A CAMPAIGN by J Street, a dovish pro-Israel group, is aimed at getting Jewish newspapers to stop running what it says are scurrilous Republican Jewish Coalition attack ads on Barack Obama

Jewish press gets targeted over anti-Obama ads

J Street campaign upsets Republican Jewish Coalition

By RON KAMPEAS

article created on: 2008-10-15T00:00:00

WASHINGTON (JTA)—A campaign by a new dovish pro-Israel group to get Jewish newspapers not to run Republican Jewish Coalition attack ads has raised questions about what’s kosher and what isn’t in this fraught political season.

The new group, J Street, helped flood many Jewish newspapers with letters in recent days urging them not to run the RJC ads attacking the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). Letters were even sent to newspapers in which the ads did not appear.

“I was saddened to see that the Republican Jewish Coalition’s vile, fear-mongering advertisements have been printed in your publication,” read one typical letter. “Since when do Jews go along with smear campaigns? By all means tolerate genuine dissent but please, draw the lines at hateful, dishonest caricatures.”

In addition to initiating the letter-writing campaign, J Street organized a petition calling on papers not to publish the ads. The petition garnered 23,000 signatures, according to the group’s executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami.

“There is a deep well of anger in the broader Jewish community over the questionable tactics used by the RJC and the lies and distortions they and others have circulated during this campaign,” Ben-Ami said. “We do hope that our campaign will spark a discussion among Jewish media executives about the extent to which they wish to provide a platform for further dissemination of baseless allegations and unfounded personal attacks.”

Matt Brooks, the RJC executive director, derided what he calledJ Street’s “amateurish” attempt at intimidation and censorship.

“It’s wildly offensive that they would engage in intimidation on newspapers not to run ads,” he said. “It’s misguided and offends people’s sensitivities.” Brooks said he was ready to meet Ben-Ami to debate the ads’ content.

The overall thrust of the RJC’s ad campaign is that Obama remains an alarming mystery to American Jews; the slogan is: “Concerned about Barack Obama? You should be.”

A review of the RJC ads reveals some substantive attacks on Obama, and others that severely distort his record and his relationships.

Perhaps the RJC’s most substantive claim is that Obama has expressed a willingness to meet with Iran’s president without preconditions.

Obama’s surrogates, including his running mate and the National Jewish Democratic Coalition, have suggested that when the Democratic presidential nominee spoke of meeting with Iranian leaders, he meant the religious hierarchy that controls the country’s security apparatus—not Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and predicted that Israel would be wiped off the map. But the record suggests this is an attempt to backpedal from Obama’s stated position, rather than a mere clarification.

The RJC also gets it right when it notes that Obama has said that Iran and other current pariah states targeting the United States are “tiny” compared to the Soviet Union and don’t pose the same threat. A television ad for Sen. John McCain (R.-Ariz) simply quoted Obama as calling Iran “tiny,” denying viewers the ability to draw their own conclusions about what Obama had actually said.

One Iran-related distortion lingers, however: “Sen. Obama is opposed to critical legislation labeling Iran’s revolutionary guard a terrorist organization,” one ad says. The legislation in question—a non-binding amendment—was hardly critical, and Obama has supported such a label in separate legislation.

In addition to the issue of Iran, the RJC ads have attacked Obama’s supposed choice of religious and foreign-policy advisers.

One ad refers to Obama’s relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has in the past embraced radical views about Israel as a colonial state and suggested that the United States bears responsibility for fomenting the unrest that leads to terrorism. Obama has cut off Wright and insisted he was unaware of his pastor’s more radical views, although these seem to have been well-known in real time.

The ads call Wright an anti-Semite, without substantiating the claim; Wright is not known to have targeted Jews and had friendly relations with Chicago Jewish groups.

Another RJC ad accurately quotes Democrats praising McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. But Obama backers are quick to note that the Democrats in question are all supporting the Illinois senator’s presidential bid.

Other RJC ads, severely distort Obama’s positions and relationships.

Obama has never backed down from endorsing Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, as one ad says. Instead, he amended the pledge, made in May to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to note that—whatever his personal views—the city’s final status is a matter for negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

That’s also McCain’s view, and generally uncontroversial. Brooks says the difference is that McCain has never had to clarify his views on Jerusalem.

Arguably the most dubious ad is the one titled “Barack Obama’s advisors: pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, even hostile to America.”

Robert Malley, a Middle East scholar and former U.S. negotiator, is not anti-Israel, as the ad suggests; nor is David Bonior, a former Democratic congressman who is on the Obama team. Both men have been critical of Israeli settlement policies and of Israeli conduct during negotiations, but have upheld Israel’s right to security. At think-tank talks in Washington, Malley gets exercised about preserving the two-state solution, in part because he says he sees it as a guarantee to Israel’s survival.

Malley is not even advising Obama—the ad makes the claim based on a single erroneous media report which engendered many others. Bizarrely, when both sides—Malley and the Obama campaign—sent out releases in May denying once and for all that Malley ever advised the campaign, many of the resulting news reports suggested Malley was quitting a campaign he had never joined.

It’s true that Obama’s campaign once called Malley an “informal adviser”—that’s a euphemism for experts who send in position papers, unsolicited. And he is hardly a “Palestinian apologist,” as the ad asserts: Although Malley assigns blame to Israel and the Palestinians for the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks, he has not spared Palestinians criticism for their intransigence and corruption.

Brooks stood by the characterization. “If he is not anti-Israel, he is certainly pro-Arab.”

Perhaps the only substantive plaint in the advisers ad is about Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, who is indeed a senior adviser to the campaign. In a 2003 interview with The Oregonian, when asked to assign blame for the Middle East peace impasse, McPeak reportedly said: “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.”

When the quote came to light during the primaries, Obama denounced it, but kept McPeak, who in a long military career has forged close relationships with figures in Israel’s security establishment. The RJC ad calls McPeak “hostile to American Jews.” That is a possible interpretation his remarks in The Oregonian, but it is not the only possible interpretation and it does not describe his whole career.

Two of the RJC ads reference Obama’s comment in May 2007 that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” But the ads fail to make clear that Obama clearly implied at the time, and later made clear, that he blames Palestinian leaders—not Israel—for their people’s suffering.

J Street’s Ben-Ami says he worries that the RJC ad campaign will end up reinforcing the subterranean, Internet-driven effort to present Obama as a Muslim who is lying about his past.

“There are limits in particular in this environment, when we’ve had a season filled with anonymous smears racing across the Internet,” he told JTA. “To run paid advertising that taps into the exact same fears is irresponsible.”

First Amendment protections in political speech are broad and Brooks rejected assertions that his ads crossed any line; indeed they are in many ways milder than the McCain campaign’s recent attempts to link Obama to domestic terrorists.

The ads and the petition to pull them have generated much debate among editors of Jewish papers. The Washington Jewish Week has run the ads, and its publisher, Larry Fishbein, said the newspaper would continue to do so.

“We reserve the right to reject ads, and while they were pushing the envelope, we do not feel they crossed the line,” Fishbein said of the RJC ads.

He said that about 15 subscribers had complained about the ads, and that he had spoken with each of them. “I tell them it is not an editorial stance we’re making, it is a commercial stance. Please judge us on the entire body of our work,” Fishbein said. So far no one has canceled a subscription.

The ads were placed only in newspapers located in swing states—the Washington Jewish Week serves northern Virginia—as well as on JTA’s Web site. But the designers of the J Street Web template mistakenly allowed members to write to newspapers that had not carried the ads.

In a letter to Jewish newspapers, including the Jewish Review, Ben-Ami apologized for the mistake, but not for the content of the campaign.