Oren Denies Story In Clinton E-Mail
Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, has strongly denied a claim made about him in a recently released e-mail sent to Hillary Clinton by her longtime confidant Sidney Blumenthal.
Blumenthal claimed Oren stalked the West Wing searching for a former Israeli prime minister who was allegedly visiting the White House behind the Israeli government’s back.
“Total and utter fabrication,” Oren told Breitbart Jerusalem in response to the e-mail in question.
The latest batch of 550 e-mails released on Saturday by the State Department contains an October 4, 2012 dispatch from Blumenthal passing on to Hillary a third-person claim about Oren that Blumenthal says he heard from his son, Paul, a campaign finance and money-in-politics reporter for The Huffington Post.
The tale was meant to highlight the divisions between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud politics and the center-left Labor party. It allegedly involves Oren racing around the West Wing to discover the reason for a purported visit to the White House by Ehud Barak, Israel’s former prime minister and a longtime Labor party leader.
Blumenthal relates that his son had learned from another Huffington Post reporter that Thomas Donilon, Obama’s former National Security Advisor, “heard about Oren’s frantic snooping and raced after him, catching him, and escorted him out.”
Clinton found the story difficult to believe, replying 13 hours after the email was sent, “Doubt that it happened, but, these days, who knows???”
University Students Honor Terrorist
Al-Quds University, a partner of Bard College in New York, held a ceremony celebrating the so-called martyrdom of Baha Alyan, the terrorist who killed three civilians and wounded four more in October.
The Palestinian Authority’s “High Commission for Youth and Sports” sponsored the Al-Quds event, which honored the memory of 22-year-old Alyan. He along with another terrorist, Bilal Ghanem, carried out the attack on October 13, 2015. The two boarded bus number 78 in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood of Jerusalem and began to indiscriminatingly stab and shoot at passengers. Haviv Haim, 78, and Alon Govberg, 51, were killed that day. Two weeks later, a third victim, Richard Lakin, 76, died from his wounds. Alyan was shot and killed by an Israeli security guard at the scene, while Ghanem – a Hamas terrorist who served time in Israeli prison in 2013-2014 – was wounded.
Photos of the Al-Quds event were broadcast on Palestinian media outlets, with Arabic descriptions of the jihadi-supporting ceremony subsequently translated into English by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI.
During the ceremony, 2,500 students reportedly formed a human chain “of readers and writers” under the banner of “The Baha Al-Shuhada Chain” or “the Light of the Martyrs chain,”MEMRI documented.
Participants can be seen in some of the photos wearing shirts bearing Alyan’s portrait. The Al-Quds students reportedly were asked to deposit into a box written messages honoring Alyan and other Palestinian “martyrs.”
According to MEMRI, not a single speaker at the event condemned Alyan’s deadly attack; instead, participants sought to connect the terrorist incident with Alyan’s “cultural legacy,” which they described as promoting education and free expression.
Al-Quds has a troubling history of ties to terror support. In December, Israel’s Shin Bet security service announced that it had arrested members of two large Hamas terrorist cells in the West Bank who were planning mass-casualty suicide bombings and other attacks inside Israel. Most of the suspects in both cells were students at Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, which is partnered with Bard College in New York. Al-Quds University in Abu Dis is located in a village bordering Jerusalem.
The Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences, located in Abu Dis, is a branch of Al-Quds that “represents the first dual-degree program between US and Palestinian institutions of higher education.” Al-Quds Bard College is also partnered with billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The Al-Quds board of trustees has included Rashid Khalidi, who taught there for 16 years before he became the Edward Said Professor of Arab studies at Columbia University.
Khalidi, a harsh critic of Israel, was a close personal friend to Barack Obama when the two taught together at the University of Chicago. Khalidi lectured at UC until 2003, while Obama taught law there from 1993 until his election to the Senate in 2004.
Khalidi’s wife, Mona, was president of the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN. The group received financing from the Woods Fund, a Chicago non-profit where Obama served as a paid director from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002. Obama sat on the Woods Fund board alongside Bill Ayers, the unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group.