American Jewish organizations and Jewish bloggers are lit up over Gov. Sarah Palin's little-known record on Israel and other key Jewish issues.
Online, much of the chatter has focused on the fact that, a few weeks ago, Palin sat in her Alaska church as her minister glowingly introduced the head of Jews for Jesus, a group of mostly evangelical Christians who aim to convert Jews to Christianity. In the talk, group Executive Director David Brickner blamed Middle East violence in part on Israeli Jews who didn't accept Jesus.
A spokesman for the McCain campaign said earlier this week that Palin did not know Brickner would be speaking that day and did not share his views. "Governor Palin does not share the views he expressed, and she and her family would not have been sitting in the pews of this church for the last seven years if his remarks were even remotely typical," Michael Goldfarb wrote in an e-mail to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
But that didn't stop the National Jewish Democratic Council from slamming Palin as "a poor choice" in a statement yesterday.
"We in the Jewish community have to question McCain's judgment for choosing a right-wing religious conservative with absolutely no foreign policy experience and a brewing scandal which is being investigated by the Alaska state legislature," the group said, calling Palin "totally out of step with Jewish public opinion" on everything from abortion to climate change to creationism, which she says should be taught in school along with evolution.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/05/sarah_palin_good_for_the_jews.htmlSarah Palin and the Jewish communityUpon returning from the Democratic Convention in Denver we find a political landscape that has drastically changed. In the course of just one week Sen. Barack Obama picked Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice presidential nominee while Sen. John McCain picked Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. These two picks say a great deal about the judgment of each presidential candidate and about their understanding of the American Jewish community.
Biden, of course, was the more conventional pick - especially for the Jewish community. The senior senator from Delaware is one of the most well-known and respected politicians among American Jewish leadership. He may be unique for a non-Jewish senator in that he loudly exclaims that he is a Zionist. Even his adversaries admit that there is no more knowledgeable senator when it comes to Middle East policy. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency describes his record his record on Israel as "sterling." On domestic issues he is totally in sync with Jewish public opinion - supporting the separation of church and state, reproductive freedom and energy independence.
Palin is another story. She is an exceedingly odd choice for a party which has spent the better part of the past year loudly exclaiming that it was reaching out to Jewish voters and made much to do about considering two Jewish legislators - Joe Lieberman and Eric Cantor - as vice presidential possibilities.
First, Palin has absolutely no foreign policy experience - it is ironic that McCain has spend his spring and summer telling Americans that the most important characteristic he is looking for in a vice president is an individual who is ready on day one to assume the presidency. Moreover, Palin has never visited Israel and besides signing a pro-Israel resolution passed by the state legislature, she has apparently never spoken out or focused on the Jewish state.
ON DOMESTIC issues she is totally out of step with public opinion in the Jewish community. Palin is against reproductive freedom - even in the cases of rape and incest - and as a result one of the first organizations to support her nomination was the Christian Coalition.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1220444321718
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
