Marie Harf Defends Obama's Aid to Hezb'allah

Marie Harf Defends Obama's Aid to Hezb'allah

By Daniel John Sobieski

Only someone who worked in Hillary Clinton’s State Department and thought giving ISIS summer jobs would stop their beheadings and terrorist attacks could dispute Josh Meyer’s lengthy, well-researched article in Politico detailing “how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook” by undermining his own government’s efforts to take down the terrorist group’s drug trafficking operations:

“I was part of the negotiating team that got the Iran nuclear deal done,” the former Obama State Department spokeswoman told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday.
“Until Politico wrote this piece, I had never even heard of this program. You know, the Politico story, this narrative in it is just false. And there’s no evidence in this story to back up their allegations,” Harf said.  “They quote a couple of low level ideological sources who clearly don’t like the Iran deal, but everything I know just doesn’t back up this narrative.”…
This story is a hit job, honestly, with no truth behind it,” Harf said.
 Meyer reacted to Harf’s comments in an appearance with Fox News’ Shannon Bream, stating that her claim that his sources were “low-level” people was “sort of ridiculous.”
“They were not ideologues. They are not flawed. I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Meyer said. “These were the people, one was a Pentagon person, one was a DEA person. But I also talked to many, many dozens of other people to get sort of ground truth and see what their allegations were held up to the light of day. So this is not a story in 14,000 words where I was just taking spin from some people.”

Politico in neither a wild west website nor right-wing publication. Yet Harf ignores and dismisses the documented evidence of how President Obama was so intent on getting any kind of nuclear deal with the state sponsor of terror known as Iran that he was willing to derail efforts that were about to shut down Hizb’allah’s drug-running activities inside the United States:

In order to keep the Iran nuclear deal on track, Obama gave a free pass to Hezbollah’s drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations, including crimes unfolding inside the United States, Politico reported.
A Drug Enforcement Administration campaign, “Project Cassandra,” was launched to target the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah’s illicit networks, tracing the actions “to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran,” according to the online political news outlet…
David Asher, a Defense Department illicit finance analyst who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra, said the Obama White House “ripped apart” their efforts.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” Asher said. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
The closer Obama got to cementing the Iran nuclear deal, Asher said, the more difficult it was to conduct their investigation into Hezbollah activities.

Harf denies this well-researched account with credible sourcing of how Obama bungled the opportunity to shut down Hizb’allah’s drug trafficking operation, putting the lives of American youth at risk, in order to cement his legacy in the fatally flawed Iran nuclear deal. As Josh Meyer detailed in Politico:

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.
The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

This rivals anything the Clintons did at the Clinton Foundation or in the Uranium One deal with Russia. And it is not out of character for an Obama administration that precipitously withdrew from Iraq, creating a vacuum ISIS gladly filled while Obama silently watched. It is not out of character for an administration that traded six top Taliban leaders for deserter Bowe Bergdahl. Obama has a soft spot for terrorists and Marie Harf has a soft spot for Obama. Why Fox News hired such a shameless and clueless shill for the loony left remains a mystery.
Fox News, presumably in the interests of being fair and balanced, hired an Obama administration -- which includes the State Department of Hillary Clinton -- sock puppet who spread the false narrative that ISIS was not a virulent and existential threat, but rather just another community that needed organizing. She pushed the administration line that terrorism was just a reaction to climate change and the lack of jobs. 
Not long ago, Harf opined on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that the rise of terrorist groups like ISIS could be prevented by a good jobs program.

Also on last night’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf stopped by to argue that the solution to defeating the Islamic State is finding economic opportunity for young Muslim men, because “we cannot kill our way out of this war.” Harf’s appearance came after a weekend that saw 21 Coptic Christians beheaded and a gunman open fire at a free-speech debate in Copenhagen…
While Harf assured viewers that “a lot” of Islamic State fighters have been killed, she also claimed that force isn’t the most effective strategy for combatting ISIS. “We cannot win this war by killing them — we cannot kill our way out of this war,” she said. Instead, she argued that the United States and its allies need to focus on the “root causes,” such as the lack of job opportunities for young Muslims. She said discouraged 17-year-olds opt to “pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business” due to their socioeconomic situation.

What makes a 17-year-old jihadi pick up an AK-47 is not the lack of summer jobs. It is, as we can finally hear it from the White House of President Trump, the desire of radical Islamic terrorists to deny women like Marie Harf their careers and their freedom, subjecting them to honor killings, genital mutilation, and other niceties dictated by Sharia law. They want to kill us because we are not like them, because we are infidels.
And to think, according to Harf, we are only a few Wal-Marts in Damascus and Baghdad away from world peace or that solar panels in the Sinai will make the lion lay down with the lamb. Who knew?
Harf served a President and a Secretary of State who shared the belief that climate change is a root cause of terrorism. President Obama’s assertion in his commencement address to cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that the rise of ISIS in Syria and Boko Haram in Nigeria and the brutality of both is somehow linked to climate change shows just how dangerously detached from reality U.S. foreign policy has become.
For those who wondered why upwards of two hundred thousand have died in Syria, Boko Haram abducts Christian schoolgirls, and ISIS beheads and burns people alive in its reign of terror, the President placed a major part of the blame on fossil fuels and your SUV.

I understand climate change did not cause the conflicts we see around the world, yet what we also know is that severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram. It's now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.

Believed by whom? Those who think Elvis Presley and Jimmy Hoffa are alive running a donut shop in Idaho? There was no violence, no beheadings, no burning people alive during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and groups like ISIS and Boko Haram are not out foraging for food. They are poster children for the evil that lurks in the world and that advances as we retreat from our global responsibilities and indulge in these irresponsible fantasies.
It is fairly certain that the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot in a cage was not caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide or that the beheading of Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya was caused by that coal plant in West Virginia,.
Yet that lowering carbon emissions and holding job fairs in Aleppo will stop terrorism is a belief shared by Marie Harf, now a Fox News contributor, paid to offer her comical musings as considered commentary. Now she defends Obama’s coddling of a drug-dealing terrorist group that before 9/11 was the leading killer of Americans worldwide, and which aided groups killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Who needs MSNBC when you can watch Marie Harf on Fox News?