic anti-Semitism? Malley had nothing to say about either.
Malley has continued to defend Hamas and call for its acceptance by the U.S., saying that “a renewed national compact and the return of Hamas to the political fold would upset Israel’s strategy of perpetuating Palestinian geographic and political division.”
“Ex-Clinton aide returns to White House with Persian Gulf brief,” from Haaretz, February 19 (thanks to Jerk Chicken):
Robert Malley, the White House aide who advised President Bill Clinton during his futile effort to broker an agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians at Camp David in 2000, is rejoining the White House, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The paper quoted administration officials as saying that Malley will manage the fraying ties between the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf. As a senior director at the National Security Council, he will help devise American policy from Saudi Arabia to Iran.
Malley, who has been program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, has been something of a lightning rod in a field that can be culturally and ideologically treacherous. In 2008, he was forced to sever his ties as an informal adviser to the Obama presidential campaign when it was reported that he had met with members of Hamas, which the State Department classifies as a terrorist organization.
Malley also came under fire for an article, co-written with Hussein Agha, that argued that some of the blame for the failure of the Camp David talks lay with the Israeli leader at the time, Ehud Barak, and not just with the uncompromising position of the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, which was the conventional wisdom then.
Some right-wing critics accused Malley of showing a persistent anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian bias in his writings. A few even cited his father, the prominent Egyptian-born Jewish journalist, Simon Malley, who had close ties to the Egyptian government.
But Malley was stoutly defended by five former colleagues from the Clinton administration — Sandy Berger, Dennis B. Ross, Martin S. Indyk, Daniel C. Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller — who wrote a letter condemning what they said were “vicious, personal attacks” that were “unfair, inappropriate and wrong.”…
Sandy Berger! A man honest as the day is long!