Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: The White House declined to comment on the criticism or on whether Mr. Obama has settled on him for the job. Administration officials said Mr. Obama would like to announce at least part of his second-term national security team this week. 
  
 Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, is viewed as a lock for secretary of state, while the choice for director of the Central Intelligence Agency has narrowed to two candidates — Michael J. Morell, the agency’s acting director, and John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser. 
  
 Administration officials noted that there were other candidates for the Pentagon, including Michèle A. Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense, and Ashton B. Carter, the current deputy secretary at the Pentagon. Mr. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who left the Senate in 2009 and now teaches at Georgetown University, declined to comment. 
  
 For the White House, it is the second time a candidate’s record has come under fire even before a nomination was announced. 
  
 Last week, Susan E. Rice, the ambassador the United Nations, withdrew her name from consideration for secretary of state after coming under weeks of withering assault by Republicans for statements she made after the deadly assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. 
  
 In the wake of Ms. Rice’s withdrawal, there have also been questions about whether Mr. Obama’s proposed national security team would lack diversity. 
  
 None of Mr. Hagel’s former Senate colleagues has come out against his candidacy. But on Tuesday, several Republicans predicted that he would face some blunt questions if nominated. 
  
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 “I am concerned about some of his statements on Iran and Hamas and Israel,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said in an interview with Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper. “I’m sure that those issues will be explored in the nomination hearing, should he be nominated.” 
  
 Mr. Hagel is a friend and “was a fine senator,” added Ms. Collins, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, which will consider the nomination of a defense secretary to succeed Leon E. Panetta. 
  
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 Some officials on Capitol Hill predicted that if nominated, Mr. Hagel, 66, would not face anywhere near the opposition that scuttled Ms. Rice’s candidacy. He remains popular among his former colleagues. 
  
 But the steady drumbeat of criticism from Jewish and other pro-Israel groups is a problem for the White House and Mr. Hagel, who as defense secretary would have to engage regularly with Israeli leaders on American military aid and the Iranian nuclear threat. 
  
 “There is a very systematic effort going on, and these things can have an impact,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group, which defends Mr. Hagel. 
  
 “It is simply beyond disturbing to think that somebody of Chuck Hagel’s stature and significant record of national service is being slandered in this way,” Mr. Ben-Ami said. 
  
 The criticism of Mr. Hagel is on two levels. The first is his voting record, which some analysts say has been soft on groups like Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He voted against designating the Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, they said, and refused to demand that the European Union designate Hezbollah a terrorist group. 
  
 “It is a matter of fact that a record like that is well outside the mainstream of both Democratic and Republican positions on such issues,” said Josh Block, the chief executive of the Israel Project, a pro-Israel educational group. 
  
 The second set of criticism centers on an interview Mr. Hagel gave in 2006 to Aaron David Miller, a longtime American diplomat, for a book he wrote on the Middle East peace process, “The Much Too Promised Land.” 
  
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 Speaking of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which advocates for Israel, Mr. Hagel said, “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.” Critics faulted both his implication that lawmakers are bullied and his use of the phrase “Jewish” rather than “Israel,” suggesting that all advocates for Israel are Jewish. Senators from both parties have expressed discomfort with his choice of words. 
  
 In the interview, Mr. Hagel noted, “I’m a United States senator, not an Israeli senator.” While he said he supported Israel, “my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States. Not to a president. Not a party. Not to Israel.” 
  
 Mr. Miller, now a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that while Mr. Hagel’s past positions on Iran sanctions, Hamas and Hezbollah differed from the administration’s policies, it did not matter much since, as defense secretary, he would not be formulating policy in the Middle East. 
  
 “His brief will concentrate on when to project American military might,” Mr. Miller said, “and here his caution and experience in the Vietnam years coincide with where the president is.” 
  
 Based on talks with Mr. Hagel, Mr. Miller said he concluded that the former senator “believes in a special relationship with Israel, but not an exclusive one.” 
  
 “There should not be a litmus test of whether he is pro-Israel enough,” Mr. Miller said. “He is just independent enough to recognize that there are moments when U.S.-Israel interests don’t always align.” ||||| Prejudice—like cooking, wine-tasting and other consummations—has an olfactory element. When Chuck Hagel, the former GOP senator from Nebraska who is now a front-runner to be the next secretary of Defense, carries on about how "the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here," the odor is especially ripe. 
  
 Ripe because a "Jewish lobby," as far as I'm aware, doesn't exist. No lesser authorities on the subject than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby," have insisted the term Jewish lobby is "inaccurate and misleading, both because the [Israel] lobby includes non-Jews like Christian Zionists and because many Jewish Americans do not support the hard-line policies favored by its most powerful elements." 
  
 Ripe because, whatever other political pressures Mr. Hagel might have had to endure during his years representing the Cornhusker state, winning over the state's Jewish voters—there are an estimated 6,100 Jewish Nebraskans in a state of 1.8 million people—was probably not a major political concern for Mr. Hagel compared to, say, the ethanol lobby. 
  
 Enlarge Image Close Reuters A United States senator, not an Israeli one. In case there was any doubt. 
  
 Ripe because the word "intimidates" ascribes to the so-called Jewish lobby powers that are at once vast, invisible and malevolent; and because it suggests that legislators who adopt positions friendly to that lobby are doing so not from political conviction but out of personal fear. Just what does that Jewish Lobby have on them? 
  
 Ripe, finally, because Mr. Hagel's Jewish lobby remark was well in keeping with the broader pattern of his thinking. "I'm a United States Senator, not an Israeli Senator," Mr. Hagel told retired U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller in 2006. "I'm a United States Senator. I support Israel. But my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States. Not to a president. Not a party. Not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I'll do that." 
  
 Read these staccato utterances again to better appreciate their insipid and insinuating qualities, all combining to cast the usual slur on Jewish-Americans: Dual loyalty. Nobody questions Mr. Hagel's loyalty. He is only making those assertions to question the loyalty of others. 
  
 Still, Mr. Hagel managed to say "I support Israel." This is the sort of thing one often hears from people who treat Israel as the Mideast equivalent of a neighborhood drunk who, for his own good, needs to be put in the clink to sober him up. 
  
 In 2002, a year in which 457 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks (a figure proportionately equivalent to more than 20,000 fatalities in the U.S., or seven 9/11s), Mr. Hagel weighed in with the advice that "Israel must take steps to show its commitment to peace." This was two years after Yasser Arafat had been offered a state by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David. 
  
 In 2006, Mr. Hagel described Israel's war against Hezbollah as "the systematic destruction of an American friend, the country and people of Lebanon." He later refused to sign a letter calling on the European Union to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. In 2007, he voted against designating Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization, and also urged President Bush to open "direct, unconditional" talks with Iran to create "a historic new dynamic in U.S.-Iran relations." In 2009, Mr. Hagel urged the Obama administration to open direct talks with Hamas. 
  
 In fairness to Mr. Hagel, all these positions emerge from his belief in the power of diplomatic engagement and talking with adversaries. The record of that kind of engagement—in 2008, Mr. Hagel and John Kerry co-authored an op-ed in this newspaper titled "It's Time to Talk to Syria"—hasn't been stellar, but at least it was borne of earnest motives. 
  
 Yet it's worth noting that while Mr. Hagel is eager to engage the world's rogues without preconditions, his attitude toward Israel tends, at best, to the paternalistic. 
  
 "The United States and Israel must understand that it is not in their long-term interests to allow themselves to become isolated in the Middle East and the world," he said in a 2006 Senate speech. It's a political Deep Thought worthy of Saturday Night Live's Jack Handey. Does Mr. Hagel reckon any other nation to be quite so blind to its own supposed self-interest as Israel? 
  
 Now President Obama may nominate Mr. Hagel to take Leon Panetta's place at the Pentagon. As a purely score-settling matter, I almost hope he does. It would confirm a point I made in a column earlier this year, which is that Mr. Obama is not a friend of Israel. Perhaps the 63% of Jewish-Americans who cast their votes for Mr. Obama last month might belatedly take notice. 
  
 Alternatively, maybe some of these voters could speak up now, before a nomination is announced, about the insult that a Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel would be. Jewish Democrats like to fancy their voice carries weight in their party. The prospect of this nomination is their chance to prove it. 
  
 Write to bstephens@wsj.com |||||
Output:
Neoconservatives have come out in force against rumored prospective Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, accusing him of being an enemy of Israel. "We will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite," a GOP Senate aide told the Weekly Standard last week. The controversy centers around a phrase the former Nebraska senator once uttered: "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here." Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal yesterday decried Hagel's line as "the usual slur on Jewish-Americans: Dual loyalty" between Israel and the US. A number of Jewish advocacy groups are urging Congress to oppose Hagel, the New York Times reports, hoping to scare the White House into picking someone else. But Dana Milbank at the Washington Post thinks the argument is overblown. In context, Hagel's remarks make sense—he was explaining why he didn't sign "stupid" letters from AIPAC. "I support Israel," he said. "But my first interest is I take an oath of office" to the US. Milbank thinks the attempt to discredit him is "particularly egregious" because Hagel is "among the best and bravest public servants," and "exactly the sort of person to head the Pentagon."