That they spew classic Jew hatred is by no means a surprise as well.
Posted on December 29, 2016 by Rafael Medoff/JNS.org and filed under Israel, News, U.S..
By Rafael Medoff/JNS.org
WASHINGTON—Several Jewish organizations and leaders are expressing alarm over former U.S. diplomat Martin Indyk’s role in the Obama administration’s recent Israel policy moves.
Indyk served as U.S. ambassador to Israel, and then assistant secretary of state, between 1995 and 2001, followed by a stint as President Barack Obama’s envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2013-2014.
Reliable Washington sources report that the maps and proposals Indyk and his aides formulated in recent years are still central to the Obama administration’s strategy for the Palestinian issue. Indyk also is said to have remained in contact with key U.S. policymakers even though he left the Obama administration and now serves as executive vice president of the Brookings Institution.
In media interviews and on Twitter in recent days, Indyk has emerged as one of the most vociferous defenders of the Obama administration’s Dec. 23 vote against Israeli settlements at the United Nations. He is also one of the most vocal opponents of President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of attorney David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel.
Indyk’s credibility is now being called into question, however, as several Jewish organizations are urging him to clarify whether or not he made a series of unusually harsh remarks about Israel and Jews in a tape-recorded private conversation when he was executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a prominent think tank.
In that conversation, in 1989, Indyk reportedly said Israelis are “paranoid,” “arrogant,” and think that “the rules of society do not apply [to them]” because “they are the goy’s rules.” Connecting Israeli attitudes to what he characterized as Jewish attitudes in general, Indyk reportedly said that “Jews would do whatever they can to avoid paying taxes,” and that Jews believe it is justified to “find a way to ignore the law or get around it.” He added, “In my own family, my grandfather used to stay up nights to figure out how to avoid paying taxes.”
The reported remarks “echo three of the most infamous centuries-old tropes of anti-Semites,” Prof. Eunice G. Pollack, a historian of anti-Semitism and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, told JNS.org.
“You have an updated version of the classic ‘Jewish swindler,’ combined with the ‘disloyal Jew’ who evades his patriotic duty to pay taxes, and the millennia-old ‘arrogant Jew’ who, in a more religious era, was accused of deriving his arrogance from his partner, Satan,” said Pollack.
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