Ambassador Chas Freeman: 'Israel voert nu zijn eigen Holocaust uit.'
Ambassador Chas Freeman: This is a disaster for the prestige of the US on several levels. There’s no way to defend what Israel is doing. Everyone understands that the focus on Hamas is just a cover for a broader genocide and we are complicit in it. Nobody will take us seriously. Israel has lost the moral argument globally. The Holocaust which gave Israel immunity to criticism and gave force to its profligate charges of anti-Semitism against anyone who criticized it has evaporated. It is now conducting its own Holocaust. When people look at Israel they will see the perpetrators of a Holocaust in the Middle East. Israel will emerge from this war as a pariah state.
Ambassadeur Chas Freeman: Dit is een ramp voor het prestige van de VS op verschillende niveaus. Er is geen manier om te verdedigen wat Israël doet. Iedereen begrijpt dat de focus op Hamas slechts een dekmantel is voor een bredere genocide en wij zijn daar medeplichtig aan. Niemand zal ons serieus nemen. Israël heeft het morele argument wereldwijd verloren. De Holocaust, die Israël immuniteit gaf voor kritiek, en kracht gaf aan zijn immorele beschuldigingen van antisemitisme tegen iedereen die het land bekritiseerde, is verdampt. Het voert nu zijn eigen Holocaust uit. Als mensen naar Israël kijken, zullen ze de daders van een Holocaust in het Midden-Oosten zien. Israël zal uit deze oorlog tevoorschijn komen als een pariastaat.
Charles "Chas" W. Freeman Jr. (born March 2, 1943)[1] is an American retired diplomat and writer. He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years.[2] Most notably, he worked as the main interpreter for Richard Nixon during his 1972 China visit and served as the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, where he dealt with the Persian Gulf War.[3]
He is a past president of the Middle East Policy Council, co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation[4] and a Lifetime Director of the Atlantic Council.[5] In February 2009, it was reported that Freeman was then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair's choice to chair the National Intelligence Council in the Obama administration.[2] After several weeks of criticisms, he withdrew his name from consideration.
Freeman matriculated at Yale University in 1960 with a full scholarship and graduated early, magna cum laude, in 1963. He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico "for a while, when I was supposed to be at Yale." After graduating from Yale he entered Harvard Law School, but he left during his second year to pursue a career in the United States Foreign Service. He finished his J.D degree at Harvard nine years later.[1][3]
Career
Government
Freeman joined the United States Foreign Service in 1965, working first in India and Taiwan before being assigned to the State Department's China desk. As an officer on the China desk, he was assigned as the principal American interpreter during U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. He later became the State Department Deputy Director for Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan) affairs.[3] The State Department sent Freeman back to Harvard Law School during this time, where he completed his J.D.[citation needed] The legal research he did there eventually became "the intellectual basis for the Taiwan Relations Act."[6]
After various positions within the State Department he was given overseas assignments as chargé d'affaires and deputy chief of mission at the Embassy in Beijing, China, and then Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. In 1986, he was appointed as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1986, a position in which he played a key role in the negotiation of Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola and the independence of Namibia.[7] He became United States Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in November 1989, serving before and after Operation Desert Storm, until August 1992. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs described his career as "remarkably varied."[3]
From 1992 to 1993 he was a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies. From 1993 to 1994 he was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. From 1994 to 1995 he was a Distinguished Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.
Private sector
In 1995 he became Chairman of the Board of Projects International, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based business development company that arranges international joint ventures. From 2004 to 2008 he served on China National Offshore Oil Corporation's international advisory board, which convened annually to advise the corporate board on the implications of various global developments (Freeman was neither consulted nor involved in the company's dealings with Iran or its attempt to buy U.S. oil company Unocal).[8] He served as a member of the board of several other corporate and non-profit advisory boards, including diplomatic institutes. He was the editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica's entry on "Diplomacy".[9]
In his thirty-year diplomatic career, Freeman received two Distinguished Public Service Awards, three Presidential Meritorious Service Awards, two Distinguished Honor Awards, the CIA Medallion, a Defense Meritorious Service Award, and four Superior Honor Awards.[10] He speaks fluent Chinese, French, Spanish, and Arabic and has a working knowledge of several other languages.[4]
Freeman has written two books on statecraft. Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy was published by the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1997.[14]The Diplomat's Dictionary has gone through several revisions, the most recent of which, also published by USIP, came out in 2010.[15] He is also the author of three books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and in China. America's Misadventures in the Middle East, published by Just World Books in 2010, focused on Bush's invasion of Iraq, America's failure to lead in the same way it did in the postwar years, and Saudi Arabia.[16]Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige, published in 2013, is Freeman's analysis of China-U.S. relations between 1969 and 2012 and his predictions about its future.[17]America's Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East, which continues Freeman's analysis of the evolving disorder in the region, came out in 2016.[18]
National Intelligence Council appointment controversy
On February 19, 2009, Laura Rozen reported in Foreign Policy's " The Cable" blog that unidentified "sources" had told her that Freeman would become chair of the National Intelligence Council, which culls intelligence from sixteen (now 17) U.S. agencies and compiles them into National Intelligence Estimates and which Rozen described as "the intelligence community's primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates." Within hours, Steve J. Rosen, a former top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had published a scathing criticism of the reported (but still unconfirmed) appointment (which he had wrongly described as being to a senior position in the CIA.) Rosen described Freeman as "a strident critic of Israel, and a textbook case of the old-line Arabism that afflicted American diplomacy at the time the state of Israel was born" and accused him of maintaining "an extremely close relationship" with the Saudi foreign ministry.
But the earlier reports of the nomination had already mobilized a wide campaign against it, which was prodded along throughout by Steven J. Rosen who published 19 blog posts on the topic over the two weeks after February 19. In a late March article in the London Review of Books, professor John Mearsheimer cited articles written by a number of influential pro-Israeli writers that had appeared between February 19 and 26.[2][21][22][23][24] On February 25, the Zionist Organization of America publicly called for rescinding "the reported appointment."[25]RepresentativeSteve Israel wrote to the Inspector General of the Office of the DNI calling for an investigation of Freeman's "relationship with the Saudi government" given his "prejudicial public statements" against Israel.[26]
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