Here They Go Again

As RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman praised the election of his new counterpart Howard Dean, influential Republican front groups were already planning a mendacious offensive against the new DNC chair.

The first attack came courtesy of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a big money pro-Israel lobby group linking Jewish-American neoconservatives to the Christian Right and Israel's Likud government. On Monday the RJC began running full-page ads in major Jewish newspapers across the country featuring a large photo of militants strapped with explosives coddling a young Palestinian boy. Above that arresting image is a quote by Dean: "It's not our place to take sides." Below the photo are quotes by Democrats critical of Dean. The ad effectively equates Dean's election with the appeasement of suicide bombers.

Such smears are to be expected from a group whose board of directors includes members of the Project for a New American Century, top fundraisers for the Bush campaign and former Bush officials, including press secretary Ari Fleischer. The RJC took Bush on his first tour of Israel in 1998. Evidently, Republicans hope to peel off a few more Jewish votes by distorting Dean's record.

"Two issues stand in the way of Republicans gaining a significant percentage of the Jewish vote: abortion and the religious right," GOP pollster Frank Luntz told a RJC conference in 1998. "But we have an answer. The magic word is 'Israel.'" To that end, the RJC opposed the Clinton-inspired peace process, attacked notorious anti-Semite Joe Lieberman for reaching out to Louis Farrakhan and now advocates nuclear weapons assistance to Israel and the expansion of new settlements throughout both Gaza and the West Bank.

Contrast these extremist positions with the moderate views of Dean. "We have a special relationship with Israel," Dean said after drawing fire in September 2003 for his vision of the US as an impartial broker. "We would defend Israel if necessary...However we are also the only country capable of bringing peace to the Middle East, and when we sit at the negotiating table, we do have to have the trust of both sides or we will never succeed." No left-wing peacenik, Dean recommended sending Bill Clinton as a special envoy to the region. After the RJC attack, the National Jewish Democratic Council released a fact sheet praising Dean's pro-Israel record.

According to an annual survey by the American Jewish Committee, two-thirds of American Jews oppose the war in Iraq. Fifty-seven percent favor the establishment of a Palestinian state. Sixty nine percent want Israel to dismantle some or all of the settlements in exchange for a permanent peace agreement. It is the RJC, not Dean, which lies squarely outside the mainstream of Jewish America.

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