This story at TPM Cafe got my attention. Are Jews really turning against Obama, and if so, why? Do they disagree with his policies, or are they buying into the "Obama is a Muslim" slurs.
Well, if you follow the links there it turns out to be false. Of the three links, one says Jewish organizations are fighting the false emails, and the other two give entirely unrelated reasons to oppose Obama. That said, it seemed like a good time, what with Florida, California, New York and New Jersey primaries in the offing, to look at Jewish newspaper editorials.
With no more ado, The Daily Pulse - Jew News
The Jewish Advocate
This seems like a good place to kick off the conversation. It is a far more fair and complete treatment of the issues than the commentary noted above. As a side note, The Jewish Advocate has a poll about what is most important to Jews for a Presidential candidate, America or Israel. Contrary to what some might think, so far it is 100% America.
Why American Jews are afraid of Barack Obama
In the race for the American presidency, securing support from Jewish leaders has become a valuable tool in swaying Jewish voters. But as Barack Obama campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, some Jews have been increasingly skeptical about the Illinois senator’s commitment to Jewish issues, and Israel in particular.
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While Obama is Christian, both his father – a native of Kenya – and his stepfather were Muslim. And an e-mail circulating throughout Israel and the U.S. seems to be preying on Jewish fears, accusing the Illinois senator of ties to Islamic extremism.
The e-mail was met with a quick response from leaders of nine Jewish organizations, including the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress.
"[The e-mail is an] attempt to drive a wedge between our community and a presidential candidate based on despicable and false attacks and innuendo based on religion," the leaders said in an open letter. "Jewish voters, like all voters, should support whichever candidate they believe would make the best president."
According to the American Jewish Committee’s 2007 Annual Survey, 38 percent of U.S. Jews have a favorable opinion of Obama, which places him behind only Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guliani in Jewish esteem. ...
But despite broad support from some Jewish Americans, many still question whether Obama is a good choice for the Jewish community and for Israel. ...
Obama has, however, stood behind Israel’s right to defend itself. During the Second Lebanon War, Obama supported Israel’s retaliation against Hezbollah and said the Jewish state should resist any pressure to establish a cease-fire until the threat was eliminated. He also pressed the European Union to recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March 2007, Obama offered his take on the U.S. role in achieving peace in Israel.
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But the Jewish community’s concerns do not seem to be tied to outlandish Internet attacks or even Obama’s relationship with the UCC. It is the senator’s relatively unknown status that raises doubts in the minds of Jewish voters, according to Steve Grossman, former chair of the Democratic National Committee and of AIPAC, and a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton.
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Still, Obama’s supporters and critics agreed that Jews have an obligation to sort out the facts from the mounting slew of falsehoods peddled on the Internet.
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The Atlanta Jewish Times
I actually think it is against the law in Georgia to write any column or article that does not mention the Georgia Bulldogs somewhere. Okay, on to the guts of the matter. This guy is right- Romney is yet another old white Christian white guy, and if Mormon is as close as they get to diversity, well, it's the same GOP as ever.
Tech, Clinton Win; UGA, Romney Lose
Scott Sherris, Columnist
As the nights get colder and the twinkling lights of the Atlanta skyline are once again visible now that the summer smog has lifted, we embark on the annual exercise of looking backward and projecting forward.
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• Mitt Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee. They're going to elect an old, white, Christian guy, then pat themselves on the backs for being so "inclusive" and "diverse" because Romney is Mormon. The truth is, Romney says all the right things to the right people. He's pro-life, he's pro-death-penalty, and he's pro-prayer-in-school. He's anti-sex-ed, anti-gun-control and anti-gay-marriage. Plus, he's in favor of further subsidizing U.S. corn farmers, making him both "environmental" and electable in Iowa.
(I know the Southern Baptists say Mormons are a cult, but they also say I'm going to hell for being Jewish, so let's use my definition, OK?)
• Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential nominee. She doesn't have anything really strongly in her favor, except: (1) She lived in the White House during eight of the most prosperous years in recent American history; (2) Rush Limbaugh has been calling her the biggest threat to the country for at least a decade, which tells Democrats that there must be something good about her; (3) She has wrinkles, people are familiar with her, and she's very good about not saying anything stupid.
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• In November, Hillary Clinton will be elected our 44th president. Voters have woken up to the fact that Republicans never turned America into Big Rock Candy Mountain and will continue the de-Republicanification that began with the congressional elections in 2006. Americans don't feel safer than they felt in 2004, and they're getting tired of being poorer and less liked in the rest of the world. They're going to look to the past, then head to the polls to vote for their own future of 2009.
The Jewish Journal
Contrary to the initial thesis at TPM Cafe, it looks like the Jewish papers and Jewish leaders are coming out pretty strongly AGAINST the race card played against Obama. Good for them.
Playing a frayed and faded 'race card'
By Joe R. Hicks
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is making a truly impressive run for the White House, and in doing so is being considered by many as America's first mainstream "black" candidate -- in other words a "black" candidate not running on a near-exclusive agenda of identity politics.
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However, it didn't take long for this race-transcendent rhetoric to become mired in the same old tired politics of blame and guilt that have for too long been the un-natural state of America's racial affairs. As the race has became increasingly heated between Obama and his chief rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the gloves have come off and race has emerged as an issue that has dominated all discussions of the Democrats' run for the White House.
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Bill Clinton went on Al Sharpton's radio show to explain his comments, and Sen. Clinton appeared on numerous news shows engaging in damage control. But the racial silliness seemed to have a momentum all its own. While campaigning with Sen. Clinton in South Carolina, Bob Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, again raised the specter of Obama's drug use while a teenager. Clinton refused to repudiate the comments, even though she was standing on the stage as the over-the-top statements were made.
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On the other hand, why did it take Barack Obama more than a week to attempt to defuse the growing argument that somehow the Clintons are neo-racists? Only within the past few days has Obama spoken out, saying "Bill and Hillary Clinton have historically and consistently been on the right side of civil rights issues. I think they care about the African American community and that they care about all Americans and that they want to see equal rights and justice in this country."
So will this issue go away now? Most likely it will not. Once unloosed, the beast of racial identity politics will be tamed only with great difficulty.
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Forward
I have seen this thesis before- Republicans nominate somebody people like, while Democrats nominate somebody who is actually competent, and Republicans win. He calls it "The Stevenson Complex." I call it national suicide.
The Stevenson Complex
The Democratic presidential contest is beginning to take on a seesaw quality, as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama trade the mantle of frontrunner back and forth between them. Unless something shifts dramatically in the very near future, the race could continue unresolved for a long time. The two main rivals could even split the prizes on Super Tuesday, February 5, when 22 states hold primaries, leaving the Democratic nomination wide open — and the Democratic contenders bashing and weakening each other — into the spring or summer.
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On substance, the roles are reversed: Obama speaks of transcending ideology and uniting left and right, hardly the stuff of fighting liberalism. His notions of economic fairness don’t seem to include redistributing the pain by taxing the rich. His health care plans wouldn’t require Americans to sign up for insurance, effectively guaranteeing that many will remain uncovered.
But little of that will matter in November. American voters have demonstrated time and time again that they vote for the candidate they find more likable. Democrats repeatedly pick the candidate that they think deserves to win on the merits, and then they try to convince the electorate to take its medicine. No wonder Democrats have won only three of the last 10 presidential elections.
The Jewish Post & Opinion
Contrary to what some think, Jewish Americans are Americans first. This editorial highlights that very simple fact.
Maybe you'll agree
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Gentle reader, I know you're probably tired of this, but, important as Israel is, I think its security must not be the sole issue that guides our decision on who might make the best president for these times.
If I were a woman, I might well want Hillary Clinton to break that highest of glass ceilings – achieved long ago in Israel by Golda Meir. ...
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However we decide to vote, I hope we do so having carefully considered the characters of the eventual nominees. I hope we'll have weighed their positions on numerous major issues – not just Israel, but (to name only a few) human rights, the economy, the environment, education, what's best for seniors, what's best for children, what's best for achieving a just and fair health care system, for our men and women in the armed forces and even for our ever-growing prison population.
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Maybe you’ll agree.
The Jewish Press
The author of this paeon/apologia is a former Giuliani official from NYC. What more do I need to say?
Bush Alone: A Balanced Look at a Much-Maligned President
As George W. Bush begins his eighth and final year in the White House, it’s fitting to step back and look at this president who almost wasn’t, save for the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the relentless recount process in Florida.
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Still, despite the sourness and hard feelings that have accompanied these past seven years, it’s inevitable that history will have the final say. So, while it’s still early, perhaps we can get a leg up on the historians by asking what the country has to show, after two terms of George W. Bush, besides the bitter cultural and political chasm that continues to divide us today.
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After a stunned initial response to the attacks, the Bush administration rallied the nation and put together a response that rolled up terrorist organizations around the world. In Afghanistan we drove the Taliban (supporters and patrons of al Qaeda) from power, while spearheading a comprehensive effort to improve national intelligence and harden our defenses at home. The upshot? We haven’t suffered any follow-on attacks since 9/11 while we have captured or killed untold terrorists and would-be terrorists around the world.
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More broadly, after hitting back at our attackers by unseating their protectors in distant Afghanistan, Bush decided to unseat Saddam Hussein as well. A Middle East dictator who had become an increasingly destabilizing force in the region, Saddam was believed to have weapons of mass destruction in his arsenal, and had been backing and fomenting terrorism himself.
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On other fronts, the current president deserves substantial credit for his tax cutting that reinvigorated the economy. Though the economy is now showing visible signs of strain, in the seven years of Bush’s presidency we’ve had roughly six solid years of economic expansion, including strong GDP numbers and record low unemployment. But Bush was manifestly not as good on spending, allowing his Republican Congress to spend more robustly than the Democratic majority it replaced, eventually convincing Americans to return Congress to Democratic hands.
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Writing recently in the New York Sun, Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University’s Maxwell School noted that Bush’s efforts to help the developing world in Africa have been substantial though they have gone largely unnoticed by the national elite. Bush, he wrote, brought "aid to sub-Saharan Africa to the highest levels in American history" and "raised HIV-AIDS funding by 36% his first year in office." Added Mr. Brooks, "By 2006, annual American aid to Africa had topped $4 billion."
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So Bush gets little or no credit for the good he’s done while the mainstream media echo chamber continues to harp on what hasn’t gone off perfectly. As Bush works the Middle East to try his hand at a little personal diplomacy and possibly nurture peace in a region that hasn’t seen anything like it in more than 60 years, it pays to remember that this president still has nearly 12 months before he enters the history books.
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Jewish Exponent
Another columnist points out that Jews arose to defend Obama from the Muslim slurs. But he also questions why ANY criticism is off- limits.
The Audacity of Criticism
African-Americans and Jews were joined in a relationship long characterized by mutual respect and shared commitment to civil rights. But it was also one that often foundered on the sensitivities and resentments that both groups often could not rise above.
Yet now that the civil-rights movement, as well as fights over affirmative action and other hot-button issues, have faded from the top of the national agenda, blacks and Jews most often have little to do with each other.
But the presidential campaign of the first serious African-American contender for the White House has brought some of the old sensitivities and fears back to the surface.
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The truth is that Obama is a practicing Christian. And he is far more a product of Columbia and Harvard, as well as of the same popular culture of the 1970s and '80s on which most Americans were reared, than the Indonesian schools where he spent a portion of his youth.
But it was no surprise that amid all the acrimony of this campaign, the organized Jewish world felt it must speak up strongly in Obama's defense. Last week, the heads of nine of the most influential national Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the United Jewish Communities, signed a joint letter denouncing the rumors about Obama.
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... when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote last week about the troubling facts about Obama's membership in a Chicago church, whose pastor was a friend and supporter of Louis Farrakhan, the racist and anti-Semitic head of the Nation of Islam, he raised a question that some people didn't want to hear.
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What was equally interesting was the response to Cohen, a liberal anchor of the Post's Op-Ed page, from some on the left.
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So for all the distance we have traveled toward King's vision of a colorblind society, it appears that some view any questions about a black as inherently tainted by prejudice. This is the same sort of false sensitivity that turned an otherwise unexceptionable statement from Hillary Clinton about the roles of both King and President Lyndon Johnson's in passing civil-rights legislation into a controversy.
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Jews and anyone else who oppose him simply because his father was a Muslim from Kenya offend the spirit of American democracy. But Jews like Chabon, himself a virulent foe of Israel, who insist that not even reasonable questions about his associations should be raised, are just as wrong.
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Concern about racism should motivate us to speak out when Obama or any African-American is treated unfairly. But even though black-Jewish relations remain sensitive, that shouldn't silence questions about a man who may well become president.
New Jersey Jewish News
This editorial pulls not punches and offers no other critique. It limits the conversation to the lies about Obama being distributed by email.
Lies, damned lies, and e-mails
One of the most dangerous weapons in the current war on civility is the "forward" function, the little click that allows e-mail users to pass on a message, no matter how ill-informed or unwelcome.
Among the most pernicious of such missives is a widely distributed e-mail smearing Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential hopeful from Illinois. Picking at threads of his biography, from his Muslim father to his middle name, it weaves a fantasy of a sort of Manchurian Muslim, intent on waging jihad from the Oval Office.
Obama was forced to address these laughable and easily falsifiable rumors, and it was heartening that so many Jewish leaders rallied to his side. In an "open letter to the Jewish communities," leaders of nine Jewish organizations spoke out against the "hateful e-mails that use falsehood and innuendo to mischaracterize Senator Barack Obama’s religious beliefs and who he is as a person."
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E-mail users have a place for rumors. It’s called the trash.
Jewish Journal
This one is not an editorial on modern politics. It is a story. But given the entire conversation above, Obama's comments about anti-Semitism in African American society, the targeting of Jews for the Muslim smear, perhaps it is a good time to remember we are all on the same side, and we can all be heros for each other.
African-American pilots over Auschwitz
Last week, President Bush remarked that the United States should have bombed the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. Next week, Americans will commemorate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and the struggle for Civil Rights.
What do these two occasions have in common? More than one might think.
The link between the two is the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, the first African American pilots in the United States military.
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On the morning of Aug. 20, 1944, a group of 127 U.S. bombers called Flying Fortresses approached Auschwitz. They were escorted by 100 Mustang fighter planes. Most of the Mustangs were piloted by Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group. The attacking force dropped more than one thousand 500-pound bombs on oil targets less than five miles from the gas chambers. ...
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The Roosevelt administration knew about the mass murder going on in Auschwitz, and even possessed diagrams of the camp that were prepared by two escapees. But when Jewish organizations asked the Roosevelt administration to order the bombing of the camp and the railways leading to it, the requests were rejected. U.S. officials claimed such raids were "impracticable" because they would require "considerable diversion" of planes needed for the war effort.
But the Tuskegee veterans know that claim was false. They were right there in the skies above Auschwitz. No "diversion" was necessary to drop a few bombs on the mass-murder machinery or the railways leading into the camp. Sadly, those orders were never given.
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The refusal to bomb Auschwitz remains the most powerful symbol of that failure. As President Bush said at Yad Vashem, Auschwitz should have been bombed. And the Tuskegee Airmen are eyewitnesses to the fact that it could have been.
And finally, as long as we're looking at a Jewish point of view, there can be little doubt anti-Semitism is on the rise. Here are reports of three recent incidents:
Anti-Semitic taggers strike in San Fernando Valley
Youth charged in anti-Semitic Vandalism
Shul regroups after suspected arson incident