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Obama’s Chinatown

A friend makes some connections related to the reports that Obama’s collapse on Israel resulted from pressure in Chicago.

Probably closer to the Obamas than Lester Crown is Marty Nesbitt (Obama’s "confidante and golfing buddy"). For the sake of the Obamas’ dear friendship with Nesbitt’s wife Anita Blanchard, Michelle made her ill-fated trip to Spain.

Earlier, to advance Nesbitt’s keen interest in Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, both Michelle and Barack made the sudden trip in 2009 to Copenhagen which also took people by surprise, and gave the Obamas their first taste of bad press.

They must like Marty Nesbitt a lot and owe him a lot to have gone so visibly out of their way for his sake. Incidentally, he was the treasurer of Obama’s presidential campaign. Nesbitt is a close friend of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod.

An Israel connection comes in, just possibly, there but more plainly when you connect two other dots:

Nesbitt works with the Pritzker Realty Group, and another close Obama friend is Penny Pritzker, a scion of the family of the Hyatt fortune, which has has been used for projects far less liberal in Israel than the Pritzker-Nesbitt politics are in the U.S.("In 2003, Forward reported on how he had ‘been courting the pro-Israel constituency.’ He co-sponsored an amendment to the Illinois Pension Code allowing the state of Illinois to lend money to the Israeli government. Among his early backers was Penny Pritzker — now his national campaign finance chair — scion of the liberal but staunchly Zionist family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. (The Hyatt Regency hotel on Mount Scopus was built on land forcibly expropriated from Palestinian owners after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967)"–Abunimah).

All these people are linked through the Chicago Housing Authority and Valerie Jarrett (chair 1992-95, Chicago Department of Planning and Development; chair 1995-2005, Chicago Transit Board).

If I were a Republican J.J. Gittes looking for the Noah Cross among all these Mulwrays, I’d be looking here.

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