President Biden rescinded the nomination of James Cavallaro to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Tuesday after anti-semitic Twitter posts surfaced a day earlier.
“Bought. Purchased. Controlled,” Cavallaro wrote in December, replying to an article about funds raised for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) by pro-Israel lobbying groups.
In other antagonistic tweets, discovered by the Algemeiner, a US-based Jewish news outlet, Cavallaro referred to Israel as an “apartheid state” and accused both the US and the Jewish state of having committed “atrocities.”
Cavallaro, who teaches courses on human rights law at Wesleyan University, Yale Law School, and UCLA Law School, also appeared to question the labeling of Hamas as a terrorist organization.
“Substance aside, why does the OAS (Organization of *American* States) have a position on Hamas?” he tweeted in May 2021. “If you’re promoting global solidarity, how about supporting human rights instead of US foreign policy?”
Cavallaro also took aim at other US lawmakers, accusing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) of being “bought and paid for” and calling Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) “pedantic, self-righteous and pompous,” while pleading with her to “learn from the Palestinian people” and to resign over her “repeated moral failings.”
Cavallaro also blasted Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) in a tweet from November 2021, writing, “I don’t know whether to call you Senator or Shameless Motherf*cker. Actually I do.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Tuesday that the Biden administration was previously unaware of Cavallaro’s Twitter tirades and that they “do not reflect US policy.”
“They are not a reflection of what we believe, and they are inappropriate to say the least,” Price said. “We have decided to withdraw our nomination of this individual.”
The Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is composed of seven members who are elected by the General Assembly of the Organization of American States from a list of candidates nominated by member governments.
The committee members are described as being persons of “high moral character and recognized competence in the field of human rights.”
In a statement posted on Twitter Tuesday, Cavallaro said that his nomination was pulled by the White House “because of my view that the conditions in Israel/Palestine meet the definition of apartheid under international human rights law.”
He did not issue an apology and said he deleted the offending tweets because he “was proactively & in good faith addressing concerns the [State Department] had raised during the vetting process about public expressions of my personal views on U.S. policy.”