State Department Spokesman Mark Toner Makes a Fool of Himself
If only George Orwell was still with us. Even the author of 1984 would be hard pressed to have one of his characters speak to the people with the words used at today’s State Department briefing by Mark C. Toner, the Department’s Deputy Spokesperson.
Although the mainstream media has failed as yet to report on the shock felt throughout America’s Jewish communities by the words of the U.S.Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman last week, at a conference in Europe on anti-Semitism, the reporters present at the Department’s Daily Briefing did ask Toner about the meaning of Gutman’s words.
What Toner came up with reads like a Woody Allen routine in one of his early comedies. Here are some of the juiciest excerpts:
QUESTION: Let’s start with Ambassador Gutman’s speech from last week. Does the – did the Administration sign off on this, or was it vetted by anyone in EUR or NEA? And does the Administration agree with the sentiments that he expressed in his speech?
MR. TONER: I think you saw – actually, let me start again. I’m not aware that his remarks were cleared back here in Washington. He made very clear in a subsequent statement that they were his thoughts or his remarks. He did condemn and was very vocal about condemning anti-Semitism in all its forms, and I believe he expressed regret that his words might have been taken out of context.
Note the “I believe” and the inaccurate claim that Gutman “did condemn” anti-Semitism in all its forms. And note this as well:
Pretending not to understand the issue, Toner continues to argue that “the Administration and the State Department says that we condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms.” Toner couldn’t be that dumb not to comprehend that the issue at hand was whether Ambassador Gutman was rationalizing Muslim anti-Semitism as something different and acceptable.
The unnamed reporter was not satisfied. Hence the following amazing exchange:
That’s great, Mark. I’m glad that you do, and I’m sure everyone is glad that you do, but do you agree with the content of Ambassador Gutman’s speech?
MR. TONER: We –
QUESTION: I don’t know; it’s a pretty easy question. Yes or no?
MR. TONER: It is – it was his remarks. It was his opinion. He was not speaking on behalf –
QUESTION: So he wasn’t speaking – the Ambassador to Belgium, he was not speaking –
MR. TONER: I think he said as much. He said it was his remarks and he was speaking on his own.
QUESTION: No, he didn’t. He did not say that. He – but he was not speaking on behalf of the U.S. Government?
MR. TONER: I don’t believe so.
So the Ambassador to Belgium speaks publicly using his title and yet is not speaking officially, or so we are led to believe. According to Toner, he was “just expressing his views on an issue.”
Then Toner raises Gutman’s own “family history” as a reason as to why his remarks have to be considered anything but anti-Semitic, since they were victims of the Holocaust. As we know from Norman Finkelstein that does not necessarily prove anything of the sort.
Next the other defense, echoing Obama’s remarks last week:
QUESTION: Mark, I understand that you condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms. I understand that, okay? I’m asking you if you agree with the content of his speech, which he gave as the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium.
MR. TONER: And I would just say that he was sharing his views on an issue. Our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad. The United States – or Israel has no greater friend or ally than the United States, and we condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms.
Our intrepid reporter does not give up, and we get this:
QUESTION: Okay. That’s fine, but I don’t – I’m not hearing in there – unless you’re going to tell me right out he was speaking as a private citizen and not as the Ambassador. Is that – that’s what you’re saying?
MR. TONER: What’s that? I’m sorry. Give me your question again.
QUESTION: That his comments were delivered as a private citizen, not as the representative of the U.S. Government.
MR. TONER: Again, we’ve been very clear that we condemn anti-Semitism in all its forms –
Reading the above, it’s hard not to think this was, as I wrote earlier, part of a Woody Allen script that was never filmed.
Finally, exasperated, Toner says “I think I’ll just stop there.” When the reporter brings up the issue of whether the administration thinks all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, Toner answers “I’d just say that this Administration has consistently stood up against anti-Semitism and efforts to delegitimize Israel, and will continue to do so.”
And here is the conclusion:
QUESTION: Okay. So in his speech, Ambassador Gutman draws a distinction between classic anti-Semitism and some kind of new form of hatred toward Jews which is based – what he said, based on the policies of the Government of Israel. Do you – it sounds as though you accept that there is a distinction between the two.
MR. TONER: What Ambassador Gutman was – I believe what he was trying to convey is that there are different forms of anti-Semitism. We condemn them in all their forms.
QUESTION: All right. I’ve got another on Israel, but it’s not on this subject.
QUESTION: If I could just follow up briefly on that, some Republicans have called for the Administration to fire Ambassador Gutman. Is there – does the Administration have a response to that, have a position on –
MR. TONER: We have full confidence in him.
The last is the important admission. There will not be any condemnation of Ambassador Gutman, neither from Secretary Clinton, nor President Obama. They have “full confidence” in a man who has sought to explain and justify Muslim anti-Semitism by claiming it is the result of the failure to reach peace with the Palestinians, which by implication, is Israel’s fault.
Of course not, because—Ambassador Gutman’s remarks obviously are the established policy of the Obama administration, and reflects its outreach to the Arabs and his disdain for Israel.
No wonder you won’t find this story in The New York Times.
This would be funny if the implications were not so serious, even terrifying. I am reminded of the black liberation theology of James Cone, whose philosophy of irrationalism and black supremacy I reported here: http://clarespark.com/2009/10/31/the-offing-of-martin-luther-king-jr-and-ralph-bunche/. Thanks for the close reading, Dr. Radosh, and for all your careful work on day to day developments in our political world.
“Our commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad.”
Mark Toner is dead serious—and that’s the problem. The Obama administration is not secretly trying to stab Israel in the back. Toner and the rest of this group truly believe the Jewish state is safer if it embraces appeasement policies. The reincarnation of Neville Chamberlain is alive and well in Washington, DC. He also meant well! Too much credit has been given to people in the past for their good intentions. The heck with it. Are their heads on straight? This is perhaps the number one question that cannot be ignored.
This affair is a classic tempest in a teapot with an accompanying sprinkle of semantic gibberish; were this not so, this account would concentrate on parsing what Gutman said and not his official versus unoffical capacity.
There is nothing Orwellian about this exchange as it is trying to force a view that Gutman is a clueless self-hating Jew, sympathetic to Muslim interests; why would anyone want a narrative controlled like that when no such narrative can be extrapolated from Gutman’s speech?
Is the idea then that the conflict in Israel is of no account whatsoever? That’s like saying the background noise of general anti-Semitism has in no way been increased or affected by the events that have occurred in the former British Mandate since the late 19th century and going forward to the 1973 War and beyond.
I have read the Gutman speech and here is what he says:
“It is a tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem.”
Gutman further adds: “…as a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories and other Arab neighbors in the Middle East.”
How in the world is that saying the fault lies solely with Israel or qualify for “self-hating Jew” status? I truly do not get this one. People are expanding Gutman’s comments out into areas that are really la-la land.
Believe it or not, I am on your side on the general conflict but this is not the fight to fight and saying so does not put me in the province of “useful idiot”, code-talking “anti-Semite”, “clueless enabler” or deluded moron.
Had the Palestinian Arabs had a man like Robert E. Lee as a leader instead of that fat Cairene Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Arabs might have seen the side of the better part of valor and simply submitted to reality. Had the city of Vickburg had a leader like Arafat in 1863, the siege might have resulted in mass suicide ala, ironically, Masada.
When one cries wolf one’s credibility is on the burner. I urge everyone to re-read this talk and listen to the words that actually come out of Gutman’s mouth instead of making ridiculous and glib analogues like this at Elder of Ziyon:
“Howard Gutman is a credulous, gullible idiot.
If his theory was correct, that Israeli actions cause Arab Jew-hatred and that diplomacy would reduce it, then the least amount of Jew-hatred in the Arab world must be seen in Egypt and Jordan, who have peace treaties with Israel.”
How in the world a peace treaty can be seen to be gratefully embraced during the national humiliation, no matter how deserved, of losing a war is not mentioned. And it is not Gutman’s “theory” but a straw man argument as Gutman is merely observing the conflict exists, not that Israel’s unilateral actions and therefore ensuing anti-Semitism is justified as a result; Gutman is saying he believes Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe would cool off – right or wrong, this makes him an impracticable and immoral dreamer? This is extrapolating the Mandate conflict as simple anti-Semitism devoid of events deep into both the future and the past and it has no business in either place.
Rejecting a “path to peace” because the smart and “knowing” “know” nothing would ever change, labeling the world, European and Muslim therefore as entrenched and endemic anti-Semites and Jews as incapable of an equivalent, is its own form of wish fulfilment and delusion as is the idea that Gutman can be mind read as a dumb self-hating child.
” In the administration’s fantasy universe, Israel is the only actor on the world stage. Its detractors, whether in the Islamic world or Europe, are mere objects. They are bereft of judgment or responsibility for their actions.
There are two possible explanations for this state of affairs – and they are not mutually exclusive. It is possible that the Obama administration is an ideological echo chamber in which only certain positions are permitted. This prospect is likely given the White House’s repeated directives prohibiting government officials from using terms like “jihad,” “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamist,” and “jihadist,” to describe jihad, Islamic terrorism, Islamists and jihadists.
Restrained by ideological thought police that outlaw critical thought about the dominant forces in the Islamic world today, US officials have little choice but to place all the blame for everything that goes wrong on the one society they are free to criticize – Israel.
The second possible explanation for the administration’s treatment of Israel is that it is permeated by anti-Semitism. The outsized responsibility and culpability placed on Israel by the likes of Obama, Clinton, Panetta and Gutman is certainly of a piece with classical anti-Semitic behavior.
There is little qualitative difference between accusing Israeli society of destroying democracy for seeking to defend itself against foreign political subversion, and accusing Jews of destroying morality for failing to embrace foreign religious faiths.
So too, there is little qualitative difference between blaming Israel for its isolation in the face of the Islamist takeover of the Arab world, and blaming the Jews for the rise of anti-Semites to power in places like Russia, Germany and Norway.”
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=248256
Again, I don’t see where the idea of “blame” in regard to Gutmans comments comes in.
As far as Obama himself goes, both scenarios you suggest are likely, a fusion of casual, almost blithe anti-Semitism not to mention an anti-white, anti-colonialist stance, and the decadent semantics of political correctness/Marxist Critical Pedagogy, wherein unwanted words become invisible. The goal is to shrink the dictionary on the one hand and to expand and stretch the meaning of words like imperialism and colonialism to their limit. The other goal is to dole out morality according to social status and ethnicity, conspicuous success residing somewhere in hell.
Obama spent 20 years in an anti-white church that adores Farrakhan; Farrakhan does not adore Jews nor does another United Trinity Church hero, Jesse Jackson. It is not a great leap of logic from there to see where Obama derives his imperatives, especially given his summary dismissal of the Churchill bust from the White House which was a dead giveaway.
Sorry Mary but you are wrong. Gutman is a credulous, gullible idiot as apparently are his bosses. When Palestinians talk about the occupation, they do not refer to the territories lost in ’67 but those lost in ’48. The PLO was formed in the early 60′s, well before the 6 day war. The Intifada should have made clear to anyone that the Palestinians were not interested in any kind of peaceful coexistence based on peace treaties. Its pretty clear that they view any kind of arrangement with the Zionist entity as a temporary arrangement and will bide their time until they can be strong enough to through the jews into the sea.
Remember, peace agreements are not the objective. Peace is. They are different beasts and clearly, the Pals (or at least their dominant political entities, can’t speak for the average person on the street) are not interested.
The solution? IMHO, the only way out is for the Palestinians to be so totally defeated that they come to the same conclusion the Japanese and Germans did at the end of WWII. This may sound brutal but I think it is the only way for there to ever be peaceful coexistence.
Arguably, the Palestinian Arabs WERE that totally defeated but were not able to bring themselves to “endure the unendurable” to paraphrase the emperor of the thoroughly fanatical Japanese. In the end, the Japanese endured occupation until they had their country back. The falsity of this analogue is that the Japanese didn’t lose half of their main island.
It’s neither here nor there as far as Gutman goes since he is not condoning Palestinian views in his talk but observing they exist and false or not, must be addressed. When we talk about Hitler and his mad views we are not condoning them or negotiating or applying cultural relativism to the depraved Wannsee Conference but pointing out something that must be acted upon. One must be able to openly discuss problems without adopting the debauched view of Political Correctness wherein the question is the insult and not the answer. One never even has a chance to arrive at an answer since that is never put on the table.
Naked force has been applied in the countries surrounding Israel again and again and it has worked as far as it is possible but Muslims have come to wear failure as a badge of honor and the spectre of Orwell’s boot stamping on one’s face forever has no fears for Islam as it had long since become a culture of failure, successful Islamic paradigms many decades if not centuries in the past. Success breeds success and failure breeds failure.