A campaign by a new dovish pro-Israel group to get Jewish newspapers not to run Republican Jewish Coalition attack ads has raised questions about what's kosher and what isn't in this fraught political season.
A campaign by J Street, a dovish pro-Israel group, is aimed at getting Jewish newspapers to stop running what it says are scurrilous Republican Jewish Coalition attack ads on Barack Obama.
Photo: JTA
The new group, J Street, helped flood many Jewish newspapers with letters in recent days urging them not to run the RJC ads attacking the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). Letters were even sent to newspapers in which the ads did not appear.
"I was saddened to see that the Republican Jewish Coalition's vile, fear-mongering advertisements have been printed in your publication," read one typical letter. "Since when do Jews go along with smear campaigns? By all means tolerate genuine dissent but please, draw the lines at hateful, dishonest caricatures."
In addition to initiating the letter-writing campaign, J Street organized a petition calling on papers not to publish the ads. The petition garnered 23,000 signatures, according to the group's executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami.
"There is a deep well of anger in the broader Jewish community over the questionable tactics used by the RJC and the lies and distortions they and others have circulated during this campaign," Ben-Ami said. "We do hope that our campaign will spark a discussion among Jewish media executives about the extent to which they wish to provide a platform for further dissemination of baseless allegations and unfounded personal attacks."
Matt Brooks, the RJC executive director, derided what he described as J Street's "amateurish" attempt at intimidation and censorship.
"It's wildly offensive that they would engage in intimidation on newspapers not to run ads," he said. "It's misguided and offends people's sensitivities." Brooks said he was ready to meet Ben-Ami to debate the ads' content.
The overall thrust of the RJC's ad campaign is that Obama remains an alarming mystery to American Jews; the slogan is: "Concerned about Barack Obama? You should be."
It's not an unprecedented tack in political campaigning, although it hardly jibes with two years of intense media scrutiny of Obama - and doesn't comport with a GOP campaign that is going out of its way to keep reporters from examining the record of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the running mate of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
A review of the RJC ads reveals some substantive attacks on Obama, and others that severely distort his record and his relationships.
Perhaps the RJC's most substantive claim is that Obama has expressed a willingness to meet with Iran's president without preconditions.
Obama's surrogates, including his running mate and the National Jewish Democratic Coalition, have suggested that when the Democratic presidential nominee spoke of meeting with Iranian leaders, he meant the religious hierarchy that controls the country's security apparatus -- not Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and predicted that Israel would be wiped off the map. But the record suggests this is an attempt to backpedal from Obama's stated position, rather than a mere clarification.
The issue first emerged during a July 2007 debate sponsored by YouTube and CNN, in which voters submitted their questions via video . With an image of Ahmadinejad flashing on the screen as he spoke, one questioner asked the Democratic candidates if they would be willing in their first year of office to meet separately - without preconditions - with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.
Obama said yes, and never challenged the initial media coverage or criticism from the other candidates based on the assumption that he had been talking about a potential meeting with Ahmadinejad.
Similarly, two months later, with the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, Obama answered questions about how he could reconcile his willingness to meet Ahmadinejad and his view that Columbia University had made a mistake in offering to host the Iranian president during his New York visit.
The RJC also gets it right when it notes that Obama has said that Iran and other current pariah states targeting the United States are "tiny" compared to the Soviet Union and don't pose the same threat. A McCain campaign TV ad simply quoted Obama as calling Iran "tiny," denying viewers the ability to draw their own conclusions about what Obama had actually said.
One Iran-related distortion lingers, however: "Sen. Obama is opposed to critical legislation labeling Iran's revolutionary guard a terrorist organization," one ad says. The legislation in question - a non-binding amendment - was hardly critical, and Obama has supported such a label in separate legislation. Additionally, he has sponsored legislation that would protect from lawsuits pensions that divest from companies that deal with Iran.
Even as Obama maintains his support for stepped up diplomacy with Iran, he has also stressed that the goal of any talks would be for the Islamic Republic to abandon its nuclear program and end its support of terrorism. Obama has portrayed US-Iranian talks as an important step for building international support for tougher measures if Iran pushed ahead with its nuclear program - and he has refused to take military options off the table in dealing with the issue.
In addition to the issue of Iran, the RJC ads have attacked Obama's supposed choice of religious and foreign-policy advisers.
One ad refers to Obama's relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has in the past embraced radical views about Israel as a colonial state and suggested that the United States bears responsibility for fomenting the unrest that leads to terrorism. Obama has cut off Wright and insisted he was unaware of his pastor's more radical views, although these seem to have been well-known in real time.
The ads call Wright an anti-Semite, without substantiating the claim; Wright is not known to have targeted Jews and had friendly relations with Chicago Jewish groups.
