AmSpec Blog: Obama Surrogate Says Obama Lacked “Political Courage” To Leave Wright’s Church

AmSpec Blog

Obama Surrogate Says Obama Lacked “Political Courage” To Leave Wright’s Church

Pamela Geller of Atlas Sruggs captured this video of New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, arguing with Jews at a Boca Raton, Florida synagoguge. Nadler, who made the visit to make the case for Obama, argued that Obama joined Trinity United Church for political reasons because it was the largest church in his Senate district, and “he didn’t have the political courage to make the statement of walking out” once he had joined, even though he didn’t share the views of Rev. Wright. It’s actually an explanation that I think is a lot closer to the truth than what Obama and most of his defenders have argued, but quite shocking that Nadler would make that argument so close to the election. In another clip, he declared, “Let Russia invade [Georgia]. It’s right next to them.”

AmSpec: Obama, Khalidi, and the PLO

AmSpec

Obama, Khalidi, and the PLO

I have an article up on the main site about Rashid Khalidi’s relationship with the PLO and why his friendship with Barack Obama matters. The key question is: which Obama will guide U.S. policy toward Israel if he is elected president – the Obama who toasted Khalidi at his farewell party, or the Obama who spoke to AIPAC this year? Like on every other issue with Obama, we won’t know until he’s in office whether he’ll reassert his radical roots, or make pragmatic compromises as he has done as a general election candidate.

Think Progress: Goldfarb: Obama has a ‘long track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American rhetoric.’

Think Progress

Goldfarb: Obama has a ‘long track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American rhetoric.’

 

This afternoon, CNN’s Rick Sanchez confronted the McCain campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb about its hypocritical criticism of Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) links to Rashid Khalidi. After Sanchez noted that McCain, as chairman of the board at the International Republican Institute, had also given Khalidi nearly $500,000, Goldfarb brushed him off, saying that Obama had a “long track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American rhetoric”:

GOLDFARB: Look you’re missing the point again Rick. The point is that Barack Obama has along track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American rhetoric.

SANCHEZ: Can you name one other person that he hangs around with who’s anti-Semitic? … We got Khalidi on the table, give me number two. Who’s the other anti-Semitic person that he hangs around with?

GOLDFARB: Rick, we both know who number two is.

Goldfarb could not or refused to name the individual who he was referring to, despite Sanchez’s repeated inquiries. Watch it:

 

Hotline on Call: Palin To LAT: Release The Tape

Hotline on Call

Palin To LAT: Release The Tape

Sarah Palin joined her running mate’s attacks againstBarack Obama and the media Wednesday, suggesting the Los Angeles Times is withholding a videotape that shows Obama watching as a former Palestinian Liberation Organization spokesman bashed Israel.

Palin departed from her stump speech to talk about Obama’s “assortment of friends from Chicago.” She described Rashid Khalidi, the former PLO spokesman, as “another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama going back several years.” She said Obama was at a party for Khalidi in 2003, when he described Israel as the perpetrator of terrorism.

But she saved her hardest criticism for the newspaper that currently holds the tape, saying they was refusing to release it to aid Obama.

“It must be nice for a candidate to have major news organizations looking after his best interests like that,” Palin said. “In this case, we have a newspaper willing to throw aside even the public’s right to know in order to protect a candidate that its own editorial board has endorsed. And if there’s a Pulitzer Prize category for excelling in cow-towing, then the L.A. Times, you’re winning.”

Palin’s comments echoed criticism John McCain has voiced in recent days. The Los Angeles Times has said they are not producing the tape because it was given to the newspaper with the condition that it not be released. But the paper documented the substance on the tape in an April 2008 article.

The Alaska governor said the newspaper could restore its credibility by producing the tape.

Jewish Journal: Move over, Willie Horton

Jewish Journal

Move over, Willie Horton

I just hope Peter Feldman isn’t Jewish.

In my parents’ New Jersey home, when the perpetrator of some awful act in the news was not yet known, I could always count on them to say, “I hope he isn’t Jewish.”

…

Peter Feldman is the McCain-Palin campaign’s communications director in Pennsylvania. 

I don’t know Peter Feldman, and the only mayhem he’s suspected of is metaphorical, and the drip, drip, drip of evidence against him is coming out in the court of public opinion, not in a court of law. I realize that politics ain’t beanbag, and I’m familiar with the riptides and undertows that can seize anyone working in a presidential campaign, especially an apparently losing one, in its final days. Still, for the sake of the reputation of Jewish ethics, and even for the sake of the reputation of Republicans, I sure hope he didn’t do last week what it kinda sorta looks like he did.

By now everyone knows that Ashley Todd, the 20-year-old McCain volunteer from College Park, Texas who told Pittsburgh police that a 6-foot-4 black man robbed her at an ATM machine and carved a backwards B on her face, has (in the words of a Pennsylvania prosecutor) “not insignificant mental health issues.” She made it all up.

But what everyone may not know is that before the contents of her allegation were fully known, let alone verified, it appears to be Peter Feldman – not the police – who told local reporters that her (fictional) big black assailant said to her, “You’re with the McCain campaign? I’m going to teach you a lesson.” 

Move over, Willie Horton.

The story begins last Thursday, when a reporter from Pittsburgh television station KDKA called the Pennsylvania McCain campaign after the Drudge Report — an online conduit for right-wing talking points — ran a big red banner saying, “MCCAIN VOLUNTEER ‘ATTACKED AND MUTILATED’ IN PITTSBURGH… MUGGER CARVED ‘B’ ON ME…” (If you think Drudge was tipped off by the Pittsburgh police, rather than by someone in the McCain campaign, I have a bridge to nowhere to sell you.)

According to KDKA News Director John Verrilli, it was Pennsylvania McCain spokesman Peter Feldman, in the absence of any confirmed facts, who told the media that the mugger saw a McCain bumper sticker on Ashley Todd’s car, and that the B stood for Barack. Mr. Feldman fed the same story to a WPXI-TV reporter, even though the assistant chief of the Pittsburgh police department’s investigative division later said, “We suspected [her story] was false from the beginning.”

Really Robin: Democrat In Ohio Plays The “Race Card” In Cleveland Legislative Election

Really Robin

Democrat In Ohio Plays The “Race Card” In Cleveland Legislative Election

Wow! Raaaaaaaaaaaaacist!! Listen to what Bob Belovich – Democrat running for the seat, and his wife, Barbara Belovich, have to say about Josh Mendel – Republican, and Iraq War Veteran, who currently holds this position. If you don’t have time to listen to it all, start at about 1:47 or so.

National Review Online: Obama’s Friendship with Khalidi

National Review Online

Obama’s Friendship with Khalidi

From the Palestinian Authority Daily: “Twenty-three-year old Ibrahim Abu Jayyab sits by the computer in the Nusairat refugee camp (in the Gaza Strip) trying to call American citizens in order to convince them to vote for the Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama. . . . ”

Like many Palestinians, Abu Jayyab is excited about the prospect of an Obama presidency. (By the way, the Gaza Strip is completely under the control of Hamas. Why then do they persist in speaking of “refugee camps”? But of course, we know why.) If Abu Jayyab and many others in the Palestinian areas are delighted, why are so many American Jewish voters feeling the same way? One side or the other has the wrong man. Which is it?

…

Even less attention has been paid to the man Obama appointed as his emissary to the Muslim community in the U.S., Mazen Asbahi. Asbahi, it turned out, had ties to the Islamic Society of North America, which in turn was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. The Holy Land Foundation was accused of being a front group for Hamas. When news of these associations became public, Asbahi resigned from the campaign to “avoid distracting from Barack Obama’s message of change.” And don’t forget hope!

Many American Jews preparing to pull the lever for Obama have never heard of Asbahi. But they surely know about Jeremiah Wright. They know that he gave a “lifetime achievement” award to Louis Farrakhan; that he supported efforts to get U.S. businesses to divest from Israel; that he gave space in the Trinity Church bulletin to Hamas; and that he has accused Israel of “genocide” against the Palestinians. They are preparing to vote for a man who tamely tolerated all of that (and more) for 20 years. 

Someone is making a big mistake — and it isn’t Abu Jayyab

AmericaBlog: Anti-Defamation League condemns Pro-McCain Republicans in Pennsylvania for ‘trivializing’ the Holocaust

AmericaBlog

Anti-Defamation League condemns Pro-McCain Republicans in Pennsylvania for ‘trivializing’ the Holocaust 

A lot has been written about Sarah Palin’s and John McCain’sdisturbing ties to anti-semites. And today, even more problems for John McCain and Sarah Palin, now from the ADL. The Anti-Defamation League, probably the lead organization in charge of fighting anti-Semitism, hatred, prejudice and bigotry, today condemned pro-McCain Republicans in Pennsylvania for trivializing the Holocaust (via email):

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today condemned an e-mail message sent to Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, reportedly paid for by the “Republican Federal Committee of PA – Victory 2008.”

The e-mail suggested that a vote for Barack Obama would be a “tragic mistake,” and “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision,” adding that “many of our ancestors ignored similar warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s.”

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor, issued the following statement from Poland, where he is traveling with an Israel Defense Force delegation visiting Auschwitz and other historical sites associated with the Holocaust:

Ugly, divisive personal attacks against a candidate for any political office should never be acceptable, and using Holocaust analogies is completely beyond the pale. 

Regardless of which candidate one supports, it is shocking and profoundly distressing that anyone would see fit to make such an odious, false and repugnant analogy. Not only does it further debase the level of our political discourse, but it also diminishes and trivializes the virulent anti-Semitism and Nazi aggression that led to the slaughter of six million Jews and millions of others.

NY Times Caucus: Pennsylvania Republican Apologizes for Anti-Obama E-mail

NY Times Caucus

Pennsylvania Republican Apologizes for Anti-Obama E-mail

An author of the e-mail we told you about last week that the Pennsylvania G.O.P. sent to Jewish voters, equating a vote for Senator Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of those Jews who “ignored the warning signs in the 1930’s and 1940’s,” has apologized for it.

Former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Judge Sandra Schultz Newman, a member of John McCain’s national task-force monitoring Election Day voting, who initially stood by the letter when we contacted her about it on Friday, said Monday that she had not read the final draft before it was released.

“Some of the language was inappropriate and intemperate,” Ms. Newman wrote in an e-mail statement Monday. “I apologize to anyone who was offended by this misguided e-mail.”

The e-mail had also falsely asserted that Senator Obama had taught workers at ACORN how to “commit voter registration fraud.”

State GOP officials disavowed the e-mail on Friday night, saying they could not support that assertion as well as another in which the e-mail reported that the former Weather Underground leader William Ayers believed Al Qaeda didn’t do enough on September 11. The letter was twisting a quote Mr. Ayers gave to The New York Times, published on September 11 – before the attacks – speaking about his groups’ bombing campaign in the 1970’s, which resulted in several deaths include those of three police officers.

Right Wing News: MSM Witholds Video of Obama Toasting Former PLO Operative at Jew Bashing Dinner

Right Wing News

MSM Witholds Video of Obama Toasting Former PLO Operative at Jew Bashing Dinner

Gateway Pundit has the scoop and what I summarize here is lifted from him.

First, get to know the character we are discussing. Here is a video that explains his history and ties with Obama. He is a long time friend of Obama and shares a mutual friend, Bill Ayers.

Barack Obama funnelled thousands of dollars of cash to Rashidi’s anti-Israel Foundation through his work on the Woods Fund.In 2000, Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO operative who justified Palestinian terrorism as contributing to “political enlightenment,”threw a fundraiser for his friend Barack Obama.

 

Now that you have the background of this radical, here are some summary points of Gateway Pundit’s report on the media willfully withholding video evidence of Obama praising him while attending a Jew bash.