The American Muslim (TAM)

Jewish Editor Suggests Israel Assassinate Obama - updated 1/24

Sheila Musaji
Posted Jan 20, 2012 •Permalink • Printer-Friendly Version

Jewish Editor Suggests Israel Assassinate Obama

by Sheila Musaji

Uproar after Jewish newspaper publisher suggests Israel assassinate Barack Obama was the headline of an article that I thought I must have misread. Andrew Adler, owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times couldn’t have said such a thing in an American newspaper, could he?

That simply isn’t possible, or it is a satirical article with a title meant to get your attention is what I initially thought.

Adler, who has since apologized for his article, listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in an article published in his newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

I did a quick search, and found lots of other articles discussing this same incident. You can see a copy of the original print article here. John Cook of Gawker seems to have been the first to report on this. The fact that the original article was in print and not online kept this from being more widely publicized right away. The print article was published on January 13th, and is only now coming to the attention of the net.

Here is what Adler actually said

“Three, give the go-ahead for US-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice-president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.

Yes, you read “three” correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?

How far would you go to save a nation comprised of 7 million lives – Jews, Christians and Arabs alike? You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.”

And now, he says that he is sorry and that he never meant that he was advocating an assassination.

National American Jewish organizations are speaking out and condemning Adler’s article:

Abraham H. Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, said there is “no excuse” for that kind of rhetoric. “It doesn’t even belong in fiction. These are irresponsible and extremist words. It is outrageous and beyond the pale. An apology cannot possibly repair the damage,” he said in a statement. “Mr. Adler’s lack of judgment as a publisher, editor and columnist raises serious questions as to whether he’s fit to run a newspaper.”

The National Jewish Democratic Council described the comments as “despicable.” “It is the height of irresponsibility to make the horrific suggestion that the State of Israel should assassinate the President of the United States of America,” NJDC President David Harris said in a statement. “To dare to give such despicable ideas space in a newspaper—no less in the words of the paper’s owner and publisher, and a Jewish newspaper at that—is beyond the pale.”

The Atlanta Journal Constitution noted in an article about Adler’s comments that The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, was in Israel on Friday and he was expected to urge the country not to rush to attack Iran at a time when the U.S. is trying to rally additional global support to pressure Tehran through sanctions to dial back its nuclear program. Dempsey met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been warning about the dangers of the Iranian nuclear program for more than a decade.

It does make it difficult not to wonder if Mr. Adler wasn’t attempting to influence these discussions by making this statement at this time. There are a lot of possibilities for what might have prompted such a disgraceful article, including the possibility that Adler was speaking on behalf of Mossad. I don’t believe that Adler’s explanation for his article is one of the possibilities— “I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers” is simply not believable.

Whatever his motivation, an American citizen used his platform as the publisher of a newspaper to call on agents of a foreign government to assassinate the President of the United States in order to further the aims of that foreign government.

It will be interesting to see if there will be an investigation, and what consequences there might be for such behavior. His statements seem to be at least as incendiary as those of Anwar al Awlaki.

The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University has the U.S. Code which contains section 2385 listing the penalties for advocating overthrow of the government and it would seem that Adler’s call for putting the assassination of the President of the U.S. “on the table” as an option fits the wording of this law.

UPDATE 1/21/2012

This story sadly intersects with another. I have just posted an article Zaid Jilani, a Victim of False Anti-Semitism Charges on a smear campaign claiming that anyone using the term “Israel-firster” is anti-Semitic. In my lengthy article giving the background of this smear campaign, I refer to an article by Chemi Shalev posted yesterday on Haaretz which clearly explains how these two stories intersect. Shalev notes in his article that

... It is ironic that Adler’s despicable diatribe comes against the backdrop of a fierce blogosphere debate that flared up yesterday about the term “Israel-firsters” and whether it is a legitimate critique or an anti-Semitic slur. Adler, for his part, has provided an example of a sub-specie of “Israel-firsters” that have not only lost track of where their loyalties lie, they have gone off the tracks altogether. He has pleased anti-Zionists and delighted anti-Semites by giving them the kind of “proof” they relish for accusing American supporters of Israel not of “double loyalty” but of one-sided treachery, plain and simple.

Under Israeli law, Adler could be prosecuted for inciting to violence and could be sentenced to five years in jail. I do not purport to know much about the Georgian penal code, but I note that it contains the offense of “criminal solicitation” which occurs “when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony, he solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.” Adler’s column of January 13 might arguably fit the bill.

There is something eerily familiar in all this, of course, for anyone who was present 16 years ago at Tel Aviv’s Kikar Malchei Yisrael, as it was then known, on the night that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. One can already envisage how Adler will be disowned, described as a “wild weed,” depicted as a lone wolf who does not represent anyone in his or in anyone else’s community and used as a springboard for a righteously indignant, preemptive counteroffensive that will show how his solitary case is being exploited to score points against anyone who legitimately criticizes Obama.

And while we might all stipulate that there is no Jew anywhere in the world who is currently contemplating any act of violence against President Obama, I know, and most of you know, that Adler’s crazy and criminal suggestions are not the ranting of some loony-tune individual and were not taken out of thin air - but are the inevitable result of the inordinate volume of repugnant venom that some of Obama’s political rivals, Jews and non-Jews included, have been spewing for the last three years.

Anyone who has spent any time talking to some of the more vociferous detractors of Obama, Jewish or otherwise, has inevitably encountered those nasty nutters, and they are many, who still believe he is a Muslim, who are utterly convinced that he wants to destroy Israel, and who seriously debate whether he is more like Ahmadinejad than Arafat or – and I heard this one with my own ears – more like Hitler than Haman.

Anyone who reads some of the opinion articles and blogs posted on the Internet by the more extreme Obama-hating writers and pundits – again, many of them Jews - cannot deny the wanton and inflammatory nature of much of their anti-Obama invective.

And anyone who lived through the Israeli right-wing’s days of rage against Rabin and the Oslo Accords can never forget that this deluge of deadly toxins need trigger just one homicidal chemical reaction in just one fanatic brain for history to be changed forever.

UPDATE 1/24/2012

Huffington Post reports that Adler has said that he is “relinquishing all day-to-day activities effective immediately,” and looking for a buyer for the newspaper.