Jews Turn Against Obama
Wednesday, 28 Apr 2010 11:52 AM
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By: Ronald Kessler
In a stunning turnaround, President Obama has lost roughly half of his support among Jewish voters.
A poll by McLaughlin and Associates found that, while 78 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Obama, only 42 percent of Jewish voters would vote to re-elect him. A plurality — 46 percent — would consider voting for anyone else. That compares with 21 percent who voted for John McCain.
Ever since he learned of Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, has been warning fellow Jews that Obama would be antithetical to Jewish interests, not only as they relate to Israel but also to issues that affect all Americans.
Before Obama was elected, Klein, whose organization of 30,000 members is the oldest pro-Israel group in the country, felt like a pariah. Now, as he speaks to Jewish audiences on a weekly basis, he has found that the climate has changed dramatically.
“As I speak at synagogues now around the country, I haven’t had a single person during Q and A or after my talk ask how I could be so critical of Obama,” Klein tells Newsmax.
Klein tells his audiences they should not be surprised that Obama’s left-leaning policies appear to tilt more toward the Palestinians than to Israelis. He cites the fact that Obama and his wife, Michelle, spent 20 years listening to Wright, who routinely denounced Israel as a racist state and America for allegedly having created the AIDS virus to kill off blacks.
Wright, whom Obama described as a mentor and sounding board, even gave an award for lifetime achievement to Louis Farrakhan.
“God damn America,” Wright shouted in one of his sermons.
Obama’s speeches have been “inimical to Israel and supportive of the stream of false Palestinian Arab claims concerning Israel,” Klein says. “He is relentlessly pressuring Israel while applying virtually almost no pressure on the Palestinian Authority to fulfill its written obligations. He is worse than Jimmy Carter was when he was president. It was so obvious if you just looked at Obama’s associations before he was elected. Jews simply ignored that.”
David Remnick’s book “The Ridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama” quotes an unidentified campaign aide to Hillary Clinton as saying that, if the stories about Wright’s ties to Obama had appeared in January 2008, “it would have been over,” meaning Hillary would have won the Democratic nomination for president.
In fact, as outlined in the Newsmax story "The Media’s Blackout on Rev. Wright," those stories on Wright were appearing as early as January 2008 — at Newsmax.com — but the mainstream media ignored them and would not pick them up until mid-March.
Before the election, Klein remembers, “If I talked about Reverend Wright in talks at synagogues, they would say I was using guilt by association. I would always explain you can’t say that. He chose this church. He chose to have a friendship with Wright because this is a person he is comfortable with and because Wright espouses views he believes in.”
Klein notes, “If a Jew was a member of a synagogue where the rabbi preached hatred of blacks, it would be clear that Jew would be comfortable with anti-black racism. I couldn’t remain for a week at a synagogue where a rabbi made a hateful speech toward blacks. I’d quit immediately.”
But now the tide is turning, Klein says. As recently as last weekend, “At the synagogue where I spoke, two of my most left-wing lunatic friends were saying, ‘My God, Mort, you were right. I never should have voted for Obama.’”
Several Jewish leaders have turned against Obama as well, Klein says, some openly and some behind the scenes because they do not want to cut off ties with a president. Klein quotes one of the most prominent Jewish leaders as having told him recently, “It’s better if I’m on the inside than the outside. So there’s no point in my publicly criticizing him because then I won’t have influence.”
“What influence?” Klein asks rhetorically. “It felt so good to so many of liberals to be voting for the first black man to run for president that nothing else mattered,” Klein says. “They felt good proving that they are not racist.”
Only 17 percent of Orthodox Jews now would vote to re-elect Obama, according to the McLaughlin poll. Among conservative Jews, 38 percent would vote for him again. Fifty-two percent of reform Jews would re-elect him. Among Jews who have been to Israel, 36 percent now would cast their ballots for him. When polled, 12 percent responded they did not know or refused to answer.
“The majority of Jews now realize that this guy is bad for Israel, let alone bad for America,” Klein says.
