From the Liveblog of
Thursday, December 1, 2016
ADL comes out against Rep. Ellison over Israel speech
The ADL says remarks recently uncovered by US Rep. Keith Ellison “raise doubts” about his candidacy to head the Democratic party.
In a recording that recently surfaced of a 2010 speech, Ellison, a Minnesotan who became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006, he can be heard questioning why US policy in the Middle East is tied to its alliance with Israel.
“The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of seven million people. A region of 350 million all turns on a country of seven million. Does that make sense? Is that logic,” he says in the speech, according to the ADL.
“Rep. Ellison’s remarks are both deeply disturbing and disqualifying. His words imply that US foreign policy is based on religiously or national origin-based special interests rather than simply on America’s best interests,” ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt says in a statement. “Additionally, whether intentional or not, his words raise the specter of age-old stereotypes about Jewish control of our government, a poisonous myth that may persist in parts of the world where intolerance thrives, but that has no place in open societies like the US.”
Ellison has been critical of many Israeli policies, but has been a staunch proponent of the two-state solution and a number of Jewish groups have come to his defense amid a campaign against him taking up the DNC chair.
Some have pointed to Ellison’s youthful involvement in the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam movement, though he renounced the group in a 2006 letter to the Jewish Community Relations Council in Minnesota, a group that he has become friendly with.
He is considered a front-runner in the race against Howard Dean and others, gaining the backing of figures from the party’s establishment as well as the insurgent left that backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in his unsuccessful bid this year for the party’s presidential nomination.
— with JTA
