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?

From The Jerusalem Post:

In the past few weeks The Jerusalem Post has run two hysterically anti-Barack Obama op-eds - Morris J. Amitay’s “McCain for America - and Israel” and Jennifer Rubin’s “Why more Jews won’t be voting Democrat this year.” At first glance these two pieces appear to take two very different approaches to the task of tearing down Obama among Jewish readers, but a closer reading highlights their similar deceptive tactics.

What is most striking in these two op-eds, as well as many other opinion pieces of this genre, is their willingness to bemoan the “ignorance” of the vast majority of American Jews who continue to vote Democratic - even in 2008. This line of argument, which bewails voter ignorance, is very common in American history. Elites who find themselves in a minority often are dumbfounded at the stupidity of the electorate and revert to what is called “the masses are asses” explanation of their minority status.

Read the rest of the article at The Jerusalem Post…

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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