The obama charm offensive

Various proxies have taken to defending Sen Barack Obama to the Jewish community. Frankly it hasn’t just been about defending Sen. Obama, it’s been about attacking the senator’s critics or even those who question him. So you can call it an offensive. And it hasn’t been all that charming. And sometimes it hasn’t been all that honest.

Clearly what’s going on is that when the Obama campaign looks at the demographics of its support, it finds that one traditionally Democratic constituency is under-represented among his supporters. That under-represented group is Jews.

The Politico observes:

A survey last November conducted by the American Jewish Committee found that 53 percent of Jews view Clinton favorably, compared to 38 percent for both Obama and Edwards.

 

Forgetting for a moment that Jews often have interests other than Israel and assume that Israel is the overriding issue for at least a large minority of Jewish voters, does Sen. Obama have a record that should make them uneasy?

Given that his record is short it shouldn’t be hard to put together. The NY Sun has put together the case for Sen. Obama, which reads in part:

He took Israel’s side against those who would fault it for its actions in Lebanon in the Summer of 2006. “When Israel is attacked, we must stand up for Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself,” Mr. Obama said. “Last summer, Hezbollah attacked Israel. By using Lebanon as an outpost for terrorism, and innocent people as shields, Hezbollah has also engulfed that entire nation in violence and conflict, and threatened the fledgling movement for democracy there.” 

And Mr. Obama rejected the idea, put forth by Israel’s false friends, that America does Israel any favors by exerting pressure in the name of peace. “We should never seek to dictate what is best for the Israelis and their security interests. No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States,” Mr. Obama said. “When I am president, the United States will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel,” Mr. Obama told the National Jewish Democratic Council in February of 2007.

“Those who have worked with me in Chicago in the state Legislature and now in the United States Senate will testify that I have not just talked the talk, I have walked the walk when it comes to Israel’s security. I think it is fundamental. I think it is something that is in the interests of the United States because of our special relationship, because Israel has not only established a democracy in the region but has been a stalwart ally of ours,” Mr. Obama said to the NJDC. “The United States government and an Obama Presidency cannot ask Israel to take risks with respect to its security.”

 

I am not denying that these are positive statements. But they are not enough.

Consider for a moment a recent action that Sen. Obama has taken to burnish his pro-Israel credentials.

These remarks came on the heels of other steps taken to underscore his support for Israel in the past week. On January 23, the senator sent a letter to Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, calling upon him to ensure that any response to the recent unrest in the Gaza strip will not be biased against Israel.

 

That’s an excellent thought. But by now it’s irrelevant. The Bush administration, as evidenced by Evelyn Gordon’s “The frequent abstainers club” had long ago established as its policy that it would veto an resolution that was not balanced. Given that the point of many Arab sponsored resolutions is to condemn Israel, this has prevented most of them from passing. Arab intransigence is such that the Arab world refuses to blame the other side. All Sen. Obama was doing was asking the Bush administration to heed to a principle it had already accepted. Did he do it out of ignorance or was he simply grandstanding? (A link to an excerpt from Gordon’s article is here.)

But what we’ve seen in the past week has been outpouring of Jewish support for Sen. Obama from liberal sources. Some of it has come directly from the Senator. Other has, as noted above, come from proxies. Sen. Obama himself addressed a number of issues in a JTA sponsored phone call. He hit all of the right notes, but he, of course, let this slip:

Says that an email smear campaign has been going around – being sent to Jews – which says that he is a Muslim, that he swore his oath of office on a Koran. Says none of it is true. He was raised by a secular mother, attended a Christian church growing up, and swore his oath of office on a family Christian Bible. Says he is not a Muslim, never has been.

 

Daniel Pipes basing himself on publicly reported accounts claims otherwise. But his point isn’t to smear Sen. Obama, rather it is to point out a possible point of contention he could have dealing with the Muslim world. Barack Obama may deny that he was ever a practicing Muslim, but there are witnesses who saw him attend a mosque as a child. Still this is neither here nor there concerning how President Obama would act towards Israel. However it is a point that Sen. Obamas and his defenders have harped on to the exclusion of dealing with the real issue.

One of the most active of the senator’s defenders has been the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC). In a number of items on its blog the NJDC has taken to attacking Sen. Obama’s critics.

One such item defended the three top candidates for the party’s nomination. (This was before Sen Edwards dropped out of the race.) It’s titled the NJDC’S Guide to Responding to Obama, Clinton, and Edwards Smears aimed at Jewish Voters

I have a particular interest in that post because I asked a question in the comment section a last week. My comment still has not appeared. What I asked was why was it wrong to judge a candidate by his advisors? Robert Malley and Samantha Power both have troubling views regarding the Middle East. (It wasn’t in those exact words.) The comment still has not appeared, nor has there been any attempt to address those concerns. The NJDC tends to be picky about the comments they allow and I’m guessing that they don’t have a good answer so they screened the question.

Someone who does deal with the issue of Sen. Obama’s advisers, is Martin Peretz. Peretz, is strongly pro-Israel – in fact in 2004 he supported the reelection of George W. Bush over the candidacy of Sen. John Kerry – on that basis. However this year, he defended Sen. Obama.

There are all kinds of spooky rumors that a man named Robert Malley is one of Obama’s advisers, specifically his Middle East adviser. His name comes up mysteriously and intrusively on the web, like the ads for Viagra. Malley, who has written several deceitful articles in The New York Review of Books, is a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it. But Malley is not and has never been a Middle East adviser to Barack Obama. Obama’s Middle East adviser is Dan Shapiro.

 

There are two problems with this. One, if you go to the Washington Post, you discover that among Sen. Obama’s advisers is one Robert Malley.

The second problem as Thomas Lifson points out, is that just a month ago, Peretz himself raised doubts about Malley.

Ben Smith seems to answer both these contradictions.

An Obama spokesman, Tommy Vietor, says, “Rob Malley has no day-to-day advisory role in the Obama campaign. He is among many people who has given his advice to the campaign. The actual day-to-day Middle East advisor is Dan Shapiro.”

 

This doesn’t answer every question. Apparently Malley has contact with the Obama campaign. So even though he’s listed in the Washington Post as a national security advisor, it must be assumed that his area of expertise is the Middle East. It also begs the question, even if he isn’t the day to day adviser of Sen. Obama on the Middle East doesn’t his involvement in the campaign suggest that he might well have a position in a future Obama administration? (Not certainly, but it has to be a possibility.)

Nor do I dismiss Malley as casually as Smith does. Malley was a major source for Deborah Sontag’s highly misleading valedictory from her position as Jerusalem correspondent of the New York Times. Malley was the only member of the American team at Camp David – that also included another Obama adviser, Dennis Ross – who blamed Ehud Barak and not Yasir Arafat for the summit’s failure.

However given Sen. Obama’s mixture of advisers, including “…Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has defended the Walt-Mearsheimer ‘Israel Lobby’ thesis…” it’s more than a little disconcerting that another one of his advisors (Malley) is the one who invented one of the Walt-Mearsheimer talking points.

Ha’aretz joined the fray by publishing an editorial titled Obama and the Jewish Question that shrilly goes on the offensive right away.

Not a year has passed since Danny Ayalon completed his term as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, but he has already seen fit to criticize Barack Obama, who may well be the next U.S. president or vice president. In an article published in The Jerusalem Post, Ayalon wrote that during his two meetings with Obama, he got the impression that the Democratic candidate was “not entirely forthright” regarding Israel. Similar and even worse smears can be found in abundance in American blogs and e-mail chain letters.

 

The editorial also charges

Racist attacks against a black American candidate could cause Israel and American Jews a great deal of damage – not to mention shame and disgrace. Obama has been forced to defend himself over things such as nonexistent ties with elements hostile to Israel, an appearance at an event at which Edward Said spoke, and praying at one church rather than another. 

Great damage has already been caused because Obama announced that an ugly campaign was being waged against him in the Jewish community. That alone ought to be enough at least to make Israel’s leaders say something about Jews who preach against anti-Semitism while employing similar tactics against other minorities.

 

A number of Jewish organizations have come together and condemned the e-mails, so the paper’s hysteria seems less sincere than cynical. It’s just another opportunity to smear “right wingers.”

But as Volokh Conspiracy.David Bernstein points out, the charges about Jewish spokesmen are bogus.

Unless Ha’aretz can come up with a reasonable example of “Jewish spokesmen” using “racist language” regarding Obama, I hope the newspaper will withdraw this accusation and run a correction. But I suspect that Ha’aretz is less concerned with Obama per se, and more with trying to discredit the America “right-wing Jews” (a very broad category for Ha’aretz; consider, as an analogy, who the editors of The Nation would consider right-wing) it holds in contempt.

However none of us should wait very long for such an admission as Bernstein notes in an update:

For those unfamiliar with Ha’aretz’s editor’s politics, note that recently Ha’aretz editor David Landau reportedly “implored [Condoleeza] Rice to intervene, asserting that the Israeli government wanted ‘to be raped’ and that it would be like a ‘wet dream’ for him to see this happen.” In other words, Ha’aretz would like policies supported by the Israeli left but opposed by most Israelis to be imposed on Israel by the U.S.

 

Bernstein also notes that the e-mail in question, which he reprints, appears to be geared not towards Jews, but towards Christians.

The final issue that’s worth examining is how Sen. Obama became pro-Israel. Before he had his eyes set on national office he apparently he wasn’t much interested in Israel. Contentions.Eric Trager repcalls a story that’s available at a number of websites.

After all, Obama is on record as having called for an “even-handed approach” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2000, just as the Palestinians commenced the Second Intifada following Camp David. According to Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah, Obama’s pro-Israel epiphany occurred shortly before his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign—an about-face for which Obama apologized to Abunimah. “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front,” Obama said at the time.

 

Perhaps Abunimah is making this up. Still when one considers the likes of Malley being an advisor to Sen. Obama, it doesn’t seem as if he’d be that far removed from someone who’s true sympathies are for the Palestinians and not Israel.

Obama’s defenders have been out in force and don’t adequately deal with the issue of the candidates advisers. It looks to me as if they’re avoiding the real issue in favor of straw men.

Overall there hasn’t been much charm here, but plenty that’s offensive.

Finally, my problem isn’t just with Sen. Obama, it would be with Sen. Clinton too. And that’s another name. That name is Debra Delee, a past chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, and more importantly for this conversation, the CEO of Americans for Peace Now.

The Israeli organization, Peace Now, has been shown to be funded largely from Europe. It’s most visible member in the political realm is Yossi Beilin who has been marginalized in election after election. And despite the fact that it can’t get significant support from the Israeli electorate, it’s influence in forcing Israel to make concessions remains strong. APN, despite claiming to be a Zionist organization, also promotes these Eurocentric policies.

At the end of his second term, President Clinton (along with his wife) were honored by APN at a dinner. Despite her efforts to build bridges to the Jewish community in New York as Senator, I can’t believe that President Clinton 44 wouldn’t be greatly influenced by the policies of APN, just as her husband was.

If someone supports Israel, I really think that he (or she) ought to think long and hard about the potential Democratic tickets. Neither likelihood is especially appealing. (That’s not to say that the Republican aren’t without their problems too, I just don’t think that those problems are as severe.)

On the topic of Sen. Obama, there are a couple of good roundups at the American Thinker and Israel Matzav.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.