Reprinted from the Houston Jewish Herald-Voice Feb. 28, 2008

Jewish community response to Obama rumors should make us reflect on ourselves

By ANDREW LACHMAN 28.FEB.08

The way Jews have responded to Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign for president shows that we have much to be proud of, and to be ashamed of. Sen. Obama has a challenge in the Jewish community because he does not have the history of Sen. Clinton, who has built a reputation of supporting the Jewish community throughout her 10 years as a senator from New York and her husband’s strong record as president.

However, Obama’s record on Israel is about the same as Sen.Clinton’s. Clinton opposes the division of Jerusalem and demanded that the Palestinian Authority stop using anti-Semitic schoolbooks in schools. Obama opposes the Palestinian right of return; has demanded that the United Nations Security Council condemn Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza and support Israel’s legitimate efforts to defend itself; and has blasted the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, going so far as to publicly rebuke his pastor for honoring Farrakhan at a church banquet.

Obama’s lack of national profile has opened the door for a series of false emails accusing him of being a “secret Muslim” and failing to salute the flag. Neoconservative Internet sites masquerading as “news” magazines, such as American Thinker and FrontPage Magazine wrote, “guilt by association” hit-pieces on Obama, falsely claiming he supported his pastor’s decision to honor Farrakhan and, erroneously stating that he had hired two critics of Israel to head his foreign policy staff, including Zbigniew Brzezinski (Brzezinski focuses on special projects only) and using third-party hearsay to infer that he was hiding an anti-Israel agenda.

Fortunately, most of the Jewish community has seen through this ruse. Eight Jewish senators and the leaders of 12 Jewish organizations, including the Wiesenthal Center and ADL, signed a letter condemning these emails as false. On Super Tuesday, Obama and Clinton carried the Jewish vote in two states each and nearly tied each other for Jewish support in Arizona and California.

However, the fact that these rumors were given credence and allowed to spread in the first place, arguably based on unfounded fears based on his name or race, is shameful.

Throughout our own history as a Jewish people, our own enemies have sought to question our allegiances and agendas, based on our ethnicity and religion. In 1897, French anti-Semitic journalists falsely questioned the loyalties of Alfred Dreyfus, merely because he was Jewish, claiming that because Jews in Germany liked the Kaiser, that all Jews, even French ones, would sell out their country’s military secrets to Germany out of loyalty to other Jews.

When we jump to conclusions about the agendas of people, based on whom they go to church with (do you agree with everything your rabbi says?), an out-of-context photograph or any other factor other than their actual record, we become what, not so long ago, we despised.

We should be vigilant in combating anti-Semitism and react strongly to those who are hostile to Israel, but this does not mean we should condone paranoia, intolerance or attempts by others to exploit our fears for their own political agendas or ignorance; and, to take part in forwarding such falsehoods makes us complicit in this subtle form of ethnicity-based character assassination that we would roundly condemn if it were happening to one of our own.

There actually are objective resources to find out what the candidates stand for. We can check their voting records and ask AIPAC or their local Jewish Federation if they have been pro-Israel or responsive to their Jewish constituents.

It was not so long ago that we, as Jews, believed the words of Martin Luther King, who said that we should judge by the content of character, or in this case, the voting records of our candidates rather than backroom whispers.