Obama and the Jewish Question

The comments after the first article is downright sickening. In the first comment, someone named "exiled53" said this about Senator Obama:

Obama, by contrast, is a certifiable jihadist sympathizer.

Amazingly terrible. And adding Obama's middle name to show that he is "connected" to Muslim extremists is just bush league. Full-grown adults who make leaps like that make me wonder if the air is clean enough.

Robin Koerner may not be aware of the history and connotations of the phrase "the Jewish question." It usually denotes an effort to eliminate Jews and can be anything from discrimination to murder.

T_Steel: Don't bother to read the talkbacks - they are almost always obnoxious.

I don't have much time to get into this deeper right now, but a few points. Yes, Israelis are interested in the positions of the US Presidential candidates, but no, these aren't really the best examples of that interest.

Israelinsider.com is a right wing web pub that basically has a target audience of more hardline US Jews. Haaretz.com is the English version of the left-wing Ha'aretz Hebrew daily, but like all other English laguage Israeli news websites (most notably the Jerusalem Post and ynetnews.com), it's audience is mainly abroad and among the Anglo population within Israel itself. Haaretz.com traffic tends to be more European than the others because of their politics (as noted by the talkbacks there), but most revenues and eyeballs are still in the US.

In order to get a good idea of what the Israeli media is thinking, you need to go to the mainstream Yediot Ahronot, Ma'ariv, and Hebrew language Ha'aretz sources and websites. You need to turn on Israeli news stations. In terms of talkbacks, you'll find the discussion in the hebrew sites (in hebrew) not congruent with the english language sites since the participants are mostly Israeli nationals. This is not to say that it's not plenty divisive since there's a broad spectrum of Israeli political opinion (intensely so), but at least those opinions are more domestic in nature rather than armchair folks abroad.

And to Holly's point, yeah, for whatever reason talkbacks on Israeli websites (left, right or center) can get pretty kookie... :-S

Idiosyncrat is correct about the various sources. If you have an open mind or a wicked (perverse?) sense of humor, you may find the talkbacks on the sites to be entertaining, rather than kooky, though.

Ditto all of the above on the sources but also on Holly's note about the Jewish Question. Robin - did you mean, the Israel and Palestinian state question?

Btw, I imagine we could find media reports that demonstrate the interest of residents of many different countries throughout the world in the current presidential contest, with very good reason. I assume, Robin, you think that Israelis have a keener interest than some? Or too keen? Or what, exactly?

Also - I bet the non-Jews in Israel are also interested in the presidential race here - though I'm not sure which sources we would go to to track it.