What Is Obama's "Jewish" Problem?

I'm asking because I honestly don't know. Is this due to his "policy statements" regarding problem areas in the middle east and the Jewish community perceiving it as a threat to Israel? Or, is there "something" between the Jewish and the Black community that goes way back??? I know that there definitely has been a "thing" between Hispanic and Black communities, but I wasn't aware of any such thing in the Jewish community. I would just like to get a reading on this from people who know something about the issue or are involved in it. If it's a "policy thing" then it can be addressed by Obama. If it's a racial thing, it really makes me sad. ---sorry about the title (now corrected) I should have proof read it.

and yet another acronym had been created about which I was clueless.

Can you blame him???

Why else would you ask?

If you didn't I would suggest you find on his site a copy of his speech and read it, it will tell you everything you need to know...very informative and in no way threatens Israel..

and that's why I cannot fathom the media's emphasis in places like Florida that he's having trouble with Jewish voters. Especially, true because in places like Florida the Jewish vote has always been very pro-Dem. That's why I ask if it's "Policy" or if there are any other factors like "race"----it seems like the Jewish community was more in tune with what it was like to be on the other side of bigots and, thus, they did not like to see this kind of thing in this country. Obama's policies and insights make a hell of a lot more sense for Israel than the awful insecurity stirred up by the Bush administration. Israel's greatest fear should be that McIdiot will blow up the whole middle east and they will,thus, have a big bull's eye painted on them.

You mean AIPAC?

AIPAC will not hesitate to fire shots across his prow.

I am also convinced that AIPAC would support McCain in a heartbeat if they thought Obama might question their public policy in Israel or not march in total lockstep with them.

P.S. no secret here I hate AIPAC, the political organization.

that is. I wonder if it has to do with his name and father??

Plus, I think his race and his name have something to do with it. Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been more critical of Israel than other members, and I will admit that when I first heard about him, when he was running for Senate in 2004, I questioned where he stood on the issue. I also asked if he was Muslim (not that it would have mattered to me, I was just curious).

I went to a Jewish high school near Philadelphia and I wonder whether some of my teachers and my peers will vote for Obama. I hope they recognize that even if he wanted to (and I don't think he wants to), a president could not make substantial changes to our policy of supporting Israel if he wants to get reelected, not to mention dealing with Congress. So I don't know what people are so worried about. I plan to spend as much time as I can in the Philadelphia suburbs wearing my Hebrew Obama button and trying to reassure people, but I am worried about it.

There are issues of interest to voters who are Jewish that he needs to address. He seems to have made a good start in that direction. He will, no doubt, fail to address some of them to the satisfacion of some of those voters and they will choose to vote for McCain. That doesn't constitute a 'Jewish Problem', though.

Even if the false claims about Obama originally emanated from the neoconservative right, the Clinton campaign has eagerly pushed them.

Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal has e-mailed damaging stories about Obama to reporters, including a recent article by Batchelor.

Clinton fundraiser Annie Totah circulated a column by Ed Lasky before Super Tuesday, with the inscription "Please vote wisely in the Primaries."

Clinton adviser Ann Lewis falsely referred to Zbigniew Brzezinski, a critic of AIPAC, as a chief adviser to Obama on a conference call with Jewish reporters.

"I can tell you for a fact people from the Clinton campaign are calling reporters and asking them to pay attention to things involving Obama and Israel," says Shmuel Rosner, Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. The volume of e-mails about Obama in a given state tends to track the election calendar--hardly a coincidence.

Is Clinton still up to this?? I can swallow--barely--her using it as a tactic in the primaries. But, pleeease tell me she isn't doing it still as we speak!! If so, then we have more than the repukes working against this party.

Obama so I'm willing to wait and see what happens regarding both Clintons.

I think you will find it in between next to the "hope that he can benefit from Arizona's close proximity to California and his strong showing with Hispanics there" and "McCain is counting on Oregon's independent streak to give him a real chance there".


In the meantime Senator Obama raised more money in AZ than McCain. So McCain's "strong" relationship with AZ Jewish community didn't translate into dollars.

He's currently polling about 65% nation wide in the Hispanic community.

http://blogs.chron.com/txpotomac/2008/05/new_poll_barack_obamas_problem_1.html

and it will go up now that he is the nominee

that Israel respect the human rights of the Palestinians.

We wouldn't want that, would we? :sarcasm:

At the fulcrum of this effort is a little-known blogger from Northbrook, Illinois, named Ed Lasky, whose articles on AmericanThinker.com have done more than anything to give the smear campaign an air of respectability. Lasky co-founded AmericanThinker.com in 2003, modeling it after Powerline, a popular conservative blog. Before that, he had frequently written letters to newspapers defending Israel and criticizing the Palestinians. Though his background remains a mystery, Lasky didn't hide his neoconservative leanings. He wrote a blog post in 2004 titled "Why American Jews Must Vote for Bush," made three separate donations to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, contributed $1,000 to Tom DeLay and has given more than $50,000 to GOP candidates and causes since 2000. Lasky sits on the board of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, headed by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, whose close affiliations with Christian-right operatives like Ralph Reed has made Eckstein a controversial figure in the Jewish community.

A lengthy article from January 16, "Barack Obama and Israel," put Lasky on the map. "One seemingly consistent theme running throughout Barack Obama's career is his comfort with aligning himself with people who are anti-Israel advocates," Lasky wrote. To reach that conclusion, Lasky laughably warped what it meant to be "pro-Israel," criticizing Obama for, among other things, opposing John Bolton as UN ambassador and hiring veteran foreign policy hands from the Clinton and Carter administrations. By Lasky's criteria, every Democrat in the Senate, and more than a few Republicans, would be considered "anti-Israel." "Lasky's piece is filled with half-truths, omission of 'inconvenient facts,' innuendo, deeply flawed logic, undocumented charges, hearsay, and guilt by distant association," wrote Ira Forman of the National Jewish Democratic Council in the Philadelphia Jewish Voice.

Despite--or perhaps because of--its propagandistic nature, Lasky's column and subsequent follow-ups circulated far and wide. Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post quoted Lasky at length in a January column, printing his false claims as fact, as did a separate column in the same paper by Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith (a onetime top official in the Bush Defense Department) and a top ally of neocon darling and Iraq War proponent Ahmad Chalabi and co-chairman of Republicans Abroad in Israel. More surprising, Lasky became a household name in the mainstream Jewish press, the talk of the town at synagogues--even liberal ones--and a useful ally for members of the Clinton campaign, who circulated his articles. Recently he's been interviewed by mainstream outlets like NPR and the New York Times, which have labeled Lasky a "critic" of Obama without explaining his neoconservative sympathies. "I wonder how a tendentiously argued anti-Obama piece is mass-emailed by so many Jews who should know better," blogged Andrew Silow-Carroll, editor of the New Jersey Jewish News.

Another key purveyor of the smear campaign is Aaron Klein, an Orthodox Jew who is Jerusalem correspondent for WorldNetDaily. WND is notoriously disreputable, a sort of National Enquirer for the right (typical headline: "Sleaze Charge: 'I Took Drugs, Had Homo Sex With Obama'"). Klein made a name for himself by getting terrorists to say nice things about Democrats and allying himself with extremist elements of the Israeli right, whom he frequently quotes as sources in his articles--when he bothers to quote anyone at all. Klein originally called Hillary Clinton the "jihadist choice for president," but when Clinton stumbled, he turned his fire to Obama, attempting to expose his so-called "terrorist connections."

Klein penned two stories in late February wildly distorting Obama's links, from his days in Chicago, to pro-Palestinian activists like Rashid Khalidi, a respected professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University who previously taught at the University of Chicago (hardly a bastion of left-wing activism). Klein's story goes something like this: Obama sat on the board of a foundation in Chicago that gave a grant to the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), run by Khalidi's wife, which supposedly rejects Israel's existence; and Khalidi directed the PLO's Beirut press office and is a supporter "for Palestinian terror." (In fact, the AAAN focuses solely on social service work in Chicago and takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Khalidi says he was never employed by the PLO; he has been a harsh critic of Palestinian suicide bombings and a longtime supporter of a two-state solution, and he has never been an adviser to Obama. As for Obama's past statements, at least in Chicago, being pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian is not a contradiction in terms.)

Once again, the facts mattered little, and Klein's stories gained an audience beyond the narrow confines of WND. Christian publicist Maria Sliwa sent Klein's articles to prominent reporters, the Tennessee GOP included his claims in a press release titled "Anti-Semites for Obama" and the Jewish Press, an Orthodox Brooklyn paper, reprinted his story about Khalidi. His latest article alleges that "terrorists worldwide would indeed be emboldened by an Obama election." As evidence, Klein quotes Ramadan Adassi, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank's Askar refugee camp, who says an Obama victory would be an "important success. He won popularity in spite of the Zionists and the conservatives." In previous stories, Klein has quoted Adassi praising Cindy Sheehan, Rosie O'Donnell and Sean Penn. For a suspected terrorist, Adassi follows pop culture and US politics remarkably closely.

Despite Klein's questionable sourcing and scandalous accusations, mainstream reporters now call the Obama campaign to ask about Klein's articles. He also reports for John Batchelor, a right-wing talk-radio host for KFI-AM in Los Angeles who has written a series of outlandish columns about Obama for the conservative magazine Human Events and repeatedly pushed the Obama smears on his radio show. According to an e-mail of Batchelor's obtained by The Nation, Batchelor says that information about Obama and Khalidi came via "oppo research."

snip

Large American Jewish organizations, like AIPAC and the Orthodox Union, have repeatedly defended Obama. Yet they've had little sway over reactionary elements in both the United States and Israel--including Jewish hate groups--who are eager to keep the smear campaign alive. The website Jews Against Obama, for instance, is run by the Jewish Task Force, which funnels money to the radical settler movement in Israel. (Curiously, John McCain's alliance with Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, a leading proponent of "end times" theology, and his recent endorsement by former Secretary of State James Baker have received far less scrutiny from pro-Israel pundits. It was Baker, after all, who reportedly told George H.W. Bush, "Fuck the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway.")

Respected news outlets have stoked these smears, even as they attempt to debunk them. "Is Barack Obama a Muslim?" asked an editorial in the Forward. "Almost certainly not. Was he ever a Muslim? Almost certainly yes." After Obama criticized "a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel," Rosner of Ha'aretz accused Obama of "meddling in Israel's internal politics." The Washington Post noted Obama's "denials" of his Muslim faith, without ever stating that the rumor was untrue. Post columnist Richard Cohen crassly connected Obama, his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan, a line of guilt-by-association questioning that Tim Russert aggressively repeated in the last Obama-Clinton debate.

Among conservatives, Fox News has endlessly amplified such rumors. Karl Rove, a new hire by the network, recently speculated that Obama would withdraw funding for Israel. Sean Hannity has asked if Obama has a "race problem." Fox News radio host Tom Sullivan compared Obama to Hitler. "Fox News are on to him and all the arguments our 'smear' camping is making and for the most part it is running with them," right-wing blogger Ted Belman, of Israpundit, wrote in a recent e-mail.

The attacks on Obama reek of racism and Islamophobia but, as John Kerry learned in 2004, any Democrat should expect such treatment. "If Moses was the Democratic nominee, he'd still be the victim of this hate mail," says Doug Bloomfield, a former legislative director for AIPAC. The right-wing smear machine grinds on, with the mainstream media and rival campaigns lending a helping hand.

That's a good problem to have.

His alleged problem is that some older Jews are likely to have the same kind of problem older Goyim have with Obama: he's a young black man with a Muslim name.

Perhaps you should use the googler to figure out why, and when you are there you might want to see if you have been duped by rightwing assholes into thinking something exists where there is nothing at all.

But he'll be fine in the GE.

Especially when we start getting our young friends registered!