Forked Tongue?: The Arab American Institute is looking askance at reports that former Vermont governor Howard Dean took some strikingly pro-Israel positions in remarks to Jewish communal leaders — the day before he appeared at the institute's conference this month in Dearborn, Mich.
Dean's opposition to the Iraq war and blasts at the antiterrorist USA Patriot Act so electrified the crowd in Dearborn that several news accounts predicted Arab Americans would be jumping aboard the Dean bandwagon.
But the institute now apparently thinks that the presidential candidate may be promising different things to different audiences.
"Howard Dean, who boasts of straight talking, may have some explaining to do if reports of his comments before Jewish leaders last week are true," the institute wrote in its "Countdown to Election 2004" newsletter.
The newsletter quoted from articles in the Jewish press that recounted statements Dean made to national communal leaders at a meeting at a Manhattan synagogue on October 17. According to those reports, Dean told the leaders that his remark saying that America "ought not to take sides" in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations was "a mistake," that the United States was not cracking down enough on Saudi Arabia for its support of terrorism and that Israel should not have to give up East Jerusalem in any peace deal with the Palestinians.
"Needless to say, these comments were not repeated the next day before an Arab-American audience in Michigan," the institute newsletter noted dryly.
Institute president James Zogby told the Forward that he is "troubled" by the reported Dean comments and is seeking a meeting with the candidate to ascertain whether the reports are true. "We need to be a whole lot more careful about what we say, as he says, about how we thread the needle," Zogby said.
Dean spokesman Eric Schmeltzer said Dean's comments to the Jewish group were "nothing new" and that the candidate "doesn't tailor his positions to who he's talking to."
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