Rahm Emanual sold out Pollard

IMRA

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Then there are those who have not only thrown away all sense of morals and justice and steadfastly refused to help their fellow Jew, but have actively joined his oppressors, in the delusion that this will somehow ingratiate
them to their political masters.

As the son of a former Irgun member, who was born in Yerushalayim, Rahm Emanuel ought to have been one of the loudest voices calling for justice in the heart-wrenching saga of Jonathan Pollard.

Emanuel was surely aware that the median sentence for the crime Pollard committed — passing classified information to an ally — was two to four years. No one else in the history of the United States has received anything
close to the life sentence that Pollard received for this offense.

Emanuel was presumably aware of the fact that the information Pollard gave the Israelis was not about America. It was information about Israel’s sworn enemies, which America was supposed to — but didn’t want to — share with
Israel.

As any unbiased observer would recognize, the reason Jonathan sat in prison for three decades, and continues to suffer from draconian parole restrictions that severely limit his freedom, isn’t because of what he did.
It is because of who he is and whom he tried to help.

As former CIA director R. James Woolsey wrote to The Wall Street Journal when Pollard was still behind bars:

“For those hung up for some reason on the fact that he’s an American Jew, pretend he’s a Greek — or Korean — or Filipino-American, and free him.”

The long list of non-Jewish key government figures and elected officials who wrote letters over the years urging clemency for Pollard illustrates that this was a matter of ending a travesty of justice, of ensuring that the
rights of an American citizen are upheld even if he happens to be Jewish.

Yet recently, in an article in The Atlantic, Emanuel, a political operative who served as chief of staff for President Obama and later as mayor of Chicago, describes how on the very first day after leaving Bill Clinton’s
administration as his senior adviser in October 1998, he received an early-morning phone call from Clinton. It was in the middle of the .S.-brokered Israeli–Palestinian Wye River summit, and Clinton feared that the summit would collapse unless he would grant clemency to Jonathan Pollard. (What Emanuel conveniently leaves out of his narrative is the fact that Clinton had in fact promised Prime Minister Netanyahu that he would let Pollard go, only to double-cross him at the last moment.)

“I told Clinton not to give in on Pollard’s release, believing that Netanyahu needed the agreement more than he did. The president followed that advice, and Netanyahu ultimately signed the Wye River Memorandum,” Emanuel wrote.

“My allegiance to this country wasn’t in question then. And it shouldn’t be now — nor should that of other American Jews,” Emanuel continued.

In other words, Emanuel sought to prove his loyalty to America by doing the unthinkable: blocking the release of his fellow Jew, and in doing so ensured that a dreadful miscarriage of justice would continue for many more years.

This most painful read is yet another reminder how far one can fall, and how unchecked political ambition can so blind someone that it wrecks any sense of morality and common decency.

Were Rahm Emanuel only willing to take minimal responsibility for his actions, he would be overcome with a crushing sense of guilt. But if his choice of wording in The Atlantic is any indication, he still has a long way to go to reach even that most basic level of decency and humanity.