For 18 years, Pete Hoekstra represented a very large and very Republican slice of West Michigan. His lowest winning percentage was 63 percent. In a district like that, he never really had to worry about being held to account.
This weekend, Hoekstra got a very sobering reminder that he’s not in West Michigan anymore. The new American ambassador to the Netherlands took a well-deserved beating over his past peddling of a common shibboleth in the Islamophobic world–that certain neighborhoods with large Muslim immigrant populations are so dangerous that police don’t even set foot there. When it became apparent that the Dutch press was not letting him get away with it, Hoekstra was all but forced to apologize.
It started last month, when Wouter Zwart, the American correspondent for Dutch public broadcaster NOS, asked Hoekstra about a speech he gave in 2015 at an event sponsored by David Horowitz. At that gathering, Hoekstra claimed that there were “no-go zones in the Netherlands.” Hoekstra denied making that comment and claimed NOS was peddling “fake news”–and then denied the denial later in the interview. Never mind that there was video of Hoekstra saying just that. Zwart later said that he couldn’t believe Hoekstra went that route, since he was almost certainly aware there was video.
Hoekstra seemingly realized that he’d stepped in it, and apologized on Twitter. Apparently he believed the matter had died when he presented his credentials to King Willem-Alexander on Wednesday. Watch that ceremony here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1SZIjdj-8o
But he got a surprise at his first press conference, when Dutch reporters asked him several times about those comments. Hoekstra tried to duck from them, saying that he was not going to address the matter further. But Dutch reporters weren’t willing to let it slide, with one reporter telling him, “This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions.”
This moment proved too wingnutty even for Trump’s State Department, which took the unusual step of publicly disavowing Hoekstra’s remarks. The State Department also announced that Hoekstra would clear the air in an interview with Dutch media.
That interview happened on Friday with De Telegraaf, the country’s largest daily paper. Hoekstra said that in hindsight, he was “shocked” at his “no-go zones” remark, saying that it was “a wrong statement.” He claimed that he’d made that remark because he’d “mixed up countries.”
As it turns out, Hoekstra may have only been sorry that he got caught. He has peddled the “no go zones” nonsense a number of times over the years. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reviewed Hoekstra’s tenure at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, an Islamophobic think tank. During that time, he claimed on numerous occasions that there are “no go zones” across Europe.
One of those times came during a 2016 interview with Islamophobic radio host Frank Gaffney. Listen here.
Hoekstra told Gaffney in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Belgium that these “no-go zones” have become “safe havens and sanctuary areas” for jihadists. As he saw it, this happened because European governments had been “asleep at the switch” as the Islamist threat grows under their noses.
It’s only fair to ask–is this the sort of person that we want as an ambassador? Remember, Hoekstra’s nomination sailed through the Senate last year; he was confirmed by voice vote. But it seems inconceivable that he would have had such an easy time of it had his past Islamophobic comments been known. They make it clear that his 2015 comments weren’t just a one-off.
If Hoekstra had anything at all in him, he wouldn’t have just agreed to clear the air. He would have offered his resignation.
(featured image courtesy William Davis, available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)
