President Biden’s Special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, whose anti-Israel, pro-Iranian perspective has colored his career, is coming under fire because of his tepid response as Iranian protesters target the despotic, theocratic Iranian government.
Malley’s avoidance of condemning the Iranian regime’s violent oppression of the Iranian people fits with his prior history, and it appears he is not alone in the Biden administration in his unwillingness to acknowledge the Iranian people’s fervent desire to rid themselves of their tyrannical government.
“Marchers in Washington and cities around the world are showing their support for the Iranian people, who continue to peacefully demonstrate for their government to respect their dignity and human rights,” Malley tweeted last week, as protests raged in Iran. He later apologized for the tweet.
Marchers in Washington and cities around the world are showing their support for the Iranian people, who continue to peacefully demonstrate for their government to respect their dignity and human rights.https://t.co/2RLjDvgTHd
— Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley (@USEnvoyIran) October 23, 2022
On Monday, State Department spokesman Ned Price echoed Malley, obfuscating the Iranian people’s desire for regime change as he stated, “It’s not for us to interpret what the people of Iran are asking for. We would never intend to characterize what it is that they seek.”
Various political figures condemned the Biden administration’s watering-down the Iranian people’s desire for a different government, as The Washington Free Beacon delineated.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told the Free Beacon that the “Biden administration is literally invested in the survival of the Iranian regime because the administration wants Iranian oil to make up for the catastrophe they’ve created by attacking American energy producers. That’s why they can’t bring themselves to support the calls by the people of Iran for regime change.”
Bryan Leib, executive director of Iranian Americans for Liberty, echoed to the Free Beacon, “Robert Malley will go down in the history books as the most ineffective and feckless State Department official of the last 50 years. It’s time for him to go. His most recent gaffe on Twitter is just another example of how he has aligned the United States government with the Islamic Republic and not with liberty-seeking Iranian people. His fake apology is not accepted and he should be terminated immediately.”
Richard Goldberg, senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said bluntly, “So long as Malley is special envoy, you know the administration’s policy remains offering sanctions relief to the regime in Tehran. If he leaves, it’ll be the first signal of a policy shift away from accommodating the regime and toward helping the Iranian people.”
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, “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.”
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.