Scaramucci says no reason to fear Trump peace plan

In Jerusalem, ex-Trump aide calls himself ‘goy’ who knows difference between ‘shaygetz’ and ‘shikza’.

By HERB KEINON
Updated: NOVEMBER 22, 2017 11:01
Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci (photo credit: JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS)
Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci
(photo credit: JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS)
Amid reports that US President Donald Trump is on the cusp of presenting a Mideast peace plan, Anthony Scaramucci, his short-lived communications director, said Jerusalem need not fear that the president will try to ram anything “down its throat.”
“We know from our history here how difficult this [Mideast diplomatic process] is,” said Scaramucci, currently in the country exploring business possibilities as the guest of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce.
“I am not going to be pollyannish about it, but I do think this American president is very unique... he is an entrepreneur, a deal maker, a successful billionaire who can bring those deal-making skills into the process, and I think he is creative thinker.”
Scaramucci, who served for 11 days in July as Trump’s communications director before being fired after the New Yorker published his obscenity-laced tirade against those leaking from the White House, told The Jerusalem Post that Trump’s thinking is “more about right or wrong, rather than Left or Right, and I think that is the healthiest philosophy to solve a problem like this.”
Scaramucci – joking that his 11-day tenure sounds longer if “you think of it in terms of seconds, 86,000 actually” – said the US-Israel relationship is now “much stronger with this administration than under the previous one.”
Nevertheless, Scaramucci said many Americans did not have an “accurate understanding of Israel and its place in their lives. If we listened to our own media we would see it as a land of war and conflict and inflamed emotions.”
Israelis as well, he advised, would do well to look at their country from time to time as others see it.
“You have to look at yourselves every once in awhile the way others see you, as opposed to the way you see yourselves,” he said. “I would imagine that in America we are very critical of each other, and then people from the outside say, ‘Look at what these people did over 200 years.’ “I would say the same thing about you guys,” he said.
“Look at what you have done over 70 years. Look at how amazing this country is. You are fighting with each other and throwing food at each other in the political debate, but when you step back from it you have an economic miracle going on here. I read that you have more start-ups here than in all of Western Europe.
You just have to think about that for a minute.”
Spicing his comments with a few disparaging Yiddish words, Scaramucci said he has the benefit of looking at the country as “a goy [non-Jew] who knows the difference between a shegetz [non-Jewish man] and a shiksa [non-Jewish woman].”
He continued: “What I can tell you from the outside is that I see a permanency to the State of Israel. From an outsider’s perspective I see an eternal homeland for the Jewish people that was actually granted to the Jewish people by God.”
If the capital of that homeland and the State of Israel is Jerusalem, he added, “I think we should move the embassy [there].”
Scaramucci, who stressed on a number of occasions that he was speaking as a private citizen, said that the failure of Trump to move the embassy is due to “the governmental process in place.
When decisions are made of that magnitude, I think there is a level of deliberation that would slow down a very fast moving person like the president.”
He said he did not believe that Trump would change his supportive policy toward Israel or the diplomatic process because the American Jewish community is largely not supportive of him.
Trump, said Scaramucci, is a “very unique political individual” who does not view himself as a politician, but rather as a “as fixer, a builder, as someone who can bring people together.”
“This is one of the intractable problems of our time,” he said, referring to the Mideast.
“We know if there is peace here, there will be more stability in the region, which will mean more stability around the world,” Scaramucci said.
“So if you are the American president – whether people are voting for you or not voting for you, and you are more focused on what is inherently right or wrong, rather than left or right – you will want to serve the interest of mankind by trying to come up with a way to have peace here. I see that in him.
“So even though my [Jewish] friends on the Upper West Side [of Manhattan] probably didn’t vote for him – I think they went 93% against him or something crazy like that – that’s fine, I don’t think he really cares about that,” he said.
Meanwhile, Scaramucci reiterated to the Post that an online poll last month on his news outlet the Scaramucci Post asking how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust was meant not to trivialize the Shoah, but rather to remind the public of its magnitude.
When the poll triggered outrage amid claims it gave a back-wind to Holocaust deniers, it was pulled, with Scaramucci apologizing for it and pledging to donate $25,000 to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Three days late, however, the poll reappeared.
“I have an Orthodox Jewish partner named Lance Leifer,” explained Scaramucci. “One of his family members is a Holocaust survivor, and he was upset that Amazon was displaying an Anne Frank costume for Halloween.”
Leifer, according to Scaramucci, thought that this was a trivialization of the Holocaust, and put out the poll because he wanted to “prove his thesis that many people were not aware of the magnitude and the volume of the atrocity.”
Scaramucci, who was in London at the time the poll came out, said that “the way we handled it, just putting the poll up without any context, was ham-handed on our part.”
The intention behind the poll, he said, “was to educate people. I think that if the living memory of this atrocity goes by the wayside, that is a calamity for the entire world, not just Jewry. From a content and intention perspective, we were trying to do the right thing. I think that stylistically we failed.”