Wednesday, March 16, 2022
Elder of ZiyonGabriel Noronha served as Special Advisor for Iran in the U.S. Department of State Department from 2019-2020. He wrote in Tablet last week a damning description of what is happening behind the scenes during the Iran nuclear negotiations, specifically how lead negotiator Robert Malley is recklessly allowing Iran to get everything it wants:
Anyone seeking to gauge the imminent outcome of the international talks over Iran’s nuclear program being held in Vienna should take a look at reports from late January that three top U.S. diplomats had quit—largely in protest over the direction set by U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, who serves as the U.S. government’s chief negotiator.Having served for two years in former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Iran Action Group, I knew that this development was tantamount to a public cry for an intervention. Such resignations—not of conservative dissenters, but of career staff and President Joe Biden’s own political appointees—should have been cause for Biden or Secretary Antony Blinken to recall Malley and investigate. Their failure to do so is a sign either of a troubling lack of attention to the talks, or else the possibility that Malley—who served in the same capacity under President Barack Obama when the first Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was originally negotiated and signed—has been given a free hand to negotiate whatever he wants, as long as he gets Iran to sign.Evidence for the latter view can be gleaned from the fact that Blinken has reneged on his pledge that his Iran negotiating team would have “a diversity of views.” Instead, he has let Malley continue to concede issue after issue in Vienna. Multiple career officials view these capitulations as so detrimental to U.S. national security that they contacted me requesting that I rapidly share details of these concessions with Congress and the public in an effort to stop them.
In 1980, when he was a freshman at Yale, Robert Malley wrote an anti-Zionist screed that veers into antisemitic territory, titled, "Examining the myth and reality of Zionism."
My claim is that any human being who opposed the Nazi era in Europe - and who did so not only because Jews were being massacred but mainly because people were being massacred - can only, if he wants to be consistent, support the Palestinians in their struggle for a homeland and a state.
In this one paragraph Malley "all lives mattered" the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
No, this is not to say that one must automatically support Palestinian terrorism - which one might do one the basis that it was their sole means of making their cause publicized - but simply that any sense of justice calls for a recognition of Palestinian rights.
...There is also a lot to be said about the Israeli treatment of Arabs - shameful on the part of a people who suffered more than any other from the injustices and horrors of racism. And the fact must be faced that the resort to violence by the Palestinians is the inevitable corollary of the violence done to them. How can one rationally expect it to cease unless the moral and physical violence of the state of Israel also cease?...Who then is today being treated as an inferior race? Who, I cannot resist asking, are the Jews of the Jews?
Malley trafficked in Holocaust inversion and justification for terrorism. It is clear that he has a problem with Israel's existence.
It is true that Malley wrote this in 1980, as a freshman, and freshmen are usually idiots. But has he shown any indication in the ensuing 42 years that he changed his mind one iota about Israel? In 2008, Marty Peretz wrote in The New Republic that Malley "is a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it," even though he was a negotiator between Israel and Palestinians during the Clinton administration.
Since Israel is the one and only country that Iran would consider dropping a nuclear bomb on, Malley's apparent antipathy towards Israel makes him a uniquely poor negotiator.
(h/t Andrew)
