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What do these people have in common?

Charles Freeman
Mary Robinson
Samantha Power
Chuck Hagel

They are all individuals that President Barack Obama has singled out, either to appoint them as advisors in some capacity, or to honor.

They share something else, too: their views on Israel.

Charles Freeman, president of the Saudi-funded Middle East Policy Council (MEPC), is an apologist for the Saudi regime and a harsh critic of Israel. As a sample of his thought, he regards Israel as a colonial power, whose "occupation" of Arab land "is inherently violence." He blamed terrorist attacks in Britain, Thailand, India and other countries on "the continuing injustices and crimes against humanity in the Holy Land." He withdrew from an appointment to head the National Intelligence Council after coming under criticism for his record.

Mary Robinson is the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights whom Obama honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom even though she was, in the words of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, “the poster-child for the anti-Israel bias that pervades the United Nations system. Her lack of leadership at the time of the 2001 Durban conference allowed anti-Israel and anti-Western forces to hijack the conference and turn it into a hate-fest against Israel.

Samantha Power is one of Pres. Obama’s top foreign policy advisors, currently serving as senior director for multilateral affairs for the National Security Council. She is a fierce critic of Israel who argues, like Walt and Mearsheimer, that “special interests” have distorted U.S. policy in the Middle East in the past, skewing it toward Israel. She implied that President Bush sent U.S. troops into Iraq because of Israeli, not American interests.

Chuck Hagel, the former Republican Senator from Nebraska, has been named co-chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. Hagel’s record on Israel and Middle East is worrisome. He has downplayed the importance of fighting terrorism (writing that Pres. Bush should have met with Yassir Arafat). In a meeting with Israel supporters in New York, Hagel was challenged for not being sufficiently supportive of Israel. His response was: “I'm a United States Senator. I'm not an Israeli senator. I'm a United States Senator.”

When you look at these individuals – and others close to Obama – you begin to sense a pattern. It’s possible to connect the dots – and the resulting picture is not pretty, or reassuring for supporters of a strong U.S. and a safe Israel. It is not our intent to imply that all of the Obama administration’s foreign policy appointees are anti-Israel, merely to note that there are those who have a troubling record of anti-Israel views, and they are embraced and welcomed by this administration.