Republican Susan Kone, who hopes to unseat Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler next week, says the congressman has been too silent about President Barack Obama’s Middle East policies.
“Absurd,” says Nadler’s campaign.
In an ad campaign she said she’ll take to Jewish newspapers and in a YouTube video emailed by her campaign Kone, an Upper West Side lawyer who founded an executive search and consulting firm, says Nadler “stood silent while Barack Obama has pursued the most anti-Israel policies of any president in U.S. history.”
The ad mentions that Nadler did not speak out when Obama asked Israel to open its nuclear facilities to U.N. inspectors without mentioning Iran, nor when the president said he would be open to negotiations with Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has denied the Holocaust and threatened Israel with destruction.
“He’s one of the most silent of all members of Congress on Israel,” said Kone, who said she wants to be the first female Jewish Republican in Congress. In an interview, she said she decided to run because doctors were complaining to her about the Obama health insurance program.
Kone also raps Nadler for his support of the Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in Manhattan, saying it should be relocated out of sympathy for victims of 9-11 and their families.
“He has demonized those who oppose [the mosque] saying it is hate speech,” said Kone. “It’s not hate speech, but hurt speech. I have met with those victims families. They are hurting.”
Nadler’s campaign spokesman , Ilan Kayatsky, said in an emailed statement “Congressman Nadler’s decades-long record as a staunch and leading supporter of Israel in Congress speaks for itself. The baseless assertions in this video are easily rebutted by a quick search of the Congressional Record and are, frankly, absurd.”
Nadler isn’t the only Jewish congressman who touts his Israel record to be attacked from the right. Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Queens and Long Island Democrat, is facing a barrage of attacks by activists who are incensed by his association with the leftist lobby JStreet, which held a fundraiser for Ackerman this month.
"Who appointed the radicals of J Street to be arbiters of Israel’s national security?" ask 40 individuals who signed an ad that appears in the current issue of The Jewish Week. "Why are you, Congressman Ackerman, lending your name to this effort and taking money raised by J Street for you?"
An ad by Ackerman’s campaign in the same issue shows the carnation-wearing congressman with Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu and declares "Nodody in Congress works harder for Israel than Gary Ackerman."
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