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.
