Tonight, and in the days and months ahead, these are the questions that we must answer. And this is a fitting moment to do so.  For Muslims, this is Ramadan.  For Jews, this is Elul. It is rare for those two months to coincide.  But this year, tonight, they do.  Different faiths, different rituals, but a shared period of devotion and contemplation. A time to reflect on right and wrong; a time to ponder one’s place in the world; a time when the people of two great religions remind the world of a truth that is both simple and profound, that each of us, all of us, in our hearts and in our lives, are capable of great and lasting change.

Obama commended Netanyahu and Abbas for their “courage” and linked them back to their predecessors who sought Arab-Israeli peace:

Each of you are the heirs of peacemakers who dared greatly Begin and Sadat, Rabin and King Hussein statesmen who saw the world as it was but also imagined the world as it should be. It is the shoulders of our predecessors upon which we stand.  It is their work that we carry on.  Now, like each of them, we must ask, do we have the wisdom and the courage to walk the path of peace?  All of us are leaders of our people, who, no matter the language they speak or the faith they practice, all basically seek the same things:  to live in security, free from fear; to live in dignity, free from want; to provide for their families and to realize a better tomorrow.  Tonight, they look to us, and each of us must decide, will we work diligently to fulfill their aspirations?

And though each of us holds a title of honor President, Prime Minister, King we are bound by the one title we share. We are fathers, blessed with sons and daughters.  So we must ask ourselves what kind of world do we want to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren.

Obama concluded:

For them to be here, to be willing to take this first step the most difficult step is a testament to their courage and their integrity and I think their vision for the future.

In addition to serving as NJDC’s chairman, Stanley regularly hosts events for Democratic candidates—recently hosting an event for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

We congratulate our Chairman for this well-deserved recognition as he continues to make a powerful impact on the political scene!

The multinational NATO drill, scheduled for the middle of October and hosted by the Turkish Air Forces, has been conducted since June 2001.  Codenamed “Anatolian Eagle,” the military exercises seek to increase international aerial cooperation and train air force members of the participating countries in the latest aerial strategies and technologies. 

The Obama Administration’s reaction comes as part of a continued effort to pressure Turkey into easing its tensions with Israel.

Yesterday’s Hamas attack against Israeli citizens was a despicable crime, clearly aimed at derailing negotiations before they even start. We stand with President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and everyone who has condemned these attacks including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. And we agree with all of the parties that these talks must proceed.

As the President importantly reiterated this afternoon while standing with Prime Minister Netanyahu, ‘The United States is going to be unwavering in its support of Israel’s security. We are going to push back against these types of terrorist activities. The message should go out to Hamas and everybody else who is taking credit for these heinous crimes that this is not going to stop us from not only ensuring a secure Israel but also securing a longer-lasting peace.’ Indeed even as it is incumbent upon the Palestinian Authority to continue searching for the perpetrators of this horrific act, we can and will continue to move towards a future that further marginalizes Hamas and brings about a peaceful settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.

According to Salon:

Bill Kristol’s new group the Emergency Committee for Israel is out with another TV ad attacking another Democrat, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), for supposedly being unfriendly to the Jewish state. But it turns out a key fact in the ad—that a purportedly Hamas-linked Muslim advocacy group gave Holt a 100% approval rating—is, if you scratch just a little below the surface, so misleading as to be essentially a lie.

And not only that, there’s evidence that ECI didn’t even know what the 100% rating was based on (not very much, as it turns out) when the group produced the ad attacking Holt for the rating.

The 100% rating represented something related to immigration policy:

A curious thing happened when we asked CAIR about this “100% rating” for Holt: the group told us that it does not issue legislative scorecards ... When we asked Emergency Committee for Israel spokesman Michael Goldfarb for a source on the “100% rating” he pointed us to this page at Project Vote Smart, a group that tracks issue groups’ scorecards.

Now note that every member of Congress on that page has either a 0% rating or a 100% rating from CAIR, but the Vote Smart site does not indicate what issue or issues the ratings are based on.

What’s going on here? 

An official at Vote Smart told us that the page was created automatically based on CAIR’s position on a single piece of legislation in 2005: the REAL ID Act, a sprawling bill that addressed, among other things, immigration and a new national ID system. Holt voted against the REAL ID Act, as did several of Republican members of Congress, thus earning each of them the same “100% rating” from CAIR. Other REAL ID opponents included Mike Huckabee and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The objections have to do with the cost of the law and civil liberties concerns surrounding what the Journal called a “de facto national ID card decree.”

The vote on the REAL ID Act had absolutely nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But this vote—and this vote alone—is the basis for one of the central claims of the Emergency Committee’s new anti-Holt spot: that the congressman sports a “100% rating” from CAIR.

The author concluded:

The remarkable thing is that ECI leaders seemingly did not even know themselves what the 100% rating was based on when they made and broadcast the ad.

In short: ECI based the attack ad on a number floating around on the Internet without even bothering to find out what it meant. Reporters would do well to keep that in mind when covering the group in the future.

Please click here to view NJDC’s fact sheet about ECI and its past actions.

Please click here to download NJDC’s fact sheet about ECI.

• ”Barack Hussein Obama, that’s the racist - obviously.”
• He has made racist statements about African-Americans.
• He proposed “beat[ing] the hell outta” homeless people with “a big old cane, Singapore-style.” 

And, of special relevance to American Jews, Cunningham said that President Barack Obama “wants to gas the Jews.”

Boehner’s office denied the report, but Cunningham claimed otherwise.

The only change in United States military aid to Israel under Obama is upward. In May, the White House asked Congress for $205 million for Israel to finance the Iron Dome project, above and beyond regular defense aid. Iron Dome is an Israeli-produced high-tech system designed to intercept short-range rockets of the type that have been fired at Israel from Gaza and Lebanon. It should make Israelis living in border areas significantly safer.

On the diplomatic front, the Obama administration’s intense lobbying recently gained Israel acceptance to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the elite organization of the world’s most advanced economies. “It’s an economic security matter of highest order,” says Daniel Kurtzer, former United States ambassador to Israel and now a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. “You can either be an object or a subject, and Israel is now a subject. They’re part of the rule-making body.”

Israel had sought membership for years-and its acceptance now breaks a pattern of increased international isolation.

And in June, the administration won United Nations’ Security Council approval for a new round of sanctions against Iran-an unexpected diplomatic accomplishment that required getting Russia and China onboard. Piggybacking on that move, both America and Europe have added their own, tougher economic steps against Iran. American lobbying is also the apparent reason the United Arab Emirates agreed to enforce the United Nations sanctions. Till now, Iran has reportedly used the Emirates as a base for sanction-busting trade.

The common denominator is Obama’s activist commitment to Israel’s security-not just talking the talk but “walking the walk,” as Kurtzer says.

He concluded:

So it’s a mistake to focus on superficial tensions and read Obama’s behavior as antipathy. Doing so ignores the Obama administration’s effort to increase Israeli security, to insure Israel’s future as a Jewish state and to prevent its international isolation. ... To support Israel wisely, it is essential to sweep away the misperceptions.

Brewer has dubbed the Federal Government’s challenge to the laws “unconstitutional” and considers the entire report, which lists 100 items that the government is doing domestically to protect human rights, to be an example of “internationalism run amok.”

So much ink has been spilled regarding President Obama and the Jewish vote that you would think the ink well would have run dry by now. Yet there appears to be an abiding fascinating with this issue that our political chattering class simply cannot let go. In walked The New York Times’ Charles Blow recently with his own highly imperfect analysis, which conclusively only really demonstrated one thing: being a columnist does not necessarily mean one understands the intricacies of polling methodology and statistics.

Despite decades of at least every-other-year debates about whether Jews are moving towards the GOP (and over-the-top claims from the right that “the time has finally come”), now—courtesy of Gallup—we have some clear-eyed information.

Per Gallup, throughout the Obama administration, American Jews have remained consistently more supportive of President Obama than other Americans—and the margin of additional support that Jews give him (13-14 percent above all Americans) has remained constant since the beginning of his term. This despite the headlines regarding supposed snubs, various circulated myths surrounding relations between this administration and Israel’s leaders, and the hard work on all sides that has brought us to the eve of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians set to begin next week.

These facts—and a genuine disinformation campaign by the right against this president within the Jewish community, and efforts by right-wing organizations covered in POLITICO and elsewhere to use the U.S.-Israel relationship as a political football—make these findings all the more significant.

Does any of this mean you’ll hear any less about how the Jewish vote is “in play?” Of course not. And are there American Jews who voted against this president and continue to oppose him? Sure. But combined with the fact that today’s Republican Party is getting farther and farther from the hearts and minds of the vast majority of American Jews, these findings remind us of one thing: American Jews remain overwhelmingly Democratic, and overwhelmingly—and consistently—supportive of President Obama.

JTA’s Ron Kampeas wrote of the new data:

Gallup’s more reliable aggregate reporting shows no change in the Jewish-general population gap support for Obama.

Kampeas’ full analysis can be read here.

Blow is just the most recent in a decades-long series of pundits to falsely predict a sweeping migration of Jews to the Republican Party. But as evidenced by both the election returns in the FL-19 special election and the new data from Gallup, Jews remain solidly Democratic.