A former CIA operative is in hot water over tweeting an article, purporting to catalogue powerful Jewish influence over American foreign policy. Despite this, she will still appear at Smith College next month, to lecture on the topic of “Social Media and U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Valerie Plame Wilson has been invited by Kahn Liberal Arts Institute of the Massachusetts women’s college to speak on December 11th to a crowd of 400.
The event was announced in the fall edition of the Kahn Chronicle, where she was described as one of the “two preeminent speakers” who would be participating in a year-long multidisciplinary program considering war. The other speaker was Claire Finkelstein, the director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
“Occasional visits by outside experts around the world are essential components of Kahn Institute long-term projects,” wrote the Chronicle, in its event announcement.
James Kirchick, who is a visiting fellow at Brookings Institution, compared the Plame invitation to Smith hosting theoretical events featuring “Harvey Weinstein on gender equality, Richard Spencer on American race relations, and Donald Trump on Social Media and U.S. Foreign Policy,” in his column at the online magazine called, the Tablet.
Plame Wilson’s Twitter account has been silent since September 24th, when she had apologized for sharing a potentially inflammatory article, “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars,” which catalogues a list of prominent Jews, who have all aggressively pushed for an ultra-hawkish foreign policy – such as the quagmire of the Iraq war.
Plame Wilson described the article as “provocative, but thoughtful,” but as it became clear that such a topic was deemed unacceptable to discuss, she admitted that she “messed up” and had only “skimmed this piece.”
The fallout from the sharing of a single article is still being felt, as Wilson had to resign from the board of Ploughshares Fund, a nonprofit that promotes nuclear disarmament, as a result of this incident.
She is still listed as a “movement leader” for Global Zero, another anti-nuclear proliferation organization.
Her position on the advisory board of the Penn State School of International Affairs appears to have ended before her controversial social media activities.
In August, she had launched a much-hyped campaign to buy Twitter and ban the president from the platform, though the operation seems to have stalled.
The ‘Go Fund Me’ page for this campaign reports $89,365 raised of its $1 billion goal, and notably, Plame herself appears to have donated no money at all.
The Smith College lecture would reportedly also feature Paul Musgrave, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, though the official Smith calendar only mentions Plame Wilson.
Plame was outed as the CIA official in the year 2003, which had led to the trial and conviction of Bush aide Scooter Libby.
Smith and Kahn Institute officials have not addressed the controversy surrounding Wilson.
