Bernie Sanders Campaign Suspends Jewish Outreach Coordinator
Bernie Sanders has suspended his newly hired Jewish outreach coordinator/director after a controversial Facebook post about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, back on March 3, 2015, Simone Zimmerman accused Netanyahu of being “an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative a**hole,” adding “F***k you, Bibi,” among other things.
Apparently Zimmerman may have later edited “a**hole” to “politician,” and replaced the F-bomb statement with “shame on you,” the Beacon claimed in its article that provided screenshots of both versions.
In an email to the New York Times, a Sanders spokesman disclosed that “she has been suspended while we investigate the matter.”
The suspension “is usually a delaying tactic, but it shows that the pressure is on,” FrontPageMag theorized.
Zimmerman’s suspension has disappointed many Sanders supporters who have taken to Twitter with the hashtag #IStandWithSimone.
“Ms. Zimmerman, who declined to comment, has been active in left-wing Jewish politics for years…,” the Times noted.
Vermont Senator Sanders, an independent socialist, is running for president as a Democrat.
“The choice of Zimmerman, a young anti-Israel activist with a history of support for the BDS movement, signaled that the Sanders campaign was not retreating from recent campaign behavior that many in the pro-Israel community viewed as hostile,” the Beacon explained.
While territorial and sectarian conflicts exist across the globe, the so-called boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement seeks to isolate only Israel from the rest of the world community.
In a recent speech in Israel, self-described socialist Roseanne Barr (the star of the eponymous 1990s hit situation comedy Roseanne) decried how many of her colleagues among the American left — including those in campus “BDS factories” — have used anti-Israel sentiment as a proxy for blatant anti-Semitism.
“And I had to admit that many of those I considered comrades were naked bigots who had absolutely no interest in peace between Israel and Palestinians Arabs at all as I did,” she declared.
In a related controversy, during an interview with the New York Daily News Editorial Board earlier this month, Sanders, who is of Jewish heritage, incorrectly claimed that Israel indiscriminately killed “10,000 innocent people” during the 2014 Gaza conflict and criticized the Netanyahu government for its disproportionate response to Hamas terrorism in Operation Protective Edge. The senator also denounced the Hamas rocket attacks and terror tunnels that threatened Israeli citizens.
“Sanders’ estimate far exceeds even Palestinian sources, which estimate that 1,462 Palestinians were killed out of the 2,251 Gaza War fatalities in 2014. Israeli figures are lower,” the Washington Examiner recalled.
“Israel, for its part, has said that up to half of those killed on the Palestinian side were combatants, and has blamed the civilian death toll on Hamas for deliberately placing rocket launches, tunnels and other military installations among civilians. Seventy-three people were killed on the Israeli side of the conflict,” The Times of Israel detailed.
As a purported voice for her fellow Jewish millennials, Simone Zimmerman has denounced what she described as “the grave injustices” committed by Israel in connection with the West Bank occupation and “rampant racism,” Haaretz reported.
Meet Simone Zimmerman: Sander's anti-occupation Jewish outreach coordinator https://t.co/bDsiJzYVni pic.twitter.com/hSwquqDaSJ
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) April 13, 2016
In a new poll of Jewish high school students in Israel, however, about 60 percent of them described themselves as right-wing in terms of their politics.
Going into tonight’s Democratic Debate in Brooklyn as televised by CNN, “A new NBC New York/WSJ/Marist poll of New York found that among Jewish Democrats, 65 percent are supporting Hillary Clinton and 32 percent are supporting Mr. Sanders,” the New York Times reported.
Added: In last night’s Dem debate, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had their harshest clash (in which both were pandering to separate constituencies) about Israel, according to the New York Post, which otherwise described the forum as old people yelling.
For 10 minutes in the middle of the debate, something amazing did happen: A true and substantive disagreement erupted between the two candidates on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians. Sanders declared that Israel’s use of force in its 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza — a war necessitated by Hamas firing literally thousands of rockets at civilian targets in Israel — had been disproportionate. Clinton defended Israel’s use of force. And then things got heated. Essentially, Sanders accused Clinton of being a shill for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of showing disrespect to the Palestinians — even though Clinton famously (or notoriously) yelled at Netanyahu in a 2010 phone call after a slight to Vice President Joe Biden for which Bibi had apologized. This goaded Clinton into the most fervent defense she has ever made of Israel’s right to defend itself, and a concomitant passionate attack on the horrendous political culture bred by Hamas in Gaza….”
[Photo by Seth Wenig/AP]
