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Kiss and tell By M.J. Rosenberg Tags: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama  The most important thing to know about the charges and counter- charges flying around the U.S. Jewish community regarding Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is that they are baseless. The attacks on Clinton began in 1999, when she was first lady, and embraced Suha Arafat after the wife of the Palestinian leader made a vicious attack on Israel in her presence. Clinton did not know what Arafat had said because the Palestinian spoke in Arabic and the translator left out the offensive parts. But no matter. The very fact that Hillary kissed Suha marked the U.S. president's wife as unsympathetic to Israel. Forgotten is that the infamous kiss took place during the height of the Oslo process, when the Arafats were meeting (and being embraced by) Israelis of all political stripes. Even Benjamin Netanyahu took Yasser Arafat's hand at the Wye River Summit in 1998. Advertisement So why the fuss? It's simple. The controversy over the kiss is an example of the manufactured outrage that opponents of particular candidates throw out every election year to damage the candidate they don't like. No one really thought that Hillary Clinton was anti-Israel. But Republicans who disliked both Clintons made the Suha Arafat kiss a cause celebre to hurt Hillary within the Jewish community. They succeeded. When she ran for the U.S. Senate in New York in 2000, she did far less well than might have been expected for a Democrat, largely because of the Arafat controversy. By 2006, when she ran for reelection, Clinton won the Jewish community by a landslide, because she is an effective senator and had demonstrated that, kiss or no kiss, she is emphatically pro-Israel. But that doesn't mean that some Jewish Republicans (some 20 percent of America's Jews) will not use the "kiss" to portray Hillary as anti-Israel if she wins the nomination this year. That is because it is not Israel they are truly concerned about, but rather the success of the Republican nominee. Their job will be to hurt Clinton, and since the Suha kiss has proven successful in the past, they can be expected to use it again. Partisan Democrats are no better. As with their counterparts on the Republican side, their interest in spreading baseless stories about candidates they want to defeat is motivated by political considerations, not "ahavat Yisrael." Because we are still in the primary season, some Democrats are not yet calling Republicans anti-Israel, but are attacking a fellow Democrat, Barack Obama. It is hard to say where the attacks are coming from, although at this point, it is clearly the Clinton campaign that benefits from the smears against Obama. If he is the Democratic nominee, it will be the Republican who benefits, although not very much. Jewish support for the Democratic nominee for president has averaged 75 percent since 1932. Both Clinton and Obama are sure to win a similar percentage. The lies about Obama are even more ridiculous than those about Clinton. The first is that Obama is a Muslim who is only pretending to be a Christian in order to get into the White House, from which he will put an end to U.S. support for Israel. (Obama's father, whom he met only once, was in fact a Muslim, so the slanderers do have something to work with. His mother and grandparents - the people who raised him - were Protestants.) The other Obama lie is that the senator's Protestant minister in Chicago is anti-Israel and so is he. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has indeed made anti-Israel statements, and once honored the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. According to those spreading the story, Obama must necessarily share the views of his minister (like Jews all share the political views of their rabbis?), although there is clear evidence that he does not. The Obama smear demonstrates just how ridiculous these charges can be. If Obama is a Muslim, what difference does it make what his Christian minister says? And if his Christian minister is so influential, how can he be a Muslim? But none of this matters to the people who spread these tales. Nor does the fact that both Obama and Clinton have virtually identical records on Israel. They support the Israel aid package, they favor a negotiated end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and they strongly support the U.S.-Israel alliance. The same is also true of John McCain, the likely Republican nominee. This is all good. The bad news is that political partisans within the Jewish community have no scruples about using Israel as a political weapon to bludgeon politicians they oppose for other reasons. Even worse is that some Jews, so intelligent on other matters, fall for the lies and genuinely worry that some Israel-hater is about to become president. The Jews who put out these lies should be ashamed. But they aren't. Their respective political party and their access to a particular candidate are more important to them than Israel or the Jewish people at large, and they will keep putting out these insinuations and lies. They may hurt the Jews, but the candidate and party appreciate their efforts. And that is what this game is all about. It surely isn't about Israel. M.J. Rosenberg is the director of policy analysis for the Israel Policy Forum, in Washington, D.C. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Land of milk and honey Israeli model Bar Refaeli poses for Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition. Finding fault Shas MK blames gays for recent earthquakes in the region.   1.   Well said!!! 20:06  |  Greg 15/02/08   2.   race to the white house 12:20  |  Taha Mokhtar 16/02/08   3.   Dishonest and Misleading Defense 16:40  |  Jonathan B. 16/02/08   4.   baseless.? 17:47  |  stephen 16/02/08   5.   Rosenberg 19:30  |  Garry 16/02/08   6.   Garry ( 35) - Spot On 22:08  |  Tod Zuckerman 16/02/08

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