In January a Ha'aretz panel of political experts ranked the various Presidential candidates based on their support for strong US-Israeli ties and their opposition to Iran. Of the candidates who made it to 2008, Barack Obama was dead last. After Obama, the next worst candidate was Joe Biden. So I'm less than surprised that the Obama/Biden ticket got this speech shut down:

Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator's intentions and to call for action to thwart him. He must be stopped. The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a "Final Solution" - the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a "stinking corpse" that is "on its way to annihilation." Such talk cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a madman - not when Iran just this summer tested long-range Shahab-3 missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv, not when the Iranian nuclear program is nearing completion, and not when Iran sponsors terrorists that threaten and kill innocent people around the world.

The awesomeness of the speech might make you forget the sheer mendacity involved in not letting Palin deliver it. I thought that liberal Jewish organizations had pretty much maxed out on insufferable absurdity when they reacted to the RJC's demonstrably accurate polling questions. But the NJDC's role in killing this speech and elevating Ahmadinejad - along with other liberal Jewish organizations like JStreet - set new standards for shameless, unblinking hypocrisy:

Monday’s protest against Ahmadinejad is too important to be tainted by partisanship. Unfortunately, the campaign of Senator John McCain is much more interested in scoring political points than insuring there is bipartisan solidarity around the anti- Ahmadinejad efforts. Therefore, we call upon the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations to withdraw the invitation to Governor Sarah Palin and we applaud Senator Hillary Clinton’s decision to not attend the rally after the attendance of Palin was announced.

The Obama campaign forces Democrats to withdraw from a non-partisan event. Then they attack the McCain campaign - along with the bulk of America's Jewish organizations - for playing partisan politics on Iran. Then they get self-righteous about it. Surreal. Just mind numbingly surreal.

You know what would be much easier than having to suffer through this? Easier than having to listen to these jagoffs make the dumbest arguments imaginable? It would be easier if liberal Jews would just admit that they're not that worried about political Islam and that they're not really concerned about Israel. It's not like this is some huge secret. The polling on this question has been conclusive for years. Both in absolute terms and relative to other groups like Christian evangelicals, liberal Jews just aren't that concerned about Israeli security.

More broadly, their foreign policy inclinations are to minimize the spread of political Islam while emphasizing "root cause" and "cycle of violence" arguments. It's not for nothing that political watchers openly mocked John Edwards for trying to get the NJDC enthusiastic about defending Israel. Yeah there are six million Israeli Jews being targeted for genocide. And yeah they kind of care. But it's just not a priority for them.

But Democrats can't just admit that their foreign policy gets cashed out as "it's all Israel's fault." They'd lose. So instead liberal Jewish groups unblinkingly offer smear after smear and aggressively stupid argument after aggressively stupid argument. After the jump, a catalogue of some of their most blatant fabrications and their most vicious smears - predictably issued about Obama's most obviously anti-Semitic supporters and stridently anti-Israel statements.