State Dept. Apologizes For Video That Removed Israel From Trump Announcement
(JTA) — The State Department called the posting of a video by the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia that removed Israel from President Trump’s announcement about his upcoming trip an “inadvertent mistake.”
Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent a letter on Monday to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in which he criticized the State Department for “editing out” Israel in the video posted on the Riyadh embassy website and Twitter account. The videos were no longer available on Monday afternoon and a video on the embassy site contained the complete announcement.
“At a time when the United States should be encouraging the governments of the region — and their people — to promote tolerance, respect and mutual recognition, this video implies that the U.S. accepts Saudi Arabia’s public rejectionist position toward Israel,” Engel wrote.
A State Department official told JTA that the embassy had taken the video from the social media account of a private Saudi citizen without realizing that Israel had been edited out.
“Upon learning this, the U.S. Embassy immediately corrected the error, took down the video, and loaded the correct version to its social media accounts,” the official said in a statement. “The Embassy expresses its regret for this inadvertent mistake.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO