A State Department official who maintained that both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were guilty of terrorism pleaded ignorance of U.S. policy Wednesday after the State Department dissociated itself from his remarks.
Gordon Brown, director of the Office of Arabian Peninsula Affairs, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that if the area of the Arab-Israeli conflict were his “bread and butter” he presumably would have been more familiar with relevant U.S. policy. He added, “I probably put in some of my own personal views.”
He was referring to a satellite interview with Arab reporters Monday during which, in response to questions, he stated that Israel’s bombing of Beirut in 1982 “killing probably hundreds of thousands of people” was as much an act of terrorism as Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel. He also stated that “some PLO actions, I would suspect, would fall into our definition of legitimate actions of resistance within occupied territories.”
The interview was broadcast on “Worldnet,” a program of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Michael Austrian, a spokesman for the State Department’s Near East Bureau, told the JTA, “This was a case of a fellow that was on the program to discuss U.S. -Gulf financial transactions — an area in which he has great expertise — and he got a question from out of left field that he didn’t know how to deal with.”
Austrian dismissed the gaff as a minor event that in no way reflects a pro-Arab bias on the part of State Department officials dealing with the Middle East. “I just think it’s a case where a guy screwed up,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
