Obama the first jewish president
Quite a few of Barack Obama’s “friends from the past” have popped up recently. It’s doubtful whether he even knows their names, but in the Chicago Jewish community many people really are long-time friends of the president-elect. Some of the older people in the community say that they “raised him,” while others half-jokingly call Obama “the first Jewish president.”
They raised contributions for him, provided him with contacts, and also enjoyed hosting him and believed in his glorious future in politics. During most of the campaign, when rumors were spreading among American Jews that Obama was a closet Muslim who was more supportive of the Palestinians and was interested in granting the president of Iran legitimacy, his support among American Jews did not even come close to that enjoyed by Bill Clinton. But at the moment of truth, according to the exit polls, it turns out that 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama.
Members of the Chicago Jewish community are not surprised. They claim that the Jews simply discovered what they have known for years. Obama lives near the synagogue in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, an area with quite a large Jewish population. Some of area visitors may even mistake the heavy security presence on the street for the synagogue’s location – that is, until they hear about Obama.
read more @ there are no sunglassesa bum wrap - burying ted kennedy with the israeli flag
excerpt: (h/t greg bacon)
Abe Foxman, President of ADL and AIPAC on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing four days earlier as both offered to send an Israeli flag to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Boston's Mission Hill section. The plan was to wrap Ted Kennedy’s casket, side by side with the American flag, each flag to cover roughly half of Ted’s casket during Kennedy’s internationally broadcast funeral, which was even watched live in Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburbs. Only the lobby’s continuing exploitation of the Holocaust and ADL’s unauthorized use of the image of Yasser Arafat to demonize him and raise millions to fund illegal settlement expansion, did Foxman see such a terrific chance to hype brand Zionism. This time by linking it in perpetuity to the Kennedy mystique and the Arlington Cemetery eternal flame. Wrapping Kennedy in the Israeli flag for history would no doubt give a boost to Israel’s preferred historical narrative and the Israeli flag which has increasingly come to represent virulent Zionism and its crimes.
AIPAC claims the well intentioned project to wrap Kennedy in the Star of David was no more than another gesture for the memory of a friend of the Jewish people. Perhaps Abe saw his initiative as a return tribute for Ted’s thoughtfulness during the November 6, 1995 funeral for Yitzak Rabin on Mount Herzl (renamed for the founder of modern Zionism, Hungarian Binyamin Ze'ev (Theodore) Herzl, who had never set foot in Palestine, from its ancient expunged Arabic name “Jabal Assalam” meaning ‘Peace Mountain”) On that day Senator Kennedy sprinkled a cup of soil from his two brothers, John and Robert’s, gravesites at Arlington Cemetery on Rabin’s, as a gesture of respect.
Despite some intense lobbying, the Kennedy family graciously declined the Foxman-Aipac offer and Ted’s coffin carried only the American flag.
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