Via Jennifer Rubin at Contentions, comes this report from the Times UK about how Clinton Administration Arab-Israeli adviser Robert Malley was sacked from the Obama campaign yesterday after they realized that Malley had been in regular contact with Hamas.
Now I touched on Malley in my piece in the current NRODT about Obama’s dubious record on Israel, and this report is interesting. Because the original problem with Malley wasn’t that he was in contact with Hamas, it was that Malley had written a series of articles for the New York Times and New York Review of Books about the collapse of the Barak-Arafat Camp David talks that were widely received as anti-Israel. (It also doesn’t help that Malley’s father, journalist Simon Malley, was a friend of Arafat’s and generally seen as a PLO sympathizer.)
So when the campiagn issued a press release describing him as a campaign adviser there was an uproar over Malley’s association with the campaign. That was months ago. At the time, the campaign immediately distanced itself saying he was not an adviser and had only offered the campaign “informal advice.” Most in the media gave the campaign a free pass. Even Marty Peretz — who should know better — bought the campaign’s spin on Malley hook, line and sinker:
There are all kinds of spooky rumors that a man named Robert Malley is one of Obama’s advisers, specifically his Middle East adviser. His name comes up mysteriously and intrusively on the web, like the ads for Viagra. Malley, who has written several deceitful articles in The New York Review of Books, is a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it. But Malley is not and has never been a Middle East adviser to Barack Obama.
Well, according to the Times report, Malley did have a “position on Mr Obama’s Middle East advisory council” at least until the campaign learned yesterday of Malley’s — surprise! — connection with Hamas. So in other words, after the initial uproar over him advising the campaign and their denial of it, he was apparently still advising the campaign in a significant enough capacity that they had to wait for evidence he was actually palling around with terrorists rather than just goosing their egos in the pages of the The New York Times, to finally get around to severing all ties. But oh I forgot, it’s a “smear” when John McCain says Hamas wants Obama to be president.