Sunday, October 28, 2012

Sheldon Adelson's Inadvertent Obama Connection

I liked this postscript by Anshel Pfiffer in Ha'aretz"

Here is what Barack Obama said in the debate this week when Mitt Romney attacked him for not visiting Israel during his first term:
"I went to Israel as a candidate, I didn't take donors, I didn't attend fund-raisers, I went to Yad Vashem ... to remind myself the nature of evil and why our bond with Israel will be unbreakable. And then I went down to the border town of Sderot ... I saw families there who showed me where missiles had come down near their children's bedrooms."
There is a delicious irony here. Obama is using his visit to the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem to endear himself to Jewish voters. The largest single donor to Yad Vashem is Sheldon Adelson, who gave $50 million for the new museum there, the same man who has pledged the Republican Party $100 million to defeating Obama on November 6.
But beyond irony, how sad it is that the president feels that the best way to connect to the feelings of the most successful community in history is to highlight Jewish suffering, victimhood and vulnerability. And how sad that he's probably right, that's what works.

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