Qatar To Abandon Hamas?
A behind-the-scenes shakeup in the Arab world could result in a flare-up of violence from the Gaza Strip while Iran becomes even closer to the Hamas terrorist group.
Informed Middle Eastern security officials said Qatar is seriously studying a proposal in which it would become more allied with the moderate Arab countries and halt its support for Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
The plan was given to Qatar by Bahrain and the Saudis. It seeks to isolate Turkey as the main sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the Islamic insurgency targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Without Qatari support, the security officials said, a weakened Hamas would be forced back into the Iranian axis, a move that could result in more violent attacks from Gaza aimed at both Israel and Egypt.
Besides its support for the Gaza Strip’s Islamic rulers, Qatar is a major sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was deposed from power in Egypt in a military coup last year.
New Appointee Has Radical Past
The new head of the U.S. pardon office, the official responsible for vetting federal inmate applicants for presidential grants of clemency, was the key point person in connecting President Obama to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.
Deborah Leff, currently a senior adviser to Attorney General Eric Holder, will take over the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the Justice Department announced last week.
Major news media reports covered the appointment of Leff to her new position. However, entirely unreported was Leff’s previous relationships with Ayers and Obama as well as her anti-gun activism.
Leff served in the 1990s as president of the Joyce Foundation, an education reform and anti-gun activist group. Obama served on the Joyce Foundation board from 1994 to 2002. He was named to the board by Leff.
While Leff served as Joyce’s president, the non-profit provided critical start-up capital to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, an education reform group founded by Ayers.
Obama worked closely with Ayers at the CAC and was appointed in 1995 as chairman of the organization’s board.
Obama would later cite his CAC position as evidence of his qualification for public office.
Leff told The New York Times in 2008 that she was the one who first suggested that Obama become Annenberg Challenge’s board chairman.
Leff is also tied to Ayers’s wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a co-founder with him of the domestic terrorist group. In 1996, Leff appeared with Dohrn, once the FBI’s most wanted woman, as a panelist at a gun violence discussion sponsored by the American Bar Association in Chicago.
Leff, meanwhile, utilized her former position to steer money to the controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
An extensive review of the grants made by a major progressive foundation run by Leff also found financing to the Marxist-oriented Sojourners, an activist group that claims to espouse Christian social justice, and funding to a group run by radical Van Jones, President Obama’s former “green” jobs czar.
Also financed by Leff’s foundation is the Herndon Alliance, a marketing outfit that was the driving force in branding Obamacare. Herndon recommended a series of phrases, some deceptive, that the White House and Democrats used to sell the health-care law to the public.
From 2006 until she came to the Justice Department in 2010, Leff served as president of the Public Welfare Foundation, a progressive funding group that describes itself as supporting “efforts to advance fundamental rights and opportunities for people in need.”
In 2009, the foundation gave $160,000 to the In These Times blog, where both Ayers and Dohrn served on the editorial board.