Thread by @JewhadiTM

How @PeteButtigieg Entered the Anti-Israel Echo Chamber - and Adopted Obama’s Foreign Policy frontpagemag.com/fpm/274003/how…

Last year, Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of a failing Indiana city with a small Jewish community, and with unlikely aspirations for higher office, visited Israel. He suggested that Israel's approach to security offered "a very important lesson that hopefully Americans can look to".

Buttigieg had joined an American Jewish Committee delegation of mayors and came back with a seeming understanding of Israel’s precarious security situation and the danger of simplistic solutions.

“One of the first things that was very clear to us is that there is not a unified or single voice for the Palestinian people.”

“Most people aren’t aware of the difference between what’s happening in Gaza, run by Hamas in a way that is contributing to a lot of misery there, but also totally different than an environment where you would have a negotiating partner across the table," he observed.

Fast forward a year and Buttigieg is running for president and threatening to cut aid to Israel.

In his foreign policy address, he falsely claimed that "the Netanyahu government is turning away from peace" and warned Israel, while, referring to himself in the third person, that "President Buttigieg would take steps to ensure that American taxpayers won’t help foot the bill."

What happened? There are two answers.

When Buttigieg was running a conservative city with an active Jewish and Christian community, where it’s not unusual to see churches flying the Israeli flag, it was safe for him to be more pro-Israel.

On the campaign trail of a radical primary, where anti-Israel protesters dogged his steps, things changed.

But the bigger answer goes inside the foreign policy factory to see how the sausage gets made.

Buttigieg’s foreign policy team is headed by Doug Wilson. Wilson, Obama's Assistant Sec of Defense for Public Affairs and the highest-ranking gay Pentagon official, is an obvious choice.

Wilson chairs the Board of Advisors at the Truman National Security Project making him the guy to talk to for 2020 Democrats like Buttigieg interested in developing a foreign policy position at the national level.

The second member of Buttigieg’s foreign policy advisory team named in the media is Tarek Ghani, the son of Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, who is a senior economic advisor to the other Soros’ International Crisis Group.

There is an obvious conflict with the son of the president of Afghanistan advising a man running to be the president of the United States.

But the most crucial name on the team list is Ned Price.

Price was the deputy of @BRhodes. As Obama’s National Security Council spokesman, Price worked closely together with Rhodes, who had boasted of creating an echo chamber in the media.

That echo chamber manufactured a pro-Iran and anti-Israel narrative.

A New York Times story profiled the echo chamber in action as Rhodes used Price to spin the crisis that ensued when Iran took ten American sailors hostage and humiliated them in front of the world.

Ned Price, a former Clinton donor, threw $1,200 to Buttigieg. It was the largest donation to come from a member of the Obama foreign complex topping Susan Rice’s cool thousand. Price had previously backed Hillary Clinton.

But he broke out a $250 check to Buttigieg in January and then another $1,000 in March.

Those were Price’s only donations in the 2020 race. Rhodes’ deputy had picked his man.

When Buttigieg delivered his speech bashing Israel and touting the Iran Deal, the echo chamber’s fingerprints were already all over it.

The 2016 election didn’t kill the echo chamber. It just morphed into National Security Action, a group co-chaired by Rhodes, which included Price, aimed at, among other things, preserving the Iran Deal which protected the terror regime’s pathway to nuclear capabilities.