"Treated As Arabs"
Not a big deal, but an unnamed official at State might want to rethink his phrasing of this gaffe:
The State Department has complained to the Israeli government about its discriminatory treatment of Arab-Americans traveling to the Palestinian territories, senior State Department officials said Thursday.
Officials said that despite a longstanding policy of issuing visas to Americans traveling to the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government has recently denied Palestinian-Americans and certain other Americans entry.
During her recent trip to Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raised the issue with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and U.S. diplomats have also recently complained to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, officials said.
"They are being treated as Arabs and not Americans," one senior official said. "They basically treat them as second-class citizens."
posted by The Cunning Realist at Thursday, October 19, 2006
4 Comments:
He should have said "scary brown people." That would have been better.
Why is this a gaffe? Because it alienates Israel? It seems pretty accurate to me. I'm not Arab, I'm Okinawan-Italian. However, each time I've visited Israel, I've had the Arab treatment. I won't recite my experiences here, but I can say that what I've seen as far as border and airport security goes, every time I've travelled, it's been me and an Arab being interviewed in the back room while our luggage is being tossed. I have no idea what will happen when as a graduate I'll be going there more frequently for research purposes.
You know what they say. A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.
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