By SHOSHANA KRANISHUpdated: SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 00:49Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson poses during a photocall for the film Fair Game at the 36th American film festival in Deauville September 9, 2010. (photo credit: VINCENT KESSLER/ REUTERS)
Valerie Plame Wilson, a former covert CIA operative, caused a controversy on Thursday when she tweeted several antisemitic messages to her nearly 50,000 followers.''American Jews are driving America's Wars,'' the rampage began. The tweet linked to an article from UNZ.com, a site that claims "a collection of interesting, important, and controversial perspectives largely excluded from the American Mainstream Media.''Valerie Plame Wilson on Twitter (credit: screenshot) The article, written by Philip Giraldi - whose author page on the site reveals a plethora of articles focusing on Israel and Jewish leaders like former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz - suggested that Jews working in foreign policy-making positions should 'recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East.''Twitter users were quick to criticize Plame Wilson, who then charged that her retweet was ''not an endorsement'' before sharing that she is ''of Jewish descent.'' She then told Twitter users to ''put aside [their] biases and think clearly.''Valerie Plame Wilson's antisemitic rant on Twitter (credit: screenshot)In what could be construed as a contradiction, the pinned tweet at the top of Plame Wilson's page links to a GoFundMe petition that aims to ban President Donald Trump from Twitter for his use of the platform to encourage what she labeled 'violence and hate.'With Twitter users lambasting her for her comments, Plame Wilson sent out several apologetic tweets two hours after her original controversial one. She tweeted that she "messed up'' having only skimmed the article, and that the whole situation was ''a doozy.'' She then replaced the pinned tweet about Trump with her apology.Valerie Plame Wilson apologizes on Twitter (credit: screenshot)"There is so much there that's problematic,'' the tweets continued. "Thank you for pushing me to look again.''
Plame Wilson was the center of a political scandal in the early 2000s after her identity as a covert officer in the CIA was leaked by a journalist. Plame Wilson had penned a memo to senior officials in which she recommended her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for a diplomatic mission to investigate claims by the then-president that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from different African countries.After her husband published several op-eds about the mission and publicly disputed the president's claims, a journalist named Robert Novak "outed" Plame Wilson as an "agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.''The scandal and subsequent court cases led to Plame Wilson's resignation from the agency in 2005. Since then, she has stayed largely out of the media - aside from selling the rights to her story to Warner Bros. for a film than was highly criticized for its inaccuracies - after moving to New Mexico to work as a consultant.
