Free Republic

Holder spent several years at Covington before he became attorney general and rejoined the firm after his stint at the Justice Department. He now advises clients on a range of issues including "cultural and social responsibility," raking in as much as $2,295 an hour for conducting racial equity audits.The former attorney general also weighed in on Israel's war against Hamas last week. Appearing alongside former Obama secretary of defense and longtime Israel critic Chuck Hagel, Holder called Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "small Man" and described Israel's response to Hamas' Oct. 7 attack as "extremely disturbing."...Hagel, who served as...

Among the holes, omission, biases at the: 'War in the Holy Land: A PBS News Special Report' [Oct 13, 2023] (By: Andrew Yang, Amna Nawaz, Geoff Bennett, Leila Molana-Allen) 1. In its narration of the historic background, it starts off about 1947 partition, however, the elephant in the room is/was that the Arabs rejected and the Jews accepted. Why was this ignored? Even Arafat acknowledged it was a mistake. And just 'how' and on what 'basis' did the Arabs rejected, via their representative Jamal Husseini? Dr. J Herf: 'Husseini claimed the Arab world's "territorial continuity" served as a "natural bulwark...

President Biden travels to Israel and Saudi Arabia next week — his first trip to the Middle East since entering the White House. And while the president has been eager to criticize a range of his predecessor's policies, he is fully embracing one key pillar of Donald Trump's Middle East policy — the Abraham Accords. Those deals were brokered by the Trump White House in 2020 to normalize relations between Israel and a number of Arab countries, including Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco. It was a huge rupture from recent history in which Arab nations had made it...

Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He served for two decades as an adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. George Marshall. Dean Acheson. Henry Kissinger. James Baker. These are the sorts of names you’d see in a Secretary of State Hall of Fame, if such a thing existed. Enshrinement would depend on negotiating a consequential agreement, defusing a major crisis, articulating a successful doctrine or fashioning a strategy for peace or war that puts you at the center of American...

GOP Leads Backlash against Obama; Democrats Uneasy 03/15/10, 10:36 PM (IsraelNN.com) Republican Party leaders attacked the Obama administration Monday with unusually harsh language, charging it with an "irresponsible” position against an ally. "In an effort to ingratiate our country with the Arab world, this administration has shown a troubling eagerness to undercut our allies and friends,” said the GOP’s only Jewish Republican Congressman, Eric Cantor of Virginia. He went so far as to say that the dispute "jeopardizes America's national security." Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the leading Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, charged that the Obama government’s condemnations of...

Obama partisans fret as Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US confront reality on Iran. Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. Friday, long-time US diplomats and Middle East experts Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky published an article in Foreign Policy expressing “buyers’ remorse” over Saudi Arabia’s newfound willingness to take the lead in regional affairs. Titled, “Donald Trump has unleashed the Saudi Arabia we always wanted – and feared,” Miller and Sokolsky note that for generations, US policymakers wanted the Saudis to take a lead in determining the future of the region. . In their words, “During decades of service...

Ahead of the Obama administration's first U.S.-Palestinian-Israeli summit, Israel has agreed to a partial freeze of settlement construction for six to nine months but still wants to build more than 2,500 new housing units, said Israeli officials... The private Israeli position, which was described by these three individuals on the condition that they not be named, is at odds with the public stance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken... What the Israelis are offering is still shy of Mr. Obama's demands. The two Israeli officials and the Israel specialist said Mr. Netanyahu wants to move forward with 2,500 to 3,000...

ZOA To President Obama: Rescind Appointment Of Anti-Israel, Anti-Iran Sanctions Fmr. Sen. Hagel To Intelligence Panel For annotated version www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=1737 NEWS RELEASE Zionist Organization of America Jacob & Libby Goodman ZOA House, 4 East 34th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016 (212) 481-1500 Fax: (212) 481-1515 email@zoa.org www.zoa.org October 29, 2009 Contact Morton A. Klein at: 917-974-8795 or 212-481-1500 Attn: NEWS EDITOR ZOA TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: RESCIND APPOINTMENT OF ANTI-ISRAEL, ANTI-IRAN SANCTIONS FMR. SEN. HAGEL TO INTELLIGENCE PANEL The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has called upon President Barack Obama to rescind his appointment of retired anti-Israel, anti-Iran sanctions Republican Senator...

Miller, Abrams both say settlement pressure misguided By Eric Fingerhut · June 22, 2009 Why has the United States made settlements such a big issue with Israel in the last few weeks? Two veterans of Middle East peace negotiations -- from opposite sides of the political spectrum -- say they are puzzled by the president's approach. Both Aaron David Miller, who advised Secretary of State Jim Baker on Arab-Israeli issues during the George H.W. Bush and was at the Camp David negotiations during the Clinton administration, and Elliott Abrams, who was deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush...

Washington: Bibi’s In, “Peace” Is Dead By P. David Hornik FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, February 13, 2009 In the wake of the Israeli elections on Tuesday, it’s reported that many U.S. officials have “privately…expressed concern that Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu might preside over a right-wing coalition.” A “Capitol Hill source” is quoted as saying that would cause “great unease.” Dennis Ross is quoted in his book as calling Netanyahu, in his first prime ministerial stint in 1996-1999, “nearly insufferable, lecturing and telling us how to deal with the Arabs.” Or as the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, “many key [U.S. officials]...

Having worked at the State Department on Arab-Israeli negotiations for the better part of a quarter century, I came up with more than my fair share of half-baked ideas. But the one issue I was smart enough to avoid -- and I advised every Secretary of State to do the same -- was Jerusalem. And yet, if you believe some media reports, President Donald Trump is preparing to do precisely that. [snip] If there is a third rail in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, it's Jerusalem. Loaded with political and religious significance, it's long been a tinderbox just waiting for a match....

Aaron David Miller, who was Dennis Ross' top assistant, has told YNet that the United States 'always' tried to interfere in Israeli elections, but never succeeded (Hat Tip: Red Tulips) (link in Hebrew). According to Miller, the US gathered a lot of information about Prime Minister Netanyahu - including his activities while a student in the United States - but no one would listen. Miller admits that the George HW Bush administration influenced the outcome of the 1992 election to bring Yitzchak Rabin to power over Yitzchak Shamir, but he claims that's because the US set up the environment...

With the red-line point of no return rapidly approaching in Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, former Clinton Administration crony Aaron David Miller spoke what is a typical misguided anti-Israel leftist mindset: [“There’s a growing concern — more than a concern — that the Israelis, in order to protect themselves, might launch a strike without approval, warning or even foreknowledge,” Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast peace negotiator in the Clinton administration, said Friday.]A concern that Israel might act "without approval" to prevent the Islamist Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons."...without approval..."?That's the arrogant misguided mindset that permeates the thinking in the Obama/Biden/Clinton Administration, as well as the...