Washington, DC | www.adc.org | March 23, 2018 |The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) expresses its opposition, in the strongest possible terms, to the forthcoming appointment of John Bolton as head of the National Security Council. Bolton’s prejudice against Arabs and Muslims, contempt for international law and institutions, and gung-ho cowboy militarism makes him an exceptionally dangerous candidate to be National Security Advisor.
The American people are exhausted with unilateral wars-of-choice conducted under false pretenses. Ironically, Trump campaigned against such a costly foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq; but has now embraced the neoconservative’s vision of Gunboat diplomacy, of which Bolton is the example par excellence. Bolton is an unrepentant advocate of the disastrous Iraq War, which cost the lives of over 4,000 U.S. soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and will eventually cost American taxpayers $3 trillion. Bolton opposes diplomatic engagement with North Korea. Instead, Bolton – refusing to learn anything from the Iraq debacle – advocates bombing North Korea, a frighteningly casual advocacy of a war that could portend the exchange of nuclear weapons.
Beyond his incessant warmongering, as chair of the Gatestone Institute, Bolton is one of the key purveyors of outrageous falsehoods against Arabs and Muslims. Gatestone specializes in portraying Arab and Muslim immigrants and refugees to Europe and the U.S. as would-be terrorists and harbingers of “highly infectious diseases.” It is responsible for the fiction that Muslims have established “no-go zones” in European cities. If Bolton’s chairmanship of Gatestone is any indication, we can expect a Bolton-headed NSC to foreground ideological zealotry and misinformation in advising the President.
ADC is once against incredibly alarmed at the dangerous direction this President is taking our country. Appointments to the National Security Council do not require Senate confirmation. Nevertheless, Congress has a vital responsibility to rein in the inevitable excesses, potentially catastrophic, of Bolton’s policies and uphold the best of American traditions.