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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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.

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