Many in my Jewish community, no matter whom they support for President, have been disturbed at the various whisper campaigns that have been (and still are) directed at Barack Obama, intending to paint him as a closet Muslim and enemy of Israel. Here's an excerpt from an editorial that ran January 24th in NY Jewish Week, and distributed at my synagogue:
It is distressing and embarrassing that the Jewish community has become a primary focus of the malicious campaign to tar Sen. Barack Obama as a secret Muslim.
There are legitimate reasons to question Obama’s candidacy on the issues — the same can be said for all his competitors, Democrats and Republicans alike — but outrageous charges about how his childhood years in Indonesia indelibly taint him as a Muslim sympathizer go far beyond the pale.
This slander is conveyed primarily through anonymous e-mails that start with nuggets of truth, including the fact Obama’s stepfather was a Muslim (but ignoring the fact he was a secular Muslim) and that he once attended a school that taught Islam (but ignoring the fact that it was a public school in Indonesia, where all schools include some Muslim teaching, and that he also attended a Catholic school).
From there, they build elaborate constructions of malicious fantasy, suggesting that he is a kind of Islamic plant determined to turn the United States against Israel.
[...]
It is too much to hope that the purveyors of this poison will stop; they have already revealed themselves to be rank partisans with little regard for democracy. But we hope Jews who receive these e-mails do the responsible thing by deleting them for the trash they are, and by not repeating the unfounded whispers of those whose only interest is in sowing discord to serve their narrow political interests.
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