washington | A new, dovish pro-Israel group’s campaign to keep Jewish newspapers from running Republican Jewish Coalition attack ads has raised questions about what’s kosher in this fraught political season.
The group, J Street, recently helped flood many Jewish newspapers with letters urging them not to run RJC ads attacking Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Letters were even sent to newspapers in which the ads did not appear. “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,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s executive director.
Matt Brooks, the RJC’s executive director, said, “It’s wildly offensive that they would engage in intimidation on newspapers not to run ads. It’s misguided and offends people’s sensitivities.” Although j. received J Street letters, the RJC does not advertise in j.
The overall thrust of the RJC’s ad campaign is that Obama remains an alarming mystery to American Jews. Its 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 presidential candidate Sen. John McCain.
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.
Two RJC ads reference Obama’s comment in May 2007 that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” But the ads fail to make clear that Obama implied at the time, and later made clear, that he blames Palestinian leaders, not Israel, for the Palestinian people’s suffering.
The ads and the petition to pull them have generated much debate among editors of Jewish papers. The Washington Jewish Week has run the ads, and its publisher, Larry Fishbein, said the newspaper would continue to do so. “We reserve the right to reject ads, and while they were pushing the envelope, we do not feel they crossed the line.”