Sanders camp suspends new Jewish outreach coordinator over controversial Facebook post
Bernie Sanders at the National Action Network Conference in New York City, April 14, 2016. (Photo: Dennis Van Tine/Star Max/IPx)
Just two days into her new job as national Jewish outreach coordinator for the Bernie Sanders campaign, Simone Zimmerman has been suspended for writing profane Facebook posts about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Zimmerman, an outspoken critic of the Israeli government, was a somewhat controversial choice from the start. The New York Times reported late Thursday that “a chorus of Jewish figures” had called on the Sanders campaign to dismiss the 25-year-old, but that “the final straw was a report on Wednesday in the Washington Free Beacon,” highlighting a March 3, 2015, Facebook post in which Zimmerman called Netanyahu “an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative a**hole.”
“F*** you, Bibi,” read the original post, which Zimmerman later edited with less crude language. “You sanctioned the murder of over 2,000 people this summer.”
“She has been suspended while we investigate the matter,” Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs told the Times via email.
The news comes just days before the primary election in New York — home to the country’s largest concentration of Jewish voters, a population Sanders has struggled to court.
In fact, recent polls have found that more than 60 percent of Jewish Democrats in New York support Hillary Clinton over Sanders, a Brooklyn native who has already made it further in this presidential campaign than any other Jewish candidate in history.
While his campaign’s decision to suspend Zimmerman may reflect an attempt to appeal to more mainline Jewish voters ahead of Tuesday’s primary, for some voters Zinmerman’s comments may underscore suspicions about how strong a supporter of Israel, sanders is—suspicions that may be reinforced by statements he made during Thursday night’s debate.
“As somebody who is 100 percent pro-Israel … in the long run, if we are ever going to bring peace to that region, which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity,” Sanders said at the Democratic debate in his native Brooklyn Thursday. “I believe the United States and the rest of the world have got to work together to help the Palestinian people. That does not make me anti-Israel. That paves the way, I think, to an approach that works in the Middle East.”
