JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Rep. Israel: Time to reassess relationship with Turkey

By Eric Fingerhut · November 17, 2009

Just back from Israel, Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) says he’ll be asking the secretary of state about Turkey.

3 Comments | Share This | Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, Steve Israel, Turkey

The view from the Middle East

By Uriel Heilman · November 4, 2008

How is the U.S. election being seen in the Middle East?

0 Comments | Share This | Arab world, Barack Obama, Iran, Israel

Khalidi and the PLO

By Ron Kampeas · October 30, 2008

Starting in 1988, intermittently at first and then routinely from the launch of the Oslo talks in 1993, U.S. presidents have waived bans on contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

President Bush continued to do so even as he isolated its leader Yasser Arafat; he expressly sought to marginalize Arafat so he could cultivate moderates in the organization and the movement.

This extends to the group’s mission in Washington D.C. The idea is that U.S. officials need to communicate with the group in order to sustain credible U.S. involvement in the region.

Now, however, in the dying, damning days of an election campaign, we’ve somehow been DeLoreaned back to the 1980s and contact with the group has become radioactive, even though the Israeli government, with full Bush administration blessing, is scrambling to come to a peace agreement with Mahmoud Abbas, who is still the PLO’s leader.

And so, Rashid Khalidi’s status as a former PLO spokesman has been repeatedly used against his friend Barack Obama. (I know there’s more to it than this: The McCain campaign wants the Los Angeles Times to release the tape of the 2003 Khalidi dinner to see whether the honoree said anything incendiary about Israel. A quick pan back to Barack and Michelle, nodding vigorously and fist-jabbing, would be icing on that cake.)

The problem with the “spokesman” claim is that you can actually prove it’s not true. In saner times, “prove it’s not true” would be a phrase frowned on in an innocent until proven guilty culture. Khalidi’s denial would be enough in the face of a lack of evidence as to same. Those promoting the claim cite a single 1982 article by Tom Friedman; Khalidi says Friedman got it wrong, and that the term “PLO spokesman” was used promiscuously in 1982 Beirut.

But like I said, things ain’t so sane.

So here’s the thing: What everyone acknowledges is that Khalidi was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid talks. That delegation - to a person - could not have had any formal affiliation with the PLO. Israel regarded the group as terrorist and its laws banned contact with its members; then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made NOT being affiliated with the PLO it a condition of Israel’s agreement to participate. The names of the Palestinian team would have been vetted by Israeli intelligence.

This was something of a nudge and a wink, of course: Faisal Husseini, who headed the team, was in constant contact with PLO headquarters in Tunis.

Still, it should put to rest the notion that Khalidi was ever a “spokesman” for the group.

“Seventeen years ago,” once upon a time, didn’t mean ancient history; one would expect older members of the McCain team to remember what was, at the time, a critical step in getting the sides to Madrid. The younger folks I can forgive and educate (Michael Goldfarb, consider yourself educated.)

2 Comments | Share This | Barack Obama, John McCain

The Khalidi Chronicles—the McCain connection (UPDATE #2)

By Eric Fingerhut · October 29, 2008

Republican Jews, and other McCain supporters, have been paying a lot of attention to Barack Obama’s relationship with Rashid Khalidi. But John McCain has his own affiliation with the Palestinian-American academic and activist.

McCain has been chairman of the International Republican Institute since 1993, an organization which “advances freedom and democracy worldwide by developing political parties, civic institutions, open elections, good governance and the rule of law.” And in 1993, the Center for Palestine Research and Studies – an organization which Khalidi co-founded and was a member of its board of directors from 1993-1998, started conducting opinion polls in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with the help of funding from IRI.

In fact, in 1998, the IRI’s second largest grant of $448,873 went to CPRS for survey work in the West Bank, according to IRI’s Form 990. That seems remarkably similar to a Republican Jewish Coalition criticism of Obama: The Democratic presidential nominee served on the board of the Woods Fund, which provided a $40,000 grant in 2001 and a $35,000 grant the following year to the Arab American Action Network, a group co-founded by Khalidi. The organization – whose president at the time was Khalidi’s wife, Mona – “works to improve the social, economic and political conditions of Arab immigrants and Arab Americans” in the Chicago area.

What’s the difference? RJC executive director Matt Brooks argued there were a couple of them. Brooks said there was nothing wrong with serving on a board that gave a Khalidi-affiliated organization funds – the issue, he said, was the type of organization being funded. He pointed to a report that the AAAN sponsored an art exhibit at DePaul University entitled “The Subject of Palestine,” which featured works related to what Palestinians call the “Nakba” or “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding in 1948. That exhibit took place in 2005, three years after Obama left the Woods Fund board.

Brooks further emphasized that he was more concerned about the personal relationship between Obama and Khalidi, and whether Obama agreed with Khalidi’s opinions about the Middle East.

Khalidi is considered a moderate by Palestinians and many in the pro-Israel community. The L.A. Times article notes that he has called killing civilians a “war crime,” although he’s also long been critical of Israel and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Obama and Khalidi became friendly as professors at the University of Chicago in the 1990s and neighbors in Hyde Park, and the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama’s unsuccessful congressional bid. Obama also attended a farewell dinner for Khalidi in Chicago in 2003, prior to his move to Columbia University, in which he said that his conversations with the Khalidis were “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases,” according to an April Los Angeles Times article, which obtained a video of the dinner. The paper reported back in April that the dinner also included the recital of a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and criticizing U.S. suppport of the Jewish state.

This week, there has been renewed interest in that videotape from certain corners of the media and blogosphere – culminating in Tuesday’s demand by McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb that the L.A. Times publicly release the tape. He also charged the publication with “intentionally suppressing information.” The Times responded that it obtained the tape from a source on the condition that it not be publicly shown, and the paper “keeps its promises to sources.”

UPDATE: On Wednesday, Sarah Palin jumped into the fray over Khalidi. “It seems that there is yet another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama going back several years,” said the Republican vice presidential nominee on Wednesday at an event in Bowling Green, Ohio.

“This is important because his associate, Rashid Khalidi … in addition to being a political ally of Barack Obama, he’s a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization,” she said.

McCain also brought up the connection in a Miami radio interview.

Khalidi has denied being a spokesperson for the PLO. He did work for the Palestinian press agency Wafa in the 1980s and served as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid peace talks in 1991.

Obama has specifically addressed his relationship with Khalidi during the campaign. At an appearance at a Florida synagogue back in May, he said in response to a question: “I do know him and I have had conversations. He is not one of my advisors; he’s not one of my foreign policy people. His kids went to the Lab school where my kids go as well. He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel’s policy.”

He continued, “To pluck out one person who I know and who I’ve had a conversation with who has very different views than 900 of my friends and then to suggest that somehow that shows that maybe I’m not sufficiently pro-Israel, I think, is a very problematic stand to take…So we gotta be careful about guilt by association.”

UPDATE #2: Jake Tapper of ABC News has a statement from IRI confirming that it did provide money to CPRS, while saying it does not recall “any contact with Khalidi.

10 Comments | Share This | Barack Obama, Democratic convention, Israel, Presidential Race, RJC, Uncategorized

Continuing fallout from Pa. GOP letter

By Lisa Hostein · October 29, 2008

The fallout continues over the Pa. GOP letter that suggested that a vote for Barack Obama could lead to another Holocaust. After JTA’s initial reports on the letter and the public apology issued by one of the Jewish signatories, former state supreme court justice Sandra Schultz Newman, the mainstream media has latched on to the issue, including Slate, the Philadelphia Inquirer and local television and radio.

Less public are the reverberations hitting the local Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, whose campaign chairman, I. Michael Coslov, was one of the three Jewish signatories.  For legal reasons, because of its non-profit status as a 501c3 as well as shalom bayit, to keep peace in the community, the federation has always taken pains to avoid endorsing political candidates.
The current federation president, Leonard Barrack, told JTA earlier this week that the federation by-laws make clear that only the CEO and president are prohibited from endorsing political candidates. Coslov is widely assumed to become the next federation president, though federation officials caution that the nominating process has not even begun.

But some in the community, including federation trustees, are not happy.
One of those trustees, Lynn Zeitlin, a prominent Philadelphia attorney, wrote to the federation:

I want to know when the Jewish Federation will denounce and demand a retraction of the email that was signed by the campaign chair of Federation, albeit as a private citizen, which email was condemned by the ADL and many others. I understand that Justice Newman has issued an apology. I would like to know if Federation is demanding that its campaign chair also issue an apology or resign his position.

The federations’s chief marketing officer, Alex Stroker, wrote back that the federation was working on “next steps to remedy any and all negative perceptions this may have caused,” Zeitlin said.

She has also written to Coslov directly, seeking an apology.

Stroker told JTA that the federation has received only a few calls and e-mails, but he acknowledged that “people are not happy” and that there’s a lot of discussion going on about the situation. He did not know what the next steps would be.
Coslov himself has not issued an apology but has distanced himself from the letter, saying he never read the full text and that he’s not “that extreme.”
Both Barrack and Stroker emphasized that Coslov signed the letter as a private citizen. “You can’t tell private citizens what to do,” Stroker said.

The whole flap speaks to the overall tenor of the campaign this year and how vigorously Jews in Pennsylvania are being courted.

One involved member of the local Jewish community, Robert Fox, called for a halt to all the infighting, with a Dayeinu:

Dayeinu.  Regardless of whether you are solid for Barack, McCain and able, Biden your time, or pining for Palin.  Dayeinu.  The rhetoric within the Jewish community is too hot, too shrill and quite frankly unbecoming of us all.  As Jews, we ALL value that America was founded on the bedrock principle of religious pluralism, a principle that protects our rights as a religious minority to worship freely.

We ALL value tikun olam, the need and obligation to help others less fortunate.  And, we ALL value the unique democracy America offers.  It is our obligation as a Jewish community to use these democratic values wisely, to exercise our free speech carefully without rancor, accusation and innuendos.

We as a Jewish community may sing in different ways, but we must begin again ALL singing from the same song book.  Find the ties that bind rather than divide us.  The harmony will be beautiful.

I bet he and many others can’t wait until next Tuesday.

3 Comments | Share This | Barack Obama, John McCain, Pennsylvania, Presidential Race

Political tidbits: Joe the Plumber takes on the Middle East and Shepard Smith is appalled

By Eric Fingerhut · October 29, 2008

• A Jewish senior citizen told “Joe the Plumber” at a campaign appearance Tuesday that the election of Obama would bring “death to Israel” – and Joe agreed. Later, asked by Fox News’ Shepard Smith whether he thinks John McCain agrees with him, Joe said he had no idea and it was his “personal opinion” that he’d come up with by “looking into different facts” – and that people shouldn’t listen to his opinion anyway. Smith is so appalled after the interview that he mutters “it just gets frightening sometimes” and states that Obama “has said and demonstrated repeatedly that Israel will always be a friend of the United States.” The Huffington Post has the video. The McCain campaign doesn’t seem nearly as disgusted, saying Joe is offering “penetrating and clear analysis.”
  
• David Gelernter writes in the Weekly Standard that the best word to describe John McCain is a Hebrew one – tsaddik, “a man of such nobility and moral substance that he approaches holiness.”
  
• The Huffington Post has the details on a Florida GOP mailer that calls Obama “no friend of Israel.”
• Photos of Obama with leaders of all three of Israel’s major political parties are featured on a mailer the Obama-Biden campaign is sending out in Florida, reports Lynn Sweet in the Chicago Sun-Times.
  
• Under the headline “How the GOP Scares Jews,” Slate examines the e-mail the Pennsylvania GOP sent out to Jewish voters suggesting that an Obama win could bring a second Holocaust.
  
• Michael Freund of the Jerusalem Post is disturbed that Israel’s foes are all rooting for Obama.
• Raphael Sonenshein speculates why recent polls are showing Jewish voters moving to Obama – and says Sarah Palin’s failure to name a single newspaper she reads couldn’t have helped the Republican ticket, in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.
  
• A liberal pro-choice Jewish woman for McCain explains her reasons, at the American Thinker.
• “From Iran Agression to U.S. Recession: The Challenges Ahead”: Mona Charen, David Horowitz, Cliff May, Daniel Pipes and Michael Medved discuss the campaign’s issues, from a conservative perspective, in a forum sponsored by the Jewish Policy Center.
• Does the voiceover on this McCain ad about Obama and Iran sound “suspiciously Jewish,” Jeffrey Goldberg wonders at The Atlantic.
• Sen. John Cornyn’s campaign manager calls Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) “a nut.” His Democratic opponent Dennis Shulman’s daughter, a Capitol Hill aide, gets it on tape, according to The Hill (Fourth item down).
  
• John and Cindy McCain photographed with a McCippah.

5 Comments | Share This | ads, Barack Obama, Congressional races, Florida, Israel, John McCain, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Presidential Race, Sarah Palin, Tidbits

Checking the footnotes

By Eric Fingerhut · October 28, 2008

It’s the last week of a very long campaign, so nothing can go unanswered – even an ad’s footnotes.

The Republican Jewish Coalition on Tuesday released the last in its controversial series of advertisements attacking Barack Obama for his foreign policy views and advisers, which will appearing in Jewish newspapers later this week. The ad was essentially a round-up of the “greatest hits” from the previous eight ads, asking “Concerned about Barack Obama? You should be,” calling the Democratic presidential nominee “dangerously naive,” and charging that “history has shown that a naive and weak foreign policy has resulted in tragic outcomes for the Jewish people.”

But what caught the National Jewish Democratic Council’s eye was the first footnote in the ad (which has since been corrected). In backing up the assertion that Obama opposed legislation labeling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organziation, it cited an article from the Annenberg Institute’s FactCheck.org entitled “McCain misrepresents Obama’s stand on naming Revolutionary Guard as terrorists.”

The RJC claim in the ad is accurate – Obama did vote against the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which would have designated the Iran Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group. The Factcheck.org article, though, points out that Obama has said he does favor designating the IRGC as a terrorist group – and supported another piece of legislation that would have done so – but felt the Kyl-Lieberman bill was “saber-rattling” against Iran.

“Oops," said Brooks when the mistake was pointed out to him Tuesday afternoon. He said it was a simple “clerical error” that “doesn’t change the underlying facts” on the issue. The RJC does “comprehensive research” on both sides of the positions it takes, he said, and the citations got switched. Less than two hours after he spoke to JTA about it, the ad posted on the RJC’s Website had already been corrected.

Meanwhile, the NJDC, which called the RJC “remarkably sloppy,” has directly responded to the RJC with its final ad of the election cycle. Entitled, “The Facts about the Republican Jewish Coalition’s dishonest campaign,” the advertisement responds directly with “the truth” to RJC ads which it says falsely attacked Obama’s positions on the IRGC and Jerusalem – and concludes with the tagline “The RJC Should Be Ashamed.”

1 Comment | Share This | ads, Barack Obama, John McCain, NJDC, Presidential Race, RJC

Political tidbits: Burns likes Obama’s stance on Iran, Fleischer calls Obama new Carter (UPDATED)

By Eric Fingerhut · October 28, 2008

• Former Bush administration official Nicholas Burns says Barack Obama is right: The United States should talk to adversaries like Iran, in Newsweek.
  
• Former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer calls Barack Obama “the Jimmy Carter of the 21st century” and brings up Jeremiah Wright when talking to Jewish voters in Las Vegas, reports the Wall Street Journal.
• In Israel, boxing promoter and Israel supporter Don King endorses Obama because he’ll speak softly but carry a big stick, according to the Jerusalem Post.
  
• The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg rips the “Jewish extremists” behind the distribution of the film “Obsession” in swing states.
• Stop using Hitler “as a political tool,” writes Brad Hirschfield on Beliefnet, in a response to that Pennsylvania e-mail.
  
• George Costanza – actually, Jason Alexander – campaigns for Obama in South Florida, writes the Huffington Post.
• Jewish Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle (R) is on the campaign trail too, for McCain, reports the Honolulu Advertiser.
• The Christian Science Monitor reports that Israelis are “uneasy” at the prospect of an Obama election.
• Young non-Orthodox Jews don’t give Israel high priority when voting for president, according to a new study reported in the Jerusalem Post.
  
• Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-Alaska) conviction yesterday means Ethan Berkowitz’s chances in his race against longtime incumbent Republican Don Young, just got better. Here’s the New York Times noting Republicans bailing out on Young, who is implicated in the same scandal as Stevens.
• The New Republic wonders about the National Republican Sentorial Committee’s “Sex-and-Al Franken Obsession.” And even Norm Coleman says he was “astonished” by the comic-book style mailer and that any more copies should be collected and destroyed.



0 Comments | Share This | ads, Al Franken, Alaska, Barack Obama, Congressional races, Florida, Israel, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, Linda Lingle, Minnesota, Nevada, Norm Coleman, Presidential Race, Sarah Palin, Tidbits

Secretary of State Kerry?

By Eric Fingerhut · October 27, 2008

Who might be Secretary of State in a potential Barack Obama administration? Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, making his debut as a surrogate for Obama last Thursday night in Richmond, said he’d bet on Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). In response to a question from the audience, Indyk admitted he wasn’t in Obama’s “inner circle” and thus didn’t have any inside information – but “if you really pushed me,” he said the Washington rumor mill led him to think it would be the 2004 Democratic nominee. Indyk’s entire speech, which concludes with a song from Mandy Patinkin, can be heard here. The secretary of state discussion happens about one hour and 14 minutes into the tape.

3 Comments | Share This | Barack Obama, Presidential Race, Virginia

John and Sarah Shmoe?

By Eric Fingerhut · October 27, 2008

“‘O’ & Joe or The Shmoes” – that’s the slogan on a new campaign button from the National Jewish Democratic Council.

For an $18 donation, you’ll get a button with caricatures of the four candidates and the slogan – with John McCain and Sarah Palin pegged as “The Shmoes.”

NJDC executive director Ira Forman said he was just injecting some fun into the campaign, but the Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matt Brooks isn’t amused by the group’s use of the Yiddish term, which means a stupid or obnoxious person.

“It’s disrespectful, in bad taste and not appropriate,” said Brooks.

The RJC has been using some rough language of its own in the last few weeks – although none of it has been in Yiddish. The group has called Barack Obama “reckless,” “dangerous,” “weak,” and “naive,” in newspaper advertisements.

2 Comments | Share This | Barack Obama, Joe Biden, NJDC, Presidential Race, RJC, Sarah Palin