New Yorker Editor Slams Gingrich Remark
Image by getty images
Republican candidate Newt Gingrich’s characterization of the Palestinians as an “invented” people is an “alarming attempt to diminish the Palestinian people and to diminish Palestinian history,” according to David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the prestigious New Yorker magazine.
David Remnick Image by getty images
In a conversation with Haaretz, Remnick also took a dim view of the support that various Republican candidates have given to positions that are to the right of the Israeli public and its government. “That’s what happens when pandering is married to ignorance,” he said, “It’s out of synch and out groove with what the arguments are. And it’s sad.”
In a blog post in the New Yorker this week Remnick lambasted Gingrich and ascribed his declarations on the Palestinians to the “discredited” book by Joan Peters “From Time Immemorial”. He says that there are “lots and lots of nationalities that are ‘invented’ – not least of which Americans and Israelis” but Gingrich “knew what he was doing: signaling a cultural and political disdain for the Palestinians as a people.”
Remnick – who features on the Web in a YouTube recording from April in which he says that “Gingrich is cooked” and would most likely not be the Republican candidate in 2012 – now adds that if Gingrich does win the nomination, “the Republican party will have a real problem.”
“The Republican Party establishment cannot stand Newt Gingrich. They didn’t even like Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House. They find him grandiose, self-regarding, incredibly arrogant and prone to making mistakes on a colossal and self-destructive level. They fear him,” Remnick said. “Barack Obama and his team at the White House are salivating at the chance of running against Newt Gingrich.”
For more, go to Haaretz.com
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
