A State Department spokesman on Thursday said anti-Muslim comments made by President Trump’s new ambassador to the Netherlands “were not the position of the State Department” — but he also declined to say the comments had been factually inaccurate.
The partial disavowal came a day after Ambassador Pete Hoekstra’s first news conference in the Netherlands, in which he was pressed by Dutch reporters to retract the false claims he made in 2015 — when he said the “Islamic movement” was responsible for “no-go zones” and politicians “being burned” in the Netherlands.
“The State Department does not agree with those statements. That is not the language that we would use,” the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, Steve Goldstein, told reporters in Washington on Thursday.
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