Adviser Fired by Obama for Hamas Meeting Gets Top WH Security Job

A radical foreign policy adviser fired by President Obama years ago for meeting with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has been hired by the White House to be the senior director at the National Security Council (NSC).

How generous of the commander-in-chief to let bygones be bygones when it comes to this extremist, a Middle East “expert” named Robert Malley whose family had close ties to Yasser Arafat, founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Fatah movement. Malley was an adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House and he consistently exonerates Palestinians and condemns Israel.

Over the years he has published a number of newspaper opinion pieces urging the United States to reach out and negotiate with terrorist enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah and Muqtada al-Sadr. A website that documents the networks and agendas of the political left offers details about Malley’s scary past and provides links to the outrageous articles he’s published, including several co-written with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat.

Malley grew up in France and his Egyptian-born father was a key figure in Egypt’s communist party and a close friend of Arafat’s. His parents were fervently anti-Israel and huge supporters of several leftist revolutionary liberation movements, especially the Palestinian cause. Malley published a piece in a mainstream newspaper declaring that Israel was responsible for the failure of Bill Clinton’s peace talks with the Palestinians. Malley attended the 2000 event, which was held at Camp David because it was the site of the landmark 1978 Israeli-Egyptian peace accords.

When Obama launched his 2008 presidential campaign, he brought Malley on as a foreign policy adviser focusing on the Middle East. The then-Illinois senator reportedly dumped Malley around May for meeting with and having regular contact with Hamas, which has long been classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. A London newspaper broke the story about Malley getting the boot for schmoozing it up with terrorists and U.S. media repeated the line, but Middle Eastern press published a vastly different version.

Shortly after Obama got elected president in early November, Israel’s largest news site revealed that the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat reported that Hamas engaged in talks with Obama for months through his “fired” adviser. The article quotes Ahmad Yousuf, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s political advisor, saying this: “We were in contact with a number of Obama’s aides through the Internet, and later met with some of them in Gaza, but they advised us not to come out with any statements, as they may have a negative effect on his election campaign and be used by Republican candidate John McCain (to attack Obama).”

Now Malley is officially a top dog in the crucial, tremendously influential agency that advises the president on national security and foreign policy matters. The Obama-loving mainstream newspaper that reported Malley’s new position this week says his return to the White House reflects a changing U.S. role in the Middle East. “This time he will manage the fraying ties between the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf, a job that says a lot about how America’s role in the Middle East has changed.”