A pro-Obama group of rabbis says recent statements by the McCain-Palin campaign are “creeping toward hate speech.”
In a statement released Thursday, the group of 562 rabbis said that “increasingly those speaking on behalf of the McCain campaign have been demonizing Senator Obama as not being like us.”
As an example, the organization notes that a sherriff recently emphasized Barack Obama’s middle name of Hussein when warming up the crowd at a campaign rally and that Palin recently said Obama has been “palling around with terrorists.”
The statement criticizes the Republican Jewish Coalition for putting “forward a list of people known to be hostile to Israel” and then “dishonestly” suggesting that these people shaped Obama’s views on the subject. “The RJC approach harkens back to the classic Republican red baiting tactics of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon from the early fifties,” the group said in a statement.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
