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Obama concerned about Austrian elections

By Eric Fingerhut · October 6, 2008

Barack Obama released a statement Monday expressing concern about the success of two far-right parties in Austrian elections on Sunday. The Freedom Party and Jorg Haider's Alliance for the Future of Austria garnered 29 percent of the vote combined, while the two moderate parties each received less than 30 percent of the vote for the first time. Here's Obama's statement:

I am very concerned about last Sunday's election results in Austria, in which two openly xenophobic far-right parties won nearly thirty percent of the vote. Extremism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism offend our most deeply held transatlantic values and have no place in the 21st century.

As Austria's voters and leaders review the election results and consider the way forward, I urge people of good will and courage in Austria to stand firmly for the principles of pluralism and tolerance that have, for the past 60 years, served Austria and Western Europe so well. Failure to do so would have serious consequences in Europe and beyond.

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Samantha Power’s unsettling ghost

By Ron Kampeas · October 6, 2008

Forget about William Ayers, the onetime native born terrorist that Barack Obama apparently really does not have a lot to do with. Samantha Power is about to make a reappearance.

A younger version of Power, that is. The video below is doing the rounds of conservative blogs. It's billed as if she's still advising the campaign – she was sacked months ago for calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) a "monster" during the primaries. And it's also billed as current, even though it was recorded by a UC-Berkeley project on April 29 2002. And the YouTube poster repeats the "Obama is a Muslim" slur and otherwise misrepresents the U.S. senator from Illinois and Democratic presidential candidate.

None of that spares his campaign at least a few discomfiting questions. We already knew Power bought into the wildly overstated estimates of the death toll in Jenin after the Israeli raid there; her proposed solution here is stunning:

* cutting off military assistance to Israel and delivering the cash to a Palestinian state;

* sending in a massive interventionary force to protect Palestine.

Power has ties into the Jewish community for backing up, in her research, arguments that the United States did not do enough during the Holocaust; and when she quit, the campaign made it clear that she had not advised Obama on the Middle East, but on genocide.

But, according to this interview, her views on genocide are germane to her understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She distinguishes between "actual genocide" and "major human rights abuses" in her allegations against Israel and the Palestinian leadership (whom it must be said, she blames in part for the Palestinian plight), but clearly sees the two phenomena on the same spectrum.

Did this come up in talks on the Obama foreign policy team before Power was ousted? How did other advisers react? How did Obama react? Did it come up in her interview? How was she not vetted?

(In fairness, we should point out that Obama's senior Middle East adviser is Dennis Ross, who is skeptical about pushing to hard right now for Palestinian statehood and who is hawkish on Iran sanctions – positions not too indistinguishable from those of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.)

There's another striking aspect of the interview that the conservatives are not pointing out: Read this, posited on April 29 2002, and imagine it not as describing Israel and the Palestinians but as describing the case against Saddam Hussein. How is it distinguishable from the neoconservative tenets that drove – at the same time – the arguments for invading Iraq?

"You have to go in as if you're serious, you have to out something on the line, and unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful, I mean it's a terrible thing to do, it's fundamentally undemocratic. But sadly, We don't just have a democracy here, we have a liberal democracy, there are certain sets of principles that guide our policy or that are meant to anyway and there it's essential that some set of principles become the benchmark, rather than a deference to people who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people."

Here, by the way, is the link to the full interview.

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When Jews parody Dickens…

By Ron Kampeas · October 6, 2008

An American Carol, David Zucker's broad blast at the American left and the creative offspring of a Republican Jewish Coalition shidduch between Zucker and co-writer Myrna Sokoloff, opened this weekend - and it's tanking.

It's more or less tied with, of all things, Bill Maher's Religulous, but that's deceptive - Maher's film is a documentary (they traditionally underperform) and opened in a third of the theaters.

The almost universally thumbs down "Carol" got from reviewers probably didn't help. Best (reviewer) line so far: "I laughed harder at Munich." I guess it's not a great sign when the reviews raise more laughs than the movie.

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Pro-Obama video misleading, say two who appear in it

By Eric Fingerhut · October 6, 2008

Two top retired Israeli security officials say they had no idea that interviews they did this summer would be used for a pro-Barack Obama video.

Former Mossad director Ephraim Halevy and retired Gen. Uzi Dayan were among seven retired Israeli security officials who appear in an eight-minute video endorsing Barack Obama, which was released Monday by the Jewish Council for Education and Research. But they told Israeli newspapers that they were interviewed about what issues the next American president will have to deal with in the Middle East, and had no idea their comments would be used to back a candidate.

"It wasn't about the campaign, it was about the political and security issues of the Middle East that the next president should be involved in," Dayan told The Jerusalem Post "Nothing was said about Obama or McCain."

He added that "I don't want other people to interfere in my elections, and I must not interfere with the elections in the United States."

Halevy told the Post that he was complimentary to both candidates in the video, and said it would be inappropriate for an Israeli to advise an American for whom to vote.

JCER co-executive director Mik Moore said Monday that his organization is willing to work with the film's producers to address the concerns raised by Halevy and Dayan, but had not yet spoken to them.

"If there are folks that are unhappy, we will work with them to come to some conclusion," he said. But he added that "the Israeli producers have assured us that all participants were fully informed of the nature of the project. While JCER has endorsed Barack Obama for president, neither the film, nor any of our subsequent remarks imply that those interviewed are endorsing Obama's candidacy."

Moore argued that the video is devoted mostly to analysis of the security situation and the candidates' policies in dealing with it. He pointed out that just one of the seven interviewed actually states he would vote for Obama. That is retired Brig. Gen. Giora Inbar, who says, "I personally would vote for Obama to help the state of Israel."

Here's JCER's full statement on the video controversy:

JCER RESPONDS TO REPORTED CONTROVERSY OVER VIDEO

NEW YORK- Mik Moore, co-executive director of the Jewish Council on Education and Research (JCER), released the following statement today with regard to the film launched by the group this weekend, featuring seven members of Israel's security establishment [ www.jcer.info/film ]:

"In the film released this weekend by the Jewish Council on Education and Research, retired members of Israel's security establishment express support for Senator Barack Obama or his policies and provide relevant analysis.

The purpose of the film is to educate Jewish voters about support within Israel's security establishment for policies Obama has advanced regarding Israel. JCER is a non-profit organization created to develop and disseminate information to voters in the United States regarding issues of concern to the Jewish community.

The Israeli producers have assured us that all participants were fully informed of the nature of the project. While JCER has endorsed Barack Obama for President, neither the film, nor any of our subsequent remarks imply that those interviewed are endorsing Obama's candidacy. This film is not an advertisement and will not be used as an advertisement. We are willing to work with the film's producers to address any new concerns now being raised by any of the participants. "

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Political tidbits: Franken up by nine, Mason flip-flopped on McCain

By Eric Fingerhut · October 6, 2008

• Al Franken (D) leads Sen. Norm Coleman (R) by nine points in a new poll of voters in Minnesota, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The paper also has a report on the first debate of the campaign, held Sunday night.
• On "Meet the Press"... Democratic strategist Paul Begala warns that the GOP's guilt-by-association reasoning could be turned on its head to make John McCain look like someone who has associated with anti-Semites.
• Jackie Mason flip-flopped on McCain? The Miami New Times posts a video of the comedian calling John McCain a "disgusting lowlife" and a "fraud" during the Republican primaries, quite a contrast with his pro-McCain, anti-Sarah Silverman video released Friday.
• Andrew Silow-Carroll, in the New Jersey Jewish News, decodes the presidential candidates' High Holiday messages – and finds that they encapsulate their strategies for winning the Jewish vote.
• By the end of this campaign, every South Florida Jewish voter will have been interviewed at least once about the campaign. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel contributes with this article.
• And Salon does its part, but with a fresher spin – it finds a lot of Florida Jews who really don't like Sarah Palin.
• Palin said during the vice-presidential debate that she backed a Sudan divestment bill in Alaska, but the bill's Democratic sponsor says she was against it before she was for it, according to ABCNews.com.
• And Joe Biden's statement that the U.S. and France "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon" wasn't accurate either.
• The Levin brothers, Carl and Sander, stump for Obama at a Bucks County, Pa. synagogue, reports the Bucks County Courier Times.
• Menachem Rosensaft urges Jews to listen to Ed Koch and vote for Obama. Willy Stern, in the Weekly Standard, quotes a Palestinian pollster who says Palestinians aren't that optimistic about an Obama presidency.
• Fox host Sean Hannity uses a source with a history of anti-Semitism to attack Obama, according to Todd Gitlin at TPMCafe.
• The Jewish Council for Education and Research has released a video of seven former IDF generals and Mossad chiefs endorsing Barack Obama, but two of them say they had no idea their interviews were going to end up in a pro-Obama video, according to Haaretz.

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Israel on SNL

By Uriel Heilman · October 6, 2008

Here's what Tina Fey had to say about Israel in Saturday Night Live's spoof of the Biden-Palin debate:

"There's a special place for Israel in heaven."

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