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.

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.

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.

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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. (more…)

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 this, part 1 of our response, we discuss the motives behind it and what its architects don’t tell you about the offensive content.  In part 2, we discuss how anti-Semitism in the Republican party should be of much greater concern to Jewish Americans than offensive content on Obama’s site.

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We humans pride ourselves on rationality, and as individuals we are!  But as a population, we often act as simple stimulus-response engines. Can someone control an individual human mind as suggested in the movie The Manchurian Candidate?  Of course not!  But mass psychological operations (psyops), using so called “Influence Science”, do work, and are in continuous use today, not merely in foreign military operations, but domestically as well.

Of course, no individual can be forced to change their mind, but statistical sampling over time proves that some people do change their minds! Just watch the Polls! Crowd psychology-based psycho-visual and psycholinguistic techniques, as well as “attention-focusing” drama can drastically and instantaneously change the outcome of a poll (or a vote). George Bush’s popularity rating soared to 90% after the attack of September 2001. It has been said that the dramatic assassination of Mrs. Bhutto brought John McCain’s campaign back from the dead.

Visual and linguistic juxtaposition are much less dramatic, but they work: Juxtapose a politician’s picture next to an unrelated headline about a murder or a story about embezzlement, and watch their popularity ratings fall. Produce authority figures, who should have inside knowledge, like Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld, and his “War Heads” shills, who repeatedly speak about Iraq and 9/11 in the same breath, and polls will move to show that 70% of Americans came to believe Saddam was “behind” 9/11 (even though people previously believed the culprit was Bin Laden or the family whose factory was destroyed by Clinton in Sudan), and knew that Saddam was a secular, not islamic, dictator.)

Now, since June, McCain has been continuously running the following banner ad on websites frequented by Jews… (more…)

By Jews for Obama volunteer Jonathan Kamens

One of the criticisms frequently leveled at Senator Barack Obama is that he is too inexperienced to be president. I have five different answers to this. First I will summarize them, and then I will write about each in more detail:

1. Experience is not a good predictor of good and bad presidents.
2. Experience is not a significant differentiator between Obama and McCain.
3. Isn’t experience what got us into this mess?
4. There are far more important differentiators in this particular election.
5. Obama has quite a bit more experience than some give him credit for.
6. Obama has proven that he has the skill he absolutely needs to be a great President.

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During Barack Obama’s recent trip to Israel, he visited the Western Wall and followed the tradition of placing in the Wall a note on which he had written a prayer.

Immediately after he left the Western Wall plaza, several Jewish men descended upon the section of the wall where he had inserted his note and attempted to find it.   One of them, a young yeshiva student, found the note and removed it from the Wall.

The student offered the note to two Israeli newspapers, Yediot Achronot and Maariv, for publication.  Yediot declined to publish it,citing privacy concerns (good for them!), but Maariv printed the note, sparking a huge outcry, including condemnation from the Rabbi of the Wall and a call for a boycott and a criminal investigation.

Several media outlets subsequently quoted an unidentified Maariv spokesman claiming that Obama’s campaign had itself leaked a copy of his note to the media and authorized its publication even before he left the his hotel to visit the Wall.  This unidentified spokesman also allegedly claimed that Maariv was “proud of its journalistic accomplishment.”  But the pièce de résistance was when this spokesman allegedly made the completely nonsensical claim that because Obama is not Jewish, he was not entitled to privacy.

The allegation that Obama leaked the note himself sparked a whirlwind of accusations in the blogosphere that he had cynically orchestrated the whole thing.

In fact, the claim that the Obama campaign leaked the note, along with all of the other statements attributed to the unidentified Maariv spokesman, were completely fabricated, probably by someone at the newspaper to deflect attention from their reprehensible act of publishing the note.  Obama did not leak the note to the press and did not approve its publication.  See this article in The New Republic for a well-sourced confirmation of this fact.

Anyone who continues to claim that Obama orchestrated the leak of his note is knowingly perpetuating a blatant lie, yet another of the many lies which have been invented about Obama by his opponents during the campaign.

There is an important question to be asked here: if Obama’s as bad as all that, then why can’t his opponents make their case with the truth rather than a constant stream of lies?

Many Jewish Americans only watched one small “Oops!” bit from Barack Obama’s impressive speech at the AIPAC conference. We already posted the entire speech, with video or audio along with a careful transcript, but it was quite a committment to watch it!

So here is a 15 minute “Readers Digest” version of Barack Obama’s speech at AIPAC. Please enjoy and click the Blue Email Button to send this to any “Jews Against Obama” you know!

Zionism and the Jewish Narrative
http://www.youtube.com/v/fN2Xr_djxKc

The Holocaust and formation of Israel
http://www.youtube.com/v/Tcc7Pz3kHbk

War and Peace
http://www.youtube.com/v/VznIdl0Zhn8

Countering the Iran threat
http://www.youtube.com/v/gquz_dPgc6U

Our focus on Tikkun Olam
http://www.youtube.com/v/himmqyhuJXA

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