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A quick leftover from Denver: The Faith Caucus

By Eric Fingerhut · August 31, 2008

There was a lot of hype the week before the Democratic National Convention about its Faith Caucus – and debate over whether the intersection of religion and politics would be harmful for both (here and here). But a visit to Tuesday's two "Faith in Action" panel discussions found a program that had similarities with the kinds of discussions that happen at conferences and think tanks throughout Washington every week. In fact, one could argue that the Faith Caucus was more of a marketing tool – and considering the publicity, an effective one – to alert voters that the Democrats care about religious voters just as much as the Republicans do.

For example, the second of two panels, "Faith in 2009," featured Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism director Rabbi David Saperstein and John DiIulio, who was the first head of President George W. Bush's faith-based initiative, discussing the various issues and problems, constitutional and otherwise, with providing government money to religiously-infused social service providers – and what they thought of Obama's speech earlier this year on the matter. In the first hour, various religious leaders spoke of how their religious teachings inspire them to work on certain issues. For instance, Rabbi Jack Moline of Alexandria, Va., emphasized the importance of education, quoting the Talmud's teaching that study is more important than action because "study leads to action." Other speakers talked about poverty and immigration, and former U.S. Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), an opponent of abortion, urged everyone to find "common ground" on reducing the number of abortions. (Roemer's colleague at the Chicago Theological Seminary, on the other hand, was a little off-message – using her speech more as a way to criticize Republican policies toward women than examine a particular policy issue.)

Both rabbinical participants agreed that the fact that the faith caucus happened was probably more important that anything that was said at the gathering.

"The purpose was not to generate controversy," said Moline, but to demonstrate what people of faith "have in common" and demonstrate the "breadth of faith value concerns."

Saperstein said the Democrats' goal was to demonstrate their party can provide a place "just as open and friendly to those who want to bring their [religious] views" as any other party.

One rabbi who wasn't a fan of the gathering was Rabbi Michael Lerner of the Tikkun Community. He said that instead of holding what he called a "cheerleading" session for Obama, participants should have held a discussion that allowed for a "prophetic critique" of Democratic policies – such as the value of the plan to move the "war from Iraq to Afghanistan, instead of ending the war."

One addendum to put the entire Faith Caucus in context is necessary. The discussions were not a part of the official convention program that took place at the Pepsi Center with all delegates in attendance. It was one of the dozens of meetings that took place during the day at the Colorado Convention Center sponsored by party organizations and various interest groups. A few hundred people were present, but most delegates and other convention participants were not in attendance and many may not have known it was even occurring.

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Palin and the Jews (cont.)

By Ron Kampeas · August 31, 2008

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's record on foreign policy and on Jews is about as empty as, well, Alaska, but that's not stopping people from reading what they can into the broad white spaces.

In this post, I go into efforts by some Democrats to make a major-breaking-scandal out of what appear to two extremely fleeting encounters between the Republican vice-presidential pick and Holocaust-diminisher John McCain Pat Buchanan.

Less insidious, but about as substantive is the attempt by her Alaskan supporters to depict her as a friend of Israel because in June she signed a resolution commemorating 60 years of relations between her state and Israel. (Alaska Airlines played a major role in flying Yemeni Jews to Israel in 1948.)

Signed. Not initiated. In a speech at the signing, Yosef Greenberg, the Chabad rabbi in Anchorage who started the ball rolling on the resolution, credits a host of Alaska civic leaders for helping to shape the resolution, preeminent among them Speaker of the Alaskan House John Harris. Palin apparently did little more than agree to sign a bill that's about as pareve as it gets.

Not that it means a lot – there's not a lot one should expect from the governor of a state of 6,000 Jews when it comes to Jews and Israel. But still.

Greenberg tells us that Palin had hoped to visit Israel with members of the Alaskan Jewish community before her Veep nomination. He also said she was an enthusiastic participant in the requisite Jewish public events.

Here are some other tidbits from here and there, telling us – well, not a whole lot:

* Adam Brickley, the Colorado University at Colorado Springs student who started the Draft Sarah Palin movement, lists "Zionism" among his interests. We're trying to track him down, but Colorado Springs is a redoubt for Christian evangelicals where no one would raise an eyebrow at a Christian describing himself as a Zionist, so don't jump to conclusions that he's Jewish.

* This Boston Globe has the most concise-yet-comprehensive roundup of her social views: abortion (banned except for cases in which the mother's life is at risk), stem cell research (opposed), evolution (teach it together with creationism). Note in the final item the insinuation of her predecessor as Wasilla mayor, John Stein – he apparently thinks he was ousted in part because he was mistaken for a Jew (although there's no indication that Palin or campaign were behind the suspicions):

After she was first elected mayor, her predecessor, John Stein, objected that a Valley cable TV program had hailed her as Wasilla's first "Christian mayor." In a column for the local newspaper, he named eight previous mayors and added that he, too, was a Christian, despite a name that led some voters to suspect "I must be a non-Christian, have non-Christian blood or at least have sympathized with a non-Christian sometime in my career."

* Depending how you look at it, there's not a lot that unites the Jewish community when it comes to energy and the environment (not so much because of disagreement, more because of the smorgasbord of alternatives to oil invites a variety of alternatives to favor). However, pretty much all but Republican Jews oppose drilling in Alaska; Palin favors it.

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Sarah Palin, Mazen Asbahi and the stifling of democracy

By Ron Kampeas · August 31, 2008

The attempt by some Democrats to paint Sarah Palin as a supporter of Pat Buchanan is probably the most baseless political attack in, well…. Weeks.

At least since the Obama campaign's Arab-American outreach director quit because, well, he seems to have done exactly the right thing when he encountered a radical Islamist.

More on that in a minute.

Palin, the vice-presidential pick of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and now the governor of Alaska, sported a Pat Buchanan button in July 1999 when Buchanan visited Wasilla, the town she then led as mayor. (Buchanan, of course, has long been reviled for intimating that Jews control foreign policy, that American efforts to stop Hitler made little sense, etc. Not beloved by the Jews.)

That led the local AP reporter to flag her as a supporter of Buchanan's presidential bid. That report was picked up in the last few days by the liberal blogosphere and she has now been transformed into a "strong" Buchanan supporter.

Except that, in real time, she corrected the impression in a letter to a local newspaper: "When presidential candidates visit our community, I am always happy to meet them. I'll even put on their button when handed one as a polite gesture of respect," she wrote in a letter to the Anchorage Daily News in 1999.

I don't entirely blame the blogger who originated the story – AP stories are likelier to come up much higher in Nexis searches then letters to the ADN editor. But, geez, couldn't U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) have waited a little before calling McCain's selection a "direct affront to the Jewish community"? It turns out she was an official – not just a supporter – of the Republican primaries campaign of Steve Forbes that year. (Buchanan had bolted the GOP and was running as a candidate of the Reform Party.)

That should have killed the story. But Buchanan then said he remembered her attending a fund-raiser for his 1996 GOP candidacy bid. (His sister Bay Buchanan now tells Politico it might have been for Jerry Ward, a local ally of Buchanan.) It seems credible – Buchanan, now an MSNBC analyst, corrected host Christ Matthews, who thought it had been 1992.

But so what? Let's take what we know about Palin-Buchanan: She might have attended a fund-raiser in 1996. She didn't give any money to Buchanan's campaign, however, nor to Jerry Ward, and was not an official of the campaign. (Ben Smith of Politico has uncovered a list of officials of the Alaskan Buchanan campaign that year; Open Secrets tracks only two $300 donations in her name: one to the state Republican Party, and the other to a Mike Miller, a GOP state senator.)

So, in 1996, perhaps Palin and her husband were intrigued by Buchanan, whose hallmark then was how he melded social conservatism with protectionism. Todd and Sarah Palin are social conservatives who strongly believe in unions: natural targets for Buchanan.

They meet Buchanan, and evidently decide he's not their man: no donation, no role in the campaign.

In a sane political world, this would define Good Judgment. Maybe Buchanan's isolationist foreign policy turned them off. Maybe it was even something Buchanan said about Jews that kept their checkbook shut.

Instead, it's used to indict her judgment. Yes, Jews have long known what Buchanan is; can we reasonably expect a small-town Alaska mayor to share our depth of knowledge to the extent that she wouldn't even bother to check him out? By setting such impossible standards, we're killing political curiosity, we're creating a political environment so safe it's doomed to stagnate. (Let me add here that the National Jewish Democratic Council has shown the good taste to ignore the Buchanan affiliation and has instead focused - legitimately - on her socially conservative policies.)

And by "we" I don't just mean Jews, I mean the entire political culture. Take the case of Mazen Asbahi.

Earlier this month, the Chicago lawyer quit as the Arab and Muslim American outreach director for the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). His sins: He served with Jamal Said, a radical Imam who has praised Hamas, in 2000 for a few weeks on the board of a foundation. Asbahi apparently quit when he learned that Said was on the board.

Again, in a sane world, this would be considered Good Judgment. Instead, once the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report revealed the tidbit and it got picked up by the Wall Street Journal, Asbahi quit, saying he did not want to harm the campaign.

Asbahi's other sin, cited by the Global Muslim thingy, was that he is active with the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA may or may not have roots decades ago in the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. It was an unindicted coconspirator in a case against alleged fund-raisers for Hamas – the case failed, and the feds often use "unindicted coconspirator" as a pretext to facilitate legal searches (and, in any case, "unindicted" means just that.)

These days, ISNA explicitly repudiates Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists. These days, it includes meetings with Holocaust survivors in its exchange program for teenagers from Arab countries, precisely because the students have been exposed to a distorted understanding of the Shoah. (Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, the director of the Orthodox Union, was visibly moved last week at the Democratic Party convention when ISNA president Ingrid Mattson described those meetings.)

So Asbahi is a man who will not associate with radicals, who is active in a Muslim group that is doing exactly what Jewish groups say they expect of Muslim groups – but the Obama campaign accepts his resignation and the Republican Jewish Coalition perpetuated the Asbahi distortions in its weekly e-mail.

Shame on the Democrats, shame on the RJC. They are helping to make it dangerous to Vote While Muslim. I don't need to explain why this is Bad for the Jews (or any minority.)

These calumnies may create convenient, even sticky, associations in the battle for the Jewish vote: McCain with Buchanan, Obama with radical Muslims.

But they cost us deliberation, nuance and curiosity – underpinnings of a successful democracy.

UPDATE: Suzanne Kurtz of the RJC called to note that the RJC simply forwarded a Wall Street Journal article on Asbahi, whereas Wexler and the DNC initiated the Buchanan-Palin trope. Noted: starting a smear is not as bad as perpetuating one (Kurtz does not acknowledge that the Asbahi slurs were a smear). But it still smells.

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NJDC: ‘Particularly strange’ pick

By Ami Eden · August 31, 2008

Ira Forman, executive direction of the National Jewish Democratic Council, argues that "for a party which claims it is trying to reach out to the Jewish community McCain's pick is particularly strange."

Here's the full statement:

Today, Senator John McCain made his first critical presidential decision with his selection of his Vice Presidential running mate. McCain's judgment appears lacking.

In Governor Sarah Palin McCain chooses a running mate with zero foreign policy experience and a brewing scandal which is being investigated by the Alaska state legislature. The contrast with Senator Joe Biden could not be starker and more unfavorable for the soon to be Republican nominee.

For a party which claims it is trying to reach out to the Jewish community McCain's pick is particularly strange. Prior to today's selection Palin apparently has never spoken publicly about Israel. Moreover, on a broad range of issues— most strikingly on the issue of women's reproductive freedom— she is totally out of step with Jewish public opinion. The gulf between Palin's public policy positions and the American Jewish community is best illustrated by the fact that the Christian Coalition of America was one of the strongest advocates of her selection.

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