Last December, when the Obama campaign put out a press release listing Robert Malley as a campaign advisor, there was a small uproar. Though Malley had worked on Middle East issues for the Clinton campaign, he was viewed with a great deal of suspicion by the Jewish community — Malley’s father, journalist Simon Malley, was a friend of Arafat’s and generally seen as a PLO sympathizer.
Well, after he left the Clinton administration he wrote a series of essays for the New York Review of Books that were widely viewed as anti-Israel. Marty Peretz called Malley “deceitful” and said he is “a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it.”
After it became known Malley was working on the campaign and the ensuing backlash, the Obama campaign immediately issued a statement saying Malley was only giving the campaign “informal advice.”
Then in May, the London Times reported that Malley — who wasn’t supposed to be working on the campaign — had been sacked from a post on the campaign’s Middle East advisory council because he had recently held meetings with Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Well now sources are reporting “Aides said Obama had sent senior foreign policy adviser Robert Malley to Egypt and Syria over the last few weeks to outline the Democratic candidate’s policy on the Middle East.”
That Malley would be working on Middle East policy for the new administration is troubling enough, but the fact they’ve now repeatedly been dishonest about his involvement in the campaign makes it much worse.