From http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3617731,00.html:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign denied reports published in a Lebanese newspaper, which claimed that Obama and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had reached a secret understanding on the matter of Jerusalem.

A statement by Ambassador Dennis Ross, one of Obama’s key advisors on foreign policy, said the report was false. “As someone who was present in Senator Obama’s meeting with the Palestinian leadership, I can state definitively that there were no secret commitments made, and no discussion of Jerusalem whatsoever,” it said. (Yitzhak Benhorin)

In short, it’s a completely fabricated story.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense can understand that the story broke today, even though Obama’s meeting with Abbas was months ago, because the people who fabricated it are hoping to scare some gullible Jews into voting against Obama by releasing the made-up story at the last minute so that there is no time to debunk it before the polls close on election day.

It is also worth noting that even Joe Lieberman has said, on the record, that an Obama presidency is not a threat to Israel.  From http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/jewish-dem-ire-boils-over-on-lieberman-2008-07-09_2.html: “When asked if Obama represents a threat to Israel, Lieberman said, ‘No.’”  Furthermore, Joe Lieberman had this to say about Obama in a conference call with reporters on October 24 (see http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/lieberman_i_respect_obama.php): “When I go out, I say, ‘I have a lot of respect for Sen. Obama.  He’s bright.  He’s eloquent.’  Someday, I might even support him for president.”

A letter recently emailed to 75,000 Pennsylvania Jews compared stopping Obama to stopping Hitler:

“In the 5,769 years of our people, there has never been a more important time for us to take proactive measures in order to stop a second Holocaust.”

It then regurgitates the various McCain campaign smears about Ayers, Wright, Farrakhan, and Ahmadinejad, and concludes:

“Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008. Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let’s not make a similar one this year.”

It was signed by a respected former state Supreme Court judge, Hon. Sandra Schwartz Newman, as well as the incoming chair of the Philadelphia Jewish Federation, Mike Coslov. According to the JTA, “both Coslov and Newman are distancing themselves from the letter, saying they hadn’t actually read its contents before signing on.”

The letter was written by a McCain “political operative” named Bryan Rudnick, specifically brought to Pennsylvania from Florida for this purpose. The New York Times reported that “leaders of the state party repudiated it on Friday. They said it had been released without their authorization and that they had fired the strategist who helped draft it, Bryan Rudnick.” Of course, for his part, Rudnick “disputed the party’s version of events and said he had approval for the letter from officials at several levels.”

The meme associating the election of Obama with another Holocaust is running rampant in Republican Jewish circles. Rabbi Brad Hershfield calls it “a political sickness taking root in the Jewish community, one which threatens the memory of the Holocaust, the integrity of the Jewish people, and the future of this country.”

Even Abe Foxman of the ADL has come out against the GOP’s scare tactic: “We hope that the signatories of this letter and those responsible for its dissemination will repudiate its message and apologize to both the candidate and the Jewish community.”

So far, no apology to the candidate has been forthcoming.

In the last few days, opponents of Barack Obama have attempted to resurrect, from a slightly different angle, the Rashid Khalidi smear first attempted months ago by Sean Hannity.

In April 2008, the Los Angeles Times ran this story about Barack Obama’s relationship with the Palestinian community.  In that story, the Times reported on a 2003 dinner held in Rashid Khalidi’s honor, before he departed the University of Chicago for a new position at Columbia.  Barack Obama attended the dinner, at which he said nice things about Khalidi and some other attendees said some not-so-nice things about Israel.

The Times was able to report about this dinner because they found a source who was willing to tell them about it, and even to provide a videotape of the event, on the condition that they not reveal his or her identity and not release the tape, presumably because people who attended the dinner would be able to deduce the identity of the person who released it.

Back in April, the Times was criticized for running this article by supporters of Barack Obama, who claimed that the article was biased against him.

Fast forward to the end of October, when the McCain campaign is in dire straights and throwing everything including the kitchen sink at Obama in a last-ditch attempt to turn the race around.  In addition to once again demonizing Khalidi (which we’ve already dealt with in our earlier article and address again below), McCain’s supporters are now claiming that the Times is “hiding something” and “protecting Obama” by refusing to release the videotape.

A smear recently discovered “in the wild” weaves together a few true facts about Barack Obama’s past with a boatload of lies and distortions to arrive at a complex conspiracy theory which bears no relation to reality.

When this smear was forwarded to you, it may have started with this:

This electdion has me very worried.  So many things to consider.  About a year ago I would have voted for Obama.  I have changed my mind three times since then.

Or perhaps like this:

Around 1979 Obama started college at Occidental in California.  He is very open about his two years at Occidental, he tried all kinds of drugs and was wasting his time but, even though he had a brilliant mind, did not apply himself to his studies.

There is very little in this smear that is true.

Snopes.com does an excellent job of debunking the claims that Obama’s education and house were paid for with money obtained from questionable sources, so we refer you to their article rather than repeating its contents here.  However, there are a number of additional lies in this smear which merit rebuttal.

The characterization of Obama’s time at Occidental given in the smear and quoted above is simply false.  See this New York Times article for proof.

The smear claims that Muhammad Chandoo and Wahid Hamid were Obama’s roommates at Occidental; in fact they were not.  Incidentally, since when does having a Pakistani background, as Chandoo and Hamid do and as the smear is careful to point out, automatically make a person worthy of suspicion?  Nowadays, Chandoo is a self-employed financial consultant, and Wahid is now a vice president at Pepsico, both living and working in New York.  Are these people we should be worried about?

Finally, to answer the question of how Obama paid for his trip, the answer is, quite simply, that his mother paid for it so that he could visit her and his father.

Truly, the absurdity of this smear makes it clear just how low Obama’s detractors will stoop in their efforts to scare people out of voting for him.

Jesse Jackson is no friend of the Jews (”hymie-town”) and no friend of Barack Obama (”He’s talking down to black people.  I wanna cut his nuts off.”).  As reported in The Washington Post, Jackson has not been asked to serve as an Obama surrogate, has not been asked to campaign jointly with him, and was given no role at the Democratic National Convention for the first time in decades.

And yet, for some inexplicable reason, Obama’s detractors would have us believe that Jackson is accurately describing Obama’s policies and beliefs when he yet again puts his foot in his mouth and says something stupid, boneheaded, and completely detached from reality.

By Marsha Cohen

Suppose, for a moment, that there were a sparkling and youthful politician with a brilliant gift for oratory whose demeanor and message were attracting legions of young and previously uninterested voters.

And suppose further that this politician, a first-term senator from an urban state, were poised to become the first member of his ethnic group to be the presidential candidate of a major political party.

And suppose his name were Barry Cohen.

Wouldn’t you be excited about one of us being this close to the American presidency?

And wouldn’t you be worried?

Read more from the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix Online…

Jews from all denominations and political parties are outraged at the techniques being used by the Republican party and the McCain campaign to scare Jewish voters and distract them from the real issues that matter in this election. We at Jews for Obama are determined to alert you to this negative campaigning and reveal who is behind it.

The most recent smear you need to watch out for originates from the Republican Jewish Coalition. Throughout the campaign, the RJC has passed on many opportunities to discuss the substantive issues which differentiate the candidates. Instead, the RJC apparently believes that its role is to try to convince voters that everyone associated with Senator Obama is anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, or both, irrationally and absurdly applying these labels even to ardently pro-Israel Orthodox Jews and Senators who have consistently voted with AIPAC for decades.

This time, the RJC has engaged in the universally despised tactic of “push polling.” According to politico.com, the RJC’s supposed “poll asked voters their response to negative statements about Obama, including reported praise for him from a leader of the Palestinian terror group Hamas and a friendship early in his career with a pro-Palestinian university professor. Some Jewish Democrats who received the poll – including a New Republic writer who lives in Michigan – were outraged by the poll, describing it in interviews as ‘ugly’ and disturbing.”

Senior ABS News correspondent Jack Tapper quotes one target of the poll, Ben Cohen: “It was evocative of a time and a kind of politics that I would never want to see rise in America. You shouldn’t scare people to get elected – Jewish people have experienced that before really horrifically.”

Needless to say, the smears in this “poll” have been thoroughly debunked by many non-partisan Web sites, including Snopes, PolitiFact.com, and FactCheck.org, as well as by Obama’s FightTheSmears.com and our Jews for Obama’s very own React! site.

The next time someone tells you that he’s “worried” about Barack Obama’s support of Israel because the “anti-Israel” diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of his advisers / his senior foreign policy adviser / his mentor / his personal hero / whatever, ask the person sharing this information with you these two questions:

1. Why is Brzezinski anti-Israel?
2. Can you prove that Brzezinski is advising Obama?

Abraham Katsman and Kory Bardash, two of the Jerusalem Post’s Republican attack dogs, jump on the “Obama has no experience” bandwagon in this August 17 article, subtitled “why Obama makes things up.”  While they’re right that Obama has occasionally exaggerated his record, for the most part it is they, and not Obama, who “make things up,” in their scurrilous attempt to convince their readers that Obama’s many noteworthy accomplishments do not exist.

Barack Obama’s detractors have made a game out of finding anti-Israel and anti-Semitic material on Obama’s social networking site, My.BarackObama.com, and using it to smear Obama.  In part 1 of our response, we discuss the motives behind it and what its architects don’t tell you about the offensive content.  In this, part 2, we discuss how anti-Semitism within the Republican party should be of much greater concern to Jewish Americans than offensive content on Obama’s site.