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.

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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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You may have had a chance to see a video in which Sean Hannity of Fox News tries to paint Senator Barack Obama as anti-Israel on the grounds that he knows Prof. Rashid Khalidi, currently the Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.

Here are a few things that Hannity hides from us in this video: (more…)

There are so many things wrong with the attacks leveled against Senator Barack Obama because of his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity Universal Church of Christ that it is hard to know where to begin a discussion of them.

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Perhaps you’ve seen or heard about the advertisement by the Republican Jewish Coalition recently published in three major South Florida newspapers in advance of an appearance by Barack Obama at a synagogue there. The RJC ad attempts to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) by “asking” three questions designed, once again, to scurrilously imply that Senator Barack Obama is anti-Israel or anti-Semitic.

The National Jewish Democratic Council released the following statement in response to the RJC ad:

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The most recent scurrilous attack against Barack Obama’s Israel credentials to come out of the right-wing smear machine is the accusation that one of Obama’s “key advisers,” Joe Cirincione, is anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. This follows the pattern of previous attacks in that Cirincione is not, in fact, one of Obama’s key advisers, and is actually a supporter of Israel.

Spencer Ackerman has done an excellent job of rebutting this attack. Please see his blog for the details. And remember: don’t believe anything you read on the Internet, about Barack Obama or anything else, without doing your own research and drawing your own conclusions!