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Sanders Lists Zogby Among Foreign Policy Advisers

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Sunday revealed some of his advisers on foreign policy matters as he promised to outline a detailed plan in the near future.

In an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press program Sunday morning, Sanders listed Larry Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, Arab American Institute president Jim Zogby and J- Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami as people he’s recently spoken with on the subject. “I will tell you that we have met recently with people like Larry Korb, who actually worked in the Reagan Administration, we talked to people like Jim Zogby, talked to the people on J Street, to get a broad perspective of the Middle East,” Sanders told host Chuck Todd.

Zogby is known as a supporter of the BDS movement against Israel. In a Huffington Post blog post last June, Zogby wrote, “As a tactic, the resort to BDS is a far better and more productive form of resistance than violence and may be the last best hope of reining in Israel’s behavior and salvaging the possibility of creating an independent Palestinian state.” He also once referred to Israelis as Nazis.

As he moves up in the polls in the Democratic presidential primaries, Sanders is facing intense scrutiny for not presenting a coherent foreign policy approach as not showing comfortability when discussing foreign affairs.

“When New Hampshire voters go on Tuesday to cast your vote, you are voting both for a president and a commander in chief,” his rival, Hillary Clinton said during the MSNBC debate last Thursday. “And there is no way to predict what comes in the door of that White House from day to day that can pose a threat to the United States or one of our friends and allies, and I think this is a big part of the job interview that we are all conducting with the voters here.”

“Let me reassure the American people.. it goes without saying that a president must be well-versed in foreign policy, must have a foreign policy position. And I will, of course, do that,” Sanders said on “Meet the Press” when asked to respond to the negative headlines reviewing his recent debate performance on foreign policy.

Sanders also repeated what he said on the debate stage: “There’s no question that Hillary Clinton has a great deal of experience regarding foreign policy. But it is not just experience that matters, it is judgment.”

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