As many of the responses point out, there was no way that Daniel Pearl could have avoided being murdered by jihadists by practicing “individual accountability & reconciliation.” Nor was he any part of a “cycle of violence”: he was a Wall Street Journal reporter. Power reveals by this tweet the entire wrongheaded mindset of the U.S. foreign policy establishment: that the way to deal with jihad is to seek “reconciliation” by making various concessions, and launching hearts and minds initiatives that shower money on the offenders in hopes that they will be bought off as “friends.”
Power is also, unsurprisingly, a vociferous foe of Israel. We tried to tell you: in our book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America, Pamela Geller and I wrote:
One Obama foreign policy adviser, Samantha Power, resigned from the Obama campaign team under fire in March 2008 after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.” Obama never seemed fazed by her calling in a 2002 interview with Harry Kreisler of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley for military action against Israel to secure the creation of a Palestinian state.
Power said that establishing a Palestinian state would mean “sacrificing – or investing, I think, more than sacrificing – billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence.” She said that this would “require external intervention.”
Many observers quite reasonably concluded that in this Power meant that the United States should invade Israel in order to secure the creation and protection of a Palestinian state. Confronted about this during the Obama presidential campaign, Power made no attempt to explain or excuse her statement: “Even I don’t understand it…This makes no sense to me….The quote seems so weird.” She assured supporters of Israel that she did not believe in “imposing a settlement.”
Power’s anti-Israel bias was not limited to that one statement. When the much-hyped “Jenin Massacre” of 2002 turned out to have been a Palestinian propaganda operation rather than an actual massacre, Power remained skeptical, saying at a conference funded by George Soros: “I was struck by a [New York Times] headline that accompanied a news story on the publication of the Human Rights Watch report. The headline was, I believe: ‘Human Rights Reports 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?” National Review’s Michael Rubin commented: “It is questionable whether any war crimes occurred in Jenin, except of course the war crimes associated with Palestinian assembly of suicide bombs which Palestinian terrorists — not uniformed officials — used to target civilians on buses and elderly in hotels. But, that does not seem to be what Samantha Power means.”…
“U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power Facing Criticism Over This Tweet,” by Sharona Schwartz for The Blaze, February 24:
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power received a torrent of negative responses after posting a tweet Sunday evening that some interpreted as suggesting Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s killing could have been prevented by “individual accountability & reconciliation.”
Here’s what she wrote:
Daniel Pearl’s story is reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break cycles of violence. @DanielPearlFNDN
Samantha PowerAnd here are some of the responses:
@AmbassadorPower To what “cycle of violence” are you referring? The man had his throat cut for being a Jew.
Zathras
.@AmbassadorPower @DanielPearlFNDN Can you elaborate? What should Pearl have been accountable for? Should he have reconciled with Al Qaeda?
@AmbassadorPower Reconciliation? With people who cut his head off because he’s Jewish and American? They referred to him as “the Jew”.
SunnyRight
@AmbassadorPower How, precisely, does on reconcile with medieval savages who traffic in videotaped decapitation porn?
Rick WilsonFive hours after she posted her tweet, not one response on her twitter line was of a positive nature….