President Joe Biden’s Special Envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, whose anti-Israel positions have been cited as well as his ambition to secure a nuclear deal (JCPOA) with arch-terrorist state Iran, has said that the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah are simply misunderstood by the West.
Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), possibly the staunchest opponent of Iran in the U.S. Senate, reacted harshly when reports indicated Biden would select Malley for his current post.
“It’s deeply troubling that President Biden would consider appointing Rob Malley to direct Iran policy,” he stated. “Malley has a long track record of sympathy for the Iranian regime & animus towards Israel. The ayatollahs wouldn’t believe their luck if he is selected.”
It’s deeply troubling that President Biden would consider appointing Rob Malley to direct Iran policy. Malley has a long track record of sympathy for the Iranian regime & animus towards Israel. The ayatollahs wouldn’t believe their luck if he is selected. https://t.co/caxHhiXjKn
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) January 22, 2021
In January, three U.S. officials left the team negotiating with Iran because Malley would not take a harder negotiating position regarding sanctions.
As another indication of his soft policy toward world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Malley told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday, “The simple fact is this: as a means of constraining Iran’s nuclear program, the JCPOA was working. Leaving it has not.”
Regarding the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, Malley has stated, “Hezbollah and Hamas, there’s so much misinformation about them. I speak to them and my colleagues speak to them. Now, we may disagree with them but they have their own rationality; that’s the one thing to understand.”
“These are not — none of them are crazies,” he continued. “They may do things that we may consider to belong to a different realm of rationality but within their own system, it’s often very logical.”
There is a reason the Obama/Biden administrations did not push back on Khamenei & Nasrallah’s power across the Middle East. Hear it from @USEnvoyIran himself: pic.twitter.com/xIVCwAle2P
— Alireza Nader علیرضا نادر (@AlirezaNader) May 25, 2022
“After Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed at the end of the Clinton administration, Malley, who engaged in those talks, publicly dissented from Clinton’s own view that the talks failed because of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s failure to make a counter-offer,” Bloomberg recalled. “In 2008, he stopped advising the Obama presidential campaign on foreign policy after reports emerged that he had met with leaders of Hamas, an organization the U.S. and Israel consider to be terrorists.”
Wang Xiyue, imprisoned in Iran between 2016 and 2019, wrote that Biden appointing him “would send a chilling signal to the dictatorship in Iran that the United States is solely focused on re-entering the Iran nuclear deal, and ignoring its regional terror and domestic crimes against humanity. It would also send a signal to Iranians, Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, and all others that are being repressed by the Iranian regime and its proxies that the Biden administration does not care about their human rights.”
Malley, who had a friendly relationship with arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, wrote in July 2001, in the middle of the murderous Second Intifada in which Palestinians murdered over 1,000 Jews, that the idea of blaming Arafat for the failure of peace talks with Israel “acts as a harmful constraint on American policy by offering up a single, convenient culprit (Arafat) rather than a more nuanced and realistic analysis.”
According to the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, during the Second Intifada, 887 of the 1,137 Israelis murdered in attacks from September 2000 – 2005 were civilians. Just between May 2001 and May 2002 there were these massacres: five Israelis murdered by a suicide bomber at the HaSharon Mall in May 2001; 21 Israelis murdered by a suicide bomber at the Dolphinarium Discotheque in June 2001; 15 Israelis murdered by a suicide bomber at Sbarro’s Pizza in August 2001, including six children and a 31-year-old woman who was the only child of her parents and was five months pregnant; 11 Israelis murdered in a bus bombing on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem on December 1, 2001; 12 more Israelis murdered the very next day in a Haifa suicide bombing; 11 more Israelis murdered in a bus attack 10 days later in Immanuel; six Israelis murdered in an attack at a bas-mitzvah in January 2002; 11 more Jews killed in an attack on a yeshiva in March 2002, including a five-month-old child; 11 Jews murdered in a bombing at café Moment in March 2002; 30 Israelis killed as they celebrated Passover in Netanya on March 27, 2002; 16 Israelis murdered in a suicide bombing four days later at the Matzah restaurant, and 16 Israelis murdered in Rishon LeZion in May 2002.