Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Sheldon Adelson: ‘Oy, those meshuganeh Democrats!’ (Alex Hofford/European Pressphoto)

The NY Times writes today that the new neocon group, Freedom’s Watch (FW) is being funded by right-wing Jewish donors. The original idea for the group was conceived at a Republican Jewish Coalition meeting and one of its key funders is Las Vegas gambling king, Sheldon Adelson. According to Congresspedia, others include shopping center magnate and former ambassador to Australia, Nauru and Italy, Mel Sembler. Fred Zeidman is senior lobbyist at Greenberg Traurig and was Jack Abramoff’s ostensible boss. A former director was Sam Fox, the Missouri Jewish Republican who received a recess appointment as ambassador to Belgium after the Senate refused to vote on his appointment because of his funding the Swift Boat smear campaign.

As best I can tell it seems to be a Valentine thrown by some fat cat donors to ex-Bushites like Ari Fleischer, Ken Mehlman, and David Frum, who are looking to extend their political shelf life beyond the end of the Bush presidency:

Freedom’s Watch, a deep-pocketed conservative group led by two former senior White House officials, made an audacious debut in late August when it began a $15 million advertising campaign designed to maintain Congressional support for President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq.

Founded this summer by a dozen wealthy conservatives, the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy.

Next month, Freedom’s Watch will sponsor a private forum of 20 experts on radical Islam that is expected to make the case that Iran poses a direct threat to the security of the United States, according to several benefactors of the group.

Although the group declined to identify the experts, several were invited from the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group with close ties to the White House. Some institute scholars have advocated a more confrontational policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, including keeping military action as an option.

Like much of the propaganda spewed by the Republican Jewish Coalition, Freedom’s Watch pays little attention to truth, balance or nuance. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a “terrorist” likened to Hitler:

“If Hitler’s warnings were heeded when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’ he could have been stopped,” said Bradley Blakeman, 49, the president of Freedom’s Watch and a former deputy assistant to Mr. Bush. “Ahmadinejad is giving all the same kind of warning signs to us, and the region — he wants the destruction of the United States and the destruction of Israel.”

Returning to a fraudulent Bush-Cheney meme, Iraq and Al Qaeda are deliberately confused once again as the forces behind 9/11:

In one Freedom’s Watch ad, Sgt. John Kriesel, a National Guardsman from Stillwater, Minn., who lost his legs in a bomb attack near Falluja, pleads with Congress and the American people not to “surrender” in Iraq. As the screen shows a still photograph of the second hijacked plane bearing down on the burning World Trade Center, Sergeant Kriesel adds, “They attacked us, and they will again. They won’t stop in Iraq.”

And according to Fleischer, if Congress capitulates to terror then World War III (or IV if you’re Norman Podhoretz) will be around the corner:

Mr. Fleischer said: “After the president announced the surge, and even Republicans started getting nervous, there was a palpable fear among several of us that this fall Congress was going to cut off the funding and the Middle East would explode and America would likely get hit. It really wasn’t much more complicated than that.”

That’s the problem with ideologues and propagandists like this gang–it’s not very complicated. In fact, all you have to do is follow their bouncing ball of lies and vote Republican in November. You’ll feel better for it, like taking an Alka Seltzer (do people still do that?) or an Ambien (to be more up to date).

One of the main current goals of the group is to exert pressure on wavering Republicans to “stay the course” on Iraq. Congresspedia notes that one of the first FW media buys targeted Norm Coleman, a “moderate” Jewish Republican with close ties to the RJC who is up for re-election and faces a stiff Democratic challenge.

There’s a lot of wannbeism about Freedom’s Watch. They’re Reaganite wannabes:

“Ideologically, we are inspired by much of Ronald Reagan’s thinking — peace through strength, protect and defend America, and prosperity through free enterprise,” Mr. Fleischer said.

While at the same time they wannabe the conservative answer to Moveon.org:

For years, the group’s founders lamented MoveOn’s growing influence, derived in large part from its grass-roots efforts, especially on the debate about the Iraq war. “A bunch of us activists kept watching MoveOn and its attacks on the war, and it just got to be obnoxious,” said Mr. Sembler, a friend of Vice President Dick Cheney. “We decided we needed to do something about this, because the conservative side was not responding.”

What Sembler, of course, neglects to understand is that Moveon is a true grassroots group with hundreds of thousands of donors and Freedom’s Watch is a fatcat’s private club. Or, as Congresspedia calls it to distinguish it from the term “grassroots,” “astroturf.”

Eli Pariser also parries Freedom’s Watch’s claims of legitimacy:

“This is the fourth or the fifth group that intends to be the right-wing MoveOn,” Mr. Pariser said, naming other fledgling groups like TheVanguard.org and Grassfire.org. “So far, it’s not clear that this group is anything other than a big neoconservative slush fund. They are a White House front group with a few consultants who are trying to make a very unpopular position on the war appear more palpable.”

…Pariser…said his group’s grass-roots membership — it claims 3.3 million members — was the envy of Freedom’s Watch. “I think people see that Freedom’s Watch is a few billionaires, and not a large, mainstream constituency,” he said.

If I were a tout, I wouldn’t put any on Freedom’s Watch. Remember that million dollar wager the RJC laid down in slick advertising that desperately tried to head off a strong Jewish showing for Congressional Democrats in the last election? Look how much good that did.

The Forward, JTA, and Jewish Week have been scooped on this story and should’ve been the first to cover it.

“Democrats have a new vision for America’s foreign policy: it doesn’t include support for Israel”
“There are lies, damn lies,” and the RJC (credit: RJC) pdf for larger image

For weeks, I’ve been reading about the sleazy campaign waged by the Republican Jewish Coalition against Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterm election. I wasn’t going to comment about this initially because I saw it as a side issue. But I just saw two full page ads in the local Seattle Jewish paper, JTNews by the group and my sense of outrage was too great to restrain it.

The National Jewish Democratic Council circulated an e mail this wake about the RJC’s campaign noting that it cost them $1-million (update: the RJC has just announced it’s “expanding” the campaign, meaning it’s throwing bad money after worse). NJDC’s director, Ira Forman, was almost gleeful in recounting the failure of the campaign:

If this is what you get with $1 million in RJC ad buys, I hope that they spend $2 million in 2008.”

And I’ve got to agree with him.

When I first heard about the campaign I said to myself: “I can see Republicans pumping money into a campaign to wrest Jews from the Democratic Party if they had a centrist candidate who might appeal to centrist Jewish Democrats. But what do they think they’re bringing to the table in this election cycle that would make Jews jump into the arms of the Republican Party? Do they know something I don’t? I’d say this is pretty much the worst time in recent U.S. history to launch such a campaign. You’ve got the most radical right-wing president in several generations in power. Jews don’t like radicals of either the right of the left. So what’s to be gained here?”

In the Letters to the Editor section of JTNews, prominent Jewish philanthropist (and Democrat) Rob Spitzer threw up some interesting statistics thus sealing my case for me. The American Jewish Committee’s 2006 survey of American Jewish opinion:

Indicates that not withstanding the RJC’s campaign, the number of Jewish…Democrats has increased from 48% to 54% since the…2002 [election]…The number of Jewish…Republicans has decreased from 18%…to 15%…The number of Jewish voters who identify themselves as liberal has increased from 37%…to 42%…The number…who identify themselves as conservative has decreased from 29% to 25%…

To give you a notion of the questionable reasoning used in these ads let’s take examples from both ads in the JTNews. The first is a reference to an LA Times/Bloomberg (the ad mistakenly refers to it as the “Los Angeles/Bloomberg Poll”) poll question:

Which of the following questions comes closer to your view: “The U.S. should continue to align itself with Israel” or “The U.S. should adopt a more neutral posture”…

To which, 64% of Republicans said they wanted a U.S. alignment with Israel while only 39% of Democrats did. The ad tagline: “Republicans are more likely to support Israel.” Which of course is patently false. First, 85% (that’s my educated guess and not based on any poll) of the Democratic Party and its Congressional representatives are in Aipac’s hip pocket. But that’s beside the point. Even more importantly, the RJC conveniently ignores the difference between supporting Israel, which the vast majority of Democrats do; and wanting the U.S. to align its foreign policy interests with Israel, which the majority do not. Admittedly, it’s not a bright-line distinction. it requires some elementary thought process to understand the difference between the two concepts. But ultimately, only someone semi-comatose or a willful political charlatan would deliberately misunderstand them.

The other oddity was the full page ad on behalf of Mike McGavick, the Repubican U.S. Senate candidate: “Mike McGavick, when you stand up for Israeli you do not stand alone.” Among the other points it made was this questionable one:

When many members of Congress said we should not take sides [against Hezbollah]–YOU STOOD WITH US.”

Excuse me, but only 8 House members voted against supporting Israel during the Lebanon war. In the Senate, the vote was unanimous. So where are the “many members of Congress” who voted against the pro-Israel resolution?? Simply put, they don’t exist. More lies and damn lies.

And further regarding Lebanon, what the RJC neglects to tell you is that the AJC survey found that only 55% of American Jews “approved…of the way the Israeli government handled the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon?. So if fully 35% disapproved, then why would it be a shande for eight House members to vote against a simplistic propaganda resolution waving the flag on behalf of Israel during the most disastrous war it ever fought?

Click here to see more of the RJC’s travesties and calumnies.