Leading neoconservatives including Bill Kristol have launched an anti-Obama pro Israel group, the Emergency Committee for Israel, Ben Smith reports: Leading conservatives will launch a new pro-Israel group this week with a scathing attack on Rep. Joe Sestak, the Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, the first shot in what they say will be a confrontational campaign against the Obama administration’s Mideast policy and the Democrats who support it.
The Emergency Committee for Israel’s leadership unites two major strands of support for the Jewish state: The hawkish, neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, many of whom are Jewish, and conservative Evangelical Christians who have become increasingly outspoken in their support for Israel. The new group’s board includes Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and Gary Bauer, the former Republican presidential candidate who leads the group American Values, as well as Rachel Abrams, a conservative writer and activist.
“We’re the pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community,” said Kristol.
While President Barack Obama and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to put the best public face on their differences after a White House meeting last week, the two leaders have had a contentious relationship. Some American backers of Israel, as well as many Israelis, remain deeply suspicious of Obama’s efforts to press Israel toward specific policy shifts and to improve American relations with the Muslim world.
The new committee declined to disclose its funding — as a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization, it isn’t required to — but said it had raised enough to air its first ad, starting this week, on Fox and CNN and during a Philadelphia Phillies game. The ad attacks Sestak for signing a letter criticizing Israel’s blockade of Gaza while not signing a defense of Israel circulated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and for appearing at a fundraiser for the Council on American Islamic Relations, which it describes as an “anti-Israel organization the FBI called a ‘front group for Hamas.’” ....
More. Meantime, our colleague Ken Vogel reported yesterday that Sarah Palin's SarahPAC has paid Kristol's Weekly Standard colleague Michael Goldfarb and former McCain campaign foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann of Orion Strategies $90,000 since July 2009 to advise her on foreign policy. Ken:
SarahPAC continued paying $10,000 a month to a consulting firm run by former John McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann to provide consulting on “national and international issues” to Palin.
Her late June speech outlining a hawkish approach to international engagement was well received by conservative foreign policy types and taken seriously by the broader community – a marked contrast from the wide-spread criticism in 2008 that her views on international affairs were often ill informed.
