A meeting with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely was ultimately cancelled when the Israelis refused to include a far right Swedish pol from a political party that the Israelis believe have “neo-Nazi tendencies”.  Because the Swede was excluded, the representative of the Trump administration said they would not attend.

A senior member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team and a delegation of US Republican and European lawmakers canceled a briefing Thursday with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely over a refusal to allow a Swedish far-right member of the group into the meeting, The Times of Israel has learned.

“The Swedish representative is a member of a party with neo-Nazi tendencies and therefore the Foreign Ministry decided not to include her in the meeting with Hotovely,” Emmanuel Nahshon said. “Unfortunately the entire group decided to cancel the meeting.”

That’s our new President’s administration, standing up for the rights of neo-Nazis.

All of the people in this invited group were conservative parliamentarians/politicos, but only Winberg represented a party considered neo-Nazi by Israel’s foreign ministry.  Israel has issues with Sweden’s liberal government, and that could have something to do with their decision, although Winberg obviously opposes her government, but whether Sweden and Israel’s rocky relationship had anything to do with the disinvite, clearly that has nothing to do with the Trumpsters who have here declared more kinship with right wing nationalist parties than Israel.

Let this sink in for the leftists in this country that don’t want to accept the word of our intelligence community because of what they did in Guatamala in 1963, or something. Whether you trust the CIA or not, how can you ignore this and all the reported ties between Trump and Putin and white nationalist parties in Europe?  You don’t have to accept the word of our intelligence services to see very disturbing ties that make the Russian hacking and election interference seem like a pretty obvious pattern.

And before you invoke the old trope of “first they came for the neo-Nazis and I said nothing” that doesn’t really work because the people coming for people ARE the neo-Nazis!  So no, I don’t feel there are any issues with excluding them.  They have to be excluded, not normalized.

Israel gets it.  We used to get it.