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.

Cogs in the right-wing smear machine WorldNetDaily, The American Thinker and Naomi Ragen are busy spreading the most recent silly smear against Barack Obama, in particular, that he has accepted illegal donations from foreigners and in particular Palestinians (gasp!).  The perpetrators of this smear hope that Obama will become entangled in their Web of lies, but in fact, the merest puff of truth causes it to dissolve like gossamer.

Senator Obama’s detractors, among them the Republican Jewish Coalition, have accused retired four-star General Merrill “Tony” McPeak of being anti-Israel. McPeak may be tactless, but he’s also a war hero, and he doesn’t deserve this sort of brazen slander.

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…

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.

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

There is a particularly ugly email circulating called “A Pilot’s Perspective on Obama” where the anonymous author questions Barack’s ties to the white community and his ability to attend private schools. The smear also includes some innuendos implying that Barack is Muslim and questioning his ties to Rezko. The following is one response to this email.

From New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, injecting himself directly into the presidential campaign, forcefully denounced on Friday what he called a “whisper campaign” linking Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to Islam.

Speaking before a crucial constituency in the coming election, Jewish voters, in the pivotal state of Florida, Mr. Bloomberg said that rumors of Mr. Obama secretly being a Muslim represent “wedge politics at its worst, and we have to reject it - loudly, clearly and unequivocally.”

“Let’s call those rumors what they are: lies,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who has been mentioned as a potential running mate for both Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain, the likely Republican nominee.