Talking Trash About Obama

by The Editors

It is distressing and embarrassing that the Jewish community has become a primary focus of the malicious campaign to tar Sen. Barack Obama as a secret Muslim.

There are legitimate reasons to question Obama’s candidacy on the issues — the same can be said for all his competitors, Democrats and Republicans alike — but outrageous charges about how his childhood years in Indonesia indelibly taint him as a Muslim sympathizer go far beyond the pale.

This slander is conveyed primarily through anonymous e-mails that start with nuggets of truth, including the fact Obama’s stepfather was a Muslim (but ignoring the fact he was a secular Muslim) and that he once attended a school that taught Islam (but ignoring the fact that it was a public

school in Indonesia, where all schools include some Muslim teaching, and that he also attended a Catholic school).

From there, they build elaborate constructions of malicious fantasy, suggesting that he is a kind of Islamic plant determined to turn the United States against Israel. Obama, they write, took his oath of office on a Koran (not true); he turns his back when the Pledge of Allegiance is recited (ditto).

Part of this reflects the corrosive victory-at-any-cost mentality that has turned “swift boating” into a verb. That is the motive behind “pollsters” who call voters, ostensibly to ask questions about issues but in reality to keep repeating Obama’s middle name — Hussein — as if that alone disqualifies him from the presidency. And in part, the fact these rumors are believed reflects a destructive, seemingly bottomless skepticism about our political leadership, fear and outright bigotry.

The insidious thing about such charges, as political scientist Gilbert Kahn noted in a recent Jewish Week blog, is that once spoken, “it is like you plant the seed in the mind of the jury even if the judge sustains the objection — it’s out there. The suspicion persists and has legs of its own.”

It is too much to hope that the purveyors of this poison will stop; they have already revealed themselves to be rank partisans with little regard for democracy. But we hope Jews who receive these e-mails do the responsible thing by deleting them for the trash they are, and by not repeating the unfounded whispers of those whose only interest is in sowing discord to serve their narrow political interests.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization

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