From calling for the destruction of Israel to the National Security Council.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“Why Is Georgetown Providing a Platform for This Dangerous Group?” an op-ed in the Washington Post had asked.
The group was the Palestine Solidarity Movement, a BDS anti-Israel hate group whose conferences had a history of antisemitism, supporting Hamas and the murder of Jews.
Maher Bitar, one of the executive board members of Students for Justice in Palestine, was one of the principal organizers of the 2006 conference which was being hosted by Georgetown University’s SJP hate group. A photo appears to show him dancing in a keffiyah in front of a banner reading, “Divest from Israel Apartheid”.
Despite protests from Jewish groups, the Georgetown BDS conference went ahead
Now, Biden has picked Maher Bitar as the Senior Director for Intelligence on the NSC.
In 2006, the American Jewish Committee was pleading with Georgetown to distance itself from the anti-Israel hate of PSM and SJP. Now the anti-Israel hate occupies the top of the foreign policy establishment and is set to define the foreign policy of the Biden administration.
In his new position, the former anti-Israel activist will coordinate intelligence between the White House and the intelligence community, receiving material from intelligence agencies, informing the intelligence community of White House policy, and deciding who gets access to secret information. The office also contains some of the most classified information around.
The job of Senior Director for Intelligence at the National Security Council is supposed to go to an intelligence professional. How did an anti-Israel activist go from helping host a conference for an organization whose speakers have supported Islamic terrorism to a top intelligence job?
At the PSM conference in Georgetown, Bitar had run a sessiondescribing how to best demonize Israel. Next year, he facilitated a Palestinian Student Society summit addressed by Joseph Massad who had called Israel a “Jewish supremacist state” and praised terrorism.
Massad had also argued that the idea that “any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is ‘anti-Semitism’ smacks of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism.”
A few years later, Bitar could be found presenting at a Sabeel conference featuring some of the worst bigots like Rebecca Vilkomerson of JVP ,who had invited a terrorist to address the BDS hate group, and Richard Falk, who had endorsed a book which wondered whether “Hitler might have been right after all”.
Maher Bitar went to work for UNRWA, interned at the misnamed and militantly anti-Israel
Foundation for Middle East Peace, and and studied at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, writing papers on the so-called ‘Nakba’ and on ‘Palestinian’ activism. He appeared to describe Israel’s security barrier as a “segregation wall”
Israel’s “political existence as a state is the cause for Palestinian dispossession and statelessness,” Bitar wrote in one paper. “Israel’s rejection of their right to return remains the main obstacle to finding a durable solution.”
The so-called ‘right to return’ would mean the destruction of Israel.
He helped assemble a BADIL publication: a BDS hate group which seeks to eliminate Israel through the ‘right of return’ and which has opposed bans on working with terrorists.
The issue in question denounced “Jewish colonization”
And yet before long, Bitar could be found working for the Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. From there he went on to serve as the NSC’s Director for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs and as Samantha Power’s Deputy at the UN. In under a decade, Bitar had gone from anti-Israel activism through the private network of BDS organizations to key positions shaping American intelligence and foreign policy at the National Security Council and the UN.
Even while Bitar was engaged in anti-Israel activism, he was also volunteering for the Obama campaign, and working for the UN. He started working for the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace as an extern while studying for his JD at Georgetown.
In 2016, Bitar came back to Georgetown to tell students that “those of you who might feel conflicted about or even disagree with American policy and want to change it” could do it.
When President Trump was elected, Bitar became the general counsel to House Intelligence Committee Democrats, serving as the top legal adviser to Rep. Adam Schiff and playing a key role in the first Democrat attempt to impeach President Trump. Now he’s back at the NSC.
Bitar’s rise through the ranks speaks to the abandonment of Israel by the Democrats and the ineptitude of pro-Israel advocates at fighting the personnel battles that define the government.
During the Obama administration, organizations that claimed to be advocating for Israel would come out to D.C. and take pride in receiving a personal briefing from Bitar about Israel’s security without having a clue about who Bitar was or how hard he must have been laughing at them.
Policy battles aren’t won at the executive level, but at the personnel level. The Left keeps winning policy battles even when moderates and conservatives win elections because it understands that having its people in a position to make policy matters more than elections.
Obama had put the author of “Ethnic Cleansing and the Falling Apart of Palestinian Society” in charge of the NSC desk on Israel. Biden put him in charge of NSC intelligence.
Israel will accordingly return to its old Obama understanding that it can no longer share the truly sensitive intelligence with its American counterparts because the NSC is once again tainted.
But the tainting of the NSC has larger implications that go far beyond Israel.
The Obama administration initially began spying on members of Congress who were speaking to Prime Minister Netanyahu after monitoring any effort to take out Iran’s nuclear program.
Pro-Israel legislators should once again expect to be spied on by the Biden administration.
The NSC was a key gateway for Obama’s surveillance of opposition politicians. Putting the right people in place at the NSC will be crucial to protecting the next wave of illegal surveillance.
And any effort by Israel to take out Iran’s nuclear program with its new Arab allies will be closely monitored and sabotaged by the Obama veterans who are back in charge of the NSC.
At the 2006 Georgetown anti-Israel conference, Bitar was advising attendees on how to infiltrate and blend in. Now that he has reached a career pinnacle at the NSC, he had the honor of being profiled by Politico as a “Palestinian”. But earlier versions of Bitar’s story had him being “of Palestinian and Egyptian descent” and claiming “family roots [that] trace back to Palestine”.
Bitar claimed that his family were “refugees”.
At the PSS summit, he described the group as those “who actively identify as Palestinian because of a shared national, historical, and cultural experience”.
The dirty little secret of the ‘Palestinian’ myth is that its identity is imaginary.
The radicalism of the Democrats and their abandonment of the Jewish State however are all too real. That’s how Maher Bitar went from anti-Israel activism, from calling for the destruction of Israel, to the Israel desk at the NSC, and then the top policy intelligence position at the NSC.
“Why Is Georgetown Providing a Platform for This Dangerous Group?” a Washington Post op-ed had asked in 2006. The question now is why are Joe Biden and the Democrats?
And what do pro-Israel groups intend to do about it?
wth009 says
We need direction on what to do! This cannot stand. It’s just Islamic SUPREMACISTS attempting to not only destroy Israel but America. Do we really want to look like the UK or other European nations invaded by Islamic supremacist murderers? NO.
juleonly says
This is true. It is too dangerous to all of us here in USA. Its really happening. Where can I move?
gravenimage says
I’m not abandoning the US. Besides, as wth009 notes, most of the West is already in worse trouble than we are. Time to take a stand. First, by protesting moves like this one.
americanpatriot says
This is like putting an aggressive venomous snake in a great herds of ignorant, non-suspecting sleeping men or also like putting an enemy’s mole into one’s own troops. A Muslim cannot be a true and loyal citizen to its host country as many examples have shown like Boston bombers, New York jihadist Muslim who killed innocent bikers. Such examples of Muslims causing harm are countless. Muslims will always be faithful to their religion and work for their causes. Let’s just wait and see how he is going to perform. As far as one can expect, they are going to highlight their Muslim cause and work for it on issues like Palestinian and so-called Bangladeshi Rohingya Muslims. They will always remain quiet about Boko Haram or the Muslim atrocities toward Christians in Africa, Egypt and Pakistan committed by Jihadi Muslims there. The heavy and thick layers of Ignorance toward true Islam and Muslim strategies by our leaders and people will prove fatal for all of us by destroying from within.
Clifford Fodor says
Or just take a look at Nigeria. Are the Muslims living peaceably with the Christians there?
juleonly says
We can only wish he was an Apostate. Maybe he is. What would CAIR do if they thought he was a traitor working against his Terrorist Bros?
mortimer says
WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
A pro-Muslim Brotherhood FOX is in charge of the intelligence hen house … will he protect jihadists from surveillance?
WHAT COULD GO WRONG with a JIHADIST in charge of surveillance? Hmmmmm … let’s think that one over.
somehistory says
Laughing along with biden’s boss. Just imagine the vile grin on ‘o’s ugly lips….in the photo and currently.
An enemy of Israel, Jews and Christians every where, knowing exactly what information is coming in, how to divert it, how to use it to the advantage of moslims in and out of the U.S.
Westman says
“I came to Georgetown angry. Angry at the world for forcing my family into exile; angry because of the dispossession I had inherited; angry because these crimes continue. I am Palestinian and Egyptian, Arab and Melkite, or Greek Catholic, American and Canadian. Especially in a post-9/11 con-text, I, like many others with names and faces like mine, have been unfairly cast as the Other, as different, even, at times here at Georgetown, as unwelcome. ” – Maher Bitar
His Georgetown instructors taught him how to tone down the rhetoric yet not change the goal – complete run of Israel for a group that wishes and will make Israelis dead or gone.
I can envision an Israeli war with Iran in which “Palestinians” die at the hands of Iran after Israel is pushed into a corner by Bitar and Biden. Israel is never going away due to military actions by Islamic nations.
What Bitar wants is impossible for Israel to give while maintaining its security. There is no place for Israel to accept 6 or 7 million offspring from the 700,000 who left at the insistence of Islamic nations; nations who promised to crush Israel in 1948 – and lost.
It’s the ummah’s own doing that created the dispossession and Jordan which gobbled up much of “Palestine” also doesn’t want any, “returnees”. The violence inherent in the “Palestinians” cause both the separation within Israel and the reticence of any Islamic nation to take them in.
The brotherhood of the ummah is both religious and political fiction – the real common mode is hatred of Jews. Since 1948, Islamic nations disliked Jews more than they love Palestinians. Today, some are recognizing the Palestinians are an increasing liability.
gravenimage says
Biden Puts Anti-Israel BDS Activist in Charge of NSC Intel
…………….
Fox, henhouse…
DazzleMe says
Just absolutely hysterical!
Eli says
Is anyone really surprised?
MrLogical says
Biden didn’t pick this guy… Obama picked him. Fact.
When are you guys in the alt-media going to eake up and face reality? Biden is just a Trojan Horse sock puppet for Obama. Ditto for Harris.
The ‘real’ President is Barack Hussein Obama, serving his 3rd term in exile in the basement kf his home in the Kalorama section of D.C. He’s got a direct line to the Oval Office. Think of it as working in “COVID remote.” Viz., he can run the government in his sweats while Joe dresses up in suits, pretending to be President.
EVERY member of Biden’s cabinet and other sr. staff appointments were former members of the Obama administration with a small handful of minor exceptions.
Wake up and smell the Communism.
E T says
Barack Obama’s quotes:
The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.
The sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer.
Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – – it is an important part of promoting peace.
The Holy Koran tells us, O Mankind! We have created you male and female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.
In ancient times and in our times the Muslim communities have been at the forefront of innovation and education.
E T says
Sheikh Ahmed Badran “Once Muslims come to power, they will never all Infidels to rule over Muslims.”
Qur’an 8:12
gravenimage says
Yes–ugly and dishonest quotes from Obama.
manzoor alam says
You are so true brother. I am from Pakistan and know muslim mentality very well. when y are powerful they will lick your feet, when y areweek they will make y slave or kill y. Where ever they go their goal is to conquer that land not to live peacefully.
OLD GUY says
Muslim men are the best of men and don’t you forget it. And women you are nothing but to be used by men.
This is the belief of islamic men. If I as an American male said that American men are the best of men and that women were here just to serve men the WOMENS LIBERATION groups would come after me with a vengeance, and they should. BUT when muslim men and islam teaching this across the board world wide they say nothing.
The great contributions that the American women have made to this country is being jeopardized by the opening of our borders to muslim/islamic migrants. Islam and freedom don’t mix. and when it comes to islam and women it is total poison to the female population.
STOP THE MIGRATION INVASION OF ISLAM.
Jerry says
Israel should draw their appropriate conclusions from the Biden inclusion of active Islamic Terrorism supporters in the US Security hierarchy and stop immediately sharing sensitive intel with the ungrateful Democ Rats.
The USA is bound to be the losers when Israeli Mossad intel dries out.
Unfortunately some of the dim witted Democ Rat politicians fail to realise that the Islamic enemies of Israel are also the enemies of a free and democratic USA
gravenimage says
Jerry, Israel is already taking a stand for her own survival. She knows she will receive little support from Biden.
“American-Israel diplomatic crisis brewing: ‘Nothing to discuss with Biden’ if he returns to Iran deal”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/american-israel-diplomatic-crisis-brewing-nothing-to-discuss-with-biden-if-he-returns-to-iran-deal
“Israel: Military chief says attack plans against Iran are being revised in light of Biden’s return to nuke deal”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/israel-military-chief-says-attack-plans-against-iran-are-being-revised-in-light-of-bidens-return-to-nuke-deal
Jerry says
Oh for the sweet sound of the peaceful Muslims
forever chanting:
Death to America
Death to Israel
Must be sweet music to Obama’s and Biden’s ears.