Robert Malley was the US’s lead negotiator on the “Iran deal” of 2015, also known as the JCPOA, and also recognised as an attempt to license Iran’s terrorist regime’s nuclear weapons programme.
Under Joe Biden, Malley was the Lead Special Envoy in the attempt to revive the deal. That is, until late June, when it emerged that the State Department had placed him on permanent leave.
When a Congressional committee requested Malley’s attendance at a hearing on Iran policy, the State Department said he was on leave. It neglected to inform Congress that his security clearance was suspended, and that he was suspected of sharing classified documents.
The scandal has not stopped Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and Yale’s Jackson School of Public Affairs from engaging Malley. Yale’s website coyly describes him as “on leave” from the State Department, but this is not the usual revolving-door appointment.
US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley GettyImages-955709414
Robert Malley (Photo: Getty Images)
Malley’s case is now reportedly with the FBI. This would suggest that his misdemeanours reached the level of possible criminal conduct.
Why are Ivy League schools rushing to wreath him in honours? In the unlikely event of anyone ever holding them to account, they will claim that Malley has wisdom to dispense. Malley himself claims this.
“While I am on leave from the State Department, I am extremely grateful to work with the next generation of public servants,” he said in a Princeton press release.
This should read: “While my security clearance is suspended from the State Department and I am under investigation by the FBI, apparently for sharing classified documents, I am extremely grateful to indoctrinate the next generation of public servants with the failed ideas on which my career has floated upwards even as the same ideas drive the standing of my country ever southwards.”
Fun fact: Malley, a longtime advocate of those misunderstood freedom fighters from Hamas, is Jewish.
Less fun fact: Malley’s mother Barbara Silverstein worked in the UN delegation of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (the FLN).
Fact we could have known was coming: the FLN offered Algerian Jews citizenship, but reneged after Algerian independence, left Algerian Jews stateless and pursued the usual catastrophic mix of Islamist and socialist policies.
More facts likely to make you shake your head in the sad recognition that the Jews, being a nation of overachievers, also overachieve at producing their own worst enemies:
Malley’s father Simon was a Syrian-Egyptian Jew who became a communist journalist. Simon Malley supported Nasser and was, Wikipedia says, “virulently anti-Israel”. As this was Nasser’s Egypt, you had to be rabidly virulent to merit that adjective.
yasser arafat
Yasser Arafat (Photo: Getty Images)
In Paris, the Malleys founded a magazine, Afrique Asie. The magazine was especially supportive of Castro’s Cuba and the PLO. Yasser Arafat was a family friend. Malley looks as if he could be the New Left-postcolonial version of a “red diaper baby”, as children of American Communist Party parents were known in a different age.
Children do not choose their parents. But if any of the allegations against Robert Malley are true, and they are as yet unproven, it would be fair to say that he may have chosen a soft version of his parents’ anti-American, anti-Israel radical chic.
Yet Malley has risen to the front ranks of American diplomacy. The upper crust of the Ivy League seems to agree with him, and rushes to comfort him. It should be a mystery, but it isn’t one really.
The State Department advised against recognising Israel in 1948 and remains institutionally sceptical, if not hostile. The Ivy League teaches that America is tainted by the political equivalent of Original Sin, and these days portrays Israel as, to quote the Iranian regime, the Little Satan.
There are thousands of people in America today, all clawing their way up the cliff face of government service, university departments and think tanks, all clutching their credentials and repeating clichés about Israel whose origin and implications they do not understand, not least because pausing for historical reflection might slow their ascent up the career ladder.
Who knows, if they play the game really well, perhaps one day they too might enjoy the prestige of Robert Malley.
That’s Professor Malley to you.
