Howard Gutman
I thought it was a grandiose joke when Bill Kristol said on Saturday that the ambassador to Belgium must be recalled because he dared suggest that Israeli intransigence was fueling Muslim anti-Semitism. Well who’s laughing now? The two Republican frontrunners, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, have now called for the firing of Howard Gutman.
What do they want that Bill Kristol commands? The support of the Israel lobby– the backing of a large segment of the establishment.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned Gutman. Also the Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. That group has hosted Islamophobes Pam Geller and Robert Spencer, and they get quoted in the Post!
Here, by the way, from the Washington Post, is a precise report of Gutman’s comments. Notice that he finds moral parity between settlement building and suicide bombers….
According to his prepared remarks, Gutman, who is Jewish, described two forms of anti-Semitism — one that he described as “classic bigotry” against Jews and a second type of “growing anti-Semitism” that is the result of the inability to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Throughout the Muslim communities that I visit, and indeed throughout Europe, there is significant anger and resentment and, yes, perhaps sometimes hatred and indeed sometimes an all-too-growing intimidation and violence directed at Jews generally as a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories and other Arab neighbors in the Middle East,” Gutman said, according to his prepared remarks.
He added, “It is the area where every new settlement announced in Israel, every rocket shot over a border or suicide bomber on a bus, and every retaliatory military strike exacerbates the problem and provides a setback here in Europe for those fighting hatred and bigotry here in Europe.”
P.S. I don’t think he’s going to lose his job. But I’m not the smart money, am I?
