JNS.org..
05 April '19..
One of Barack Obama’s very last actions before leaving office seemed, at the time, to be one his strangest: the appointment of his deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Rhodes has no connection to the Holocaust or to Jewish communal life. Although his mother is Jewish, his parents raised him Episcopalian. Yet suddenly he became part of the leadership of the agency that runs the largest and most famous Holocaust museum in the world.
The peculiar appointment of Rhodes to the Holocaust council was, I suppose, no more peculiar than his rise in the Obama administration. Rhodes had no experience in the realm of foreign policy when, at age 29, he met then-candidate Barack Obama in 2007. In fact, his college degree was in creative writing. But Rhodes and Obama became personal friends, and that was sufficient for Rhodes to zoom up the ladder from minor campaign speechwriter to deputy national security adviser and close confidant to the new president.
It’s always difficult for the public to figure out which of a president’s advisers has his ear on which policy. But Rhodes could not wait until Obama left office to start crowing about the role he had played in promoting the disastrous 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
In an infamous interview with The New York Times in May 2016, Rhodes boasted how he had manipulated public opinion by creating what he called an “echo chamber” of nongovernmental organizations, nuclear “experts” and sympathetic journalists. They waited anxiously by their phones for talking points from him on how to whitewash the Iranian regime and promote arguments in favor of the deal.
Now, thanks to Rhodes’s appetite for attention, we have important information, straight from the horse’s mouth, about what was going on behind the scenes in shaping Obama’s policies towards Israel.
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