The United States is now entering into the negotiation of an ambitious agreement on trade and economic cooperation with the EU. But do the Administration and Congress really know the man who will be sitting on the other side of the negotiating table, Karel De Gucht? Searching for more clues about the rumors that the EU might have played a central or important role in the exclusion of African candidates from the WTO DG race, I did a bit of digging about De Gucht.
For starters, he has managed to achieve a very unusual (dis)honor: he made the Simon Wiesenthal Center List of Top Ten Anti-Semitic Slurs in 2010. I feel too squeamish about actually reproducing what he said on this blog, but if you look at the Wikipedia article on De Gucht you will get the details and a link to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which itself didn't reproduce the most vile of his anti-Jewish comments
Earlier,as a Belgian politician, De Gucht was forced to resign from a party leadership role because of anti-migrant views (concerning voting rights, according to Wikipedia).
This brings us to Africa. In a 2012 interview with "This is Africa", http://bit.ly/14KC88T, de Gucht suggested that Africans were "pupils"-that "one way or another ...will have to come to us" for "knowledge." Indeed. Perhaps Amina Mohamed will end up teaching De Gucht-and the EU-a thing or two.
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