Orthodox Jewish Leader Hints About Obama Muslim Connections
Posted By James BesserPolitical Insider: Orthodox Jewish Leader Hints About Obama Muslim Connections / James Besser in Washington
Despite warnings by a broad coalition of community leaders, some Jewish political activists continue to promote the idea that Sen. Barack Obama, locked into a fierce battle for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, is a secret Muslim. (See the Jewish Week story on another line of attack against Obama - his relationship with a controversial South Side Chicago pastor).
Dr. Mendy Ganchrow, the longtime leader of a pro-Israel political action committee and former Orthodox Union head, this week hinted in his blog that the Muslim environment in which Obama spent four childhood years will inevitably affect his judgment.
"In the Jewish religion when someone is far away from observance, however at a certain time he has a spark of Jewishness, we call it a 'pintele Yid' -a smattering, or a deep seated unconscious attachment to ones roots," Ganchrow wrote. "With a Muslim father, and being surrounded in his early youth in a Muslim environment, is there such a thing as a 'pintele Muslim,' with deep seated feelings which could color decisions re: terrorism and the Middle East?"
Ganchrow's comments come only a day after leaders of nine major Jewish groups - including his own OU - issued a joint statement condemning a campaign of "hateful emails that use falsehood and innuendo to mischaracterize Senator Barack Obama's religious beliefs, and who he is as a person." (Read the letter here .)
Such tactics, the group wrote, "attempt to drive a wedge between our community and a presidential candidate based on despicable and false attacks and innuendo based on religion. We reject these efforts to manipulate members of our community into supporting opposing candidates."
In addition to the OU, the letter was signed by leaders of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the United Jewish Communities, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
According to most reports, Obama's Kenyan father was an atheist and his stepfather a secular Muslim; in his four childhood years in Indonesia, he attended both a predominately Muslim public school and a Catholic parochial school.
But some leaders of some of the groups signing the letter concede it will be impossible to tamp down the Obama-as-secret-Muslim rhetoric, which they say is emanating mostly from right-wing Jewish activists determined to defeat any Democratic presidential candidate.
Once a charge like that is out there, "it is like you plant the seed in the mind of the jury even if the judge sustains the objection--it is out there," said Kean University political scientist Gilbert Kahn. "The suspicion persists and has legs of its own."