Sen. John Kerry's on his way, Jewish backers say

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's surprising victory in Iowa Monday has led his Jewish supporters to predict that more members of the Jewish community will now back his campaign.

Kerry, 60, defied expectations – and recent polls – with the victory. North Carolina Sen. John Edwards placed a strong, surprising second. And the frontrunner for months, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, came in third.

"People want to nominate a Democratic candidate for president who can beat George Bush and can lead this country in a different direction, who basically meets those two tests," Alan Solomont, co-chairman of Kerry's campaign in Massachusetts, told The Jerusalem Post Tuesday.

"The voters of Iowa looked at the candidates real close and decided, maybe surprisingly but also significantly, that John Kerry best meets those two tests... That's just going to be replicated. It's the unique combination that John Kerry brings to this race – experience in foreign policy and national security with experience dealing with domestic issues."

"John has support in the Jewish community that is as strong as any candidate," he added.

While Solomont is heading up the fund-raising effort in Massachusetts, other Jews across the country are raising money for Kerry. Among them is Kerry's national finance chairman, Lou Susman, a financial services executive based in Chicago. Mark Gorenberg, a San Francisco venture capitalist, is scouting out donors on the West Coast. And in Colorado, Norm Brownstein, a Denver-based lawyer active in AIPAC, is raising funds.

Another Jewish supporter is Kerry's brother, Cameron, who converted to Judaism two decades ago before marrying his Jewish wife, Kathy Weinman. Kerry's Jewish roots are also biological. Kerry learned last year from a newspaper report that his grandfather Frederick Kerry – born Fritz Kohn – was originally Jewish. Kerry was raised Catholic.

Solomont is on the executive board of the Israel Policy Forum, which advocates strong US involvement in fostering a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. He attended the December 1 signing of the Geneva Accord in Switzerland, he notes, "on my own behalf, because I believe that whatever we're doing there ain't working."

Asked whether Kerry is a backer of Geneva, Solomont said, "No, I don't think John Kerry is looking to really get into that discussion, because I think, in a sense, his views and positions would have a broader perspective – that nothing positive is going to happen in that region without purposeful and consistent American involvement."

Two days after the Geneva signing, Kerry spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and applauded "private citizens as well as elected officials [who] have worked hard in these last months to advance the peace process, with some of them offering their own vision of a final settlement.

"They understand, as president [Bill] Clinton did, that it may be easier to break the stalemate and end the violence fostered by extremists if the end game is the focus, not the steps leading up to it."

Kerry vowed to appoint a presidential ambassador to shepherd the peace process. Among those cited as possibilities are Clinton, former president Jimmy Carter, and former secretary of state James Baker, who had notoriously rough relations with the Shamir government.

Kerry acknowledged that Baker "wasn't all that popular" after a number of his shuttle missions to the Middle East but said it is necessary to appoint someone with experience in the region.

"I think he was trying to show that he would take a more activist role," Solomont said. "There are probably other people that John Kerry would be more likely to send than Baker... He would certainly hear advice from the Jewish community." Kerry has tried to portray Dean as less supportive of Israel.

"Howard Dean has said that Hamas are soldiers – no one has ever called Hamas soldiers before. Howard Dean has said we don't take sides in the Middle East. We took sides in 1948. Israel is our ally," Kerry said in a January 11 interview on Meet the Press.

Kerry was referring to a CNN interview with Dean in November. When asked about Israel's targeted killings of Hamas members, Dean said: "There is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war, and, therefore it seems to me, that they are going to be casualties if they are going to make war."

Dean aides said the candidate, by referring to Hamas terrorists as soldiers, was indicating he believes Israel has a legal right to kill them. Solomont acknowledges that the Kerry campaign struggled to win Jewish, and general, support in the run-up to Iowa.

"There's no question that a month ago people basically thought the candidacy was dead, so they didn't have confidence that this guy was going to get the nomination."

He says the turnaround has been immediate. "What we're seeing already this morning, and started seeing it over the last few days... is John Kerry's candidacy has been revived. People have confidence now that he has an ability to come back and that he can win this thing."

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, has outlined a foreign policy that would renew America's participation in international institutions, and, as he told the Council on Foreign Relations, would "replace the Bush years of isolation with a new era of alliances."

"We have to work with the international community to define a global strategy that is inclusive, not exclusive, collective and not imperial," Kerry said.

He has said he would put the UN – which he says should be seen as "an asset... not a liability" – in charge of reconstruction in Iraq, convene a summit of world leaders to discuss a common anti-terrorism agenda, and appoint a "special presidential envoy for the Islamic world."

The next crucial vote is the January 27 New Hampshire primary, which political analysts said would determine whether Iowa was simply exhibiting an independent streak or was in fact predictive of a turn around in the primary race.

"Iowa obviously meant that the Dean phenomenon is not all that it's cracked up to be. But it could also be a quadrennial measure of the independence of Iowa voters," said Democratic media strategist Steve Rabinowitz.

What You Don’t Know About John Kerry
Newsmax. ^ | Jan. 20, 2004 | Chuck Noe

Posted on 01/21/2004 8:04:53 AM PST by OPS4

What You Don’t Know About John Kerry Chuck Noe, NewsMax.com Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2004 With his win in Iowa, Sen. John Kerry could be on his way to the White House. But most Americans are unaware of the real Kerry. Here are facts and quotations that reveal the character of the new Democrat leader.

Denouncing America with ‘Hanoi’ Jane: Although Wesley Clark and others have attacked former front-runner Howard Dean as a draft-dodging ski bum, Kerry is far more complex than the simple war hero he portrays himself as. He became a celebrated organizer for one of America's most extreme appeasement groups, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He consorted with the likes of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s radical former attorney general.

He attended a seminar bankrolled by Fonda in Detroit in February 1971. Watching 125 self-proclaimed Vietnam veterans testify at a Howard Johnson’s about atrocities allegedly committed by U.S. forces, the man who would be president later said he found the accounts shocking and irrefutable.

Dubbed “The Winter Soldier Investigation,” the protest attracted minimal media attention, according to the Los Angeles Times, because Fonda insisted it be held in the remote Michigan city rather than the less “authentic” Washington, D.C.

Still, the event gave Kerry an idea for a protest that was sure to be a media smash, and he immediately set out to organize one of the most confrontational protests of the war.

Operation Dewey Canyon III began on April 18, 1971, when nearly 1,000 Vietnam veterans and people claiming to be veterans gathered on Washington’s Mall for what they called “a limited incursion into the country of Congress.”

The group staged mock firefights on the steps of the Capitol and Supreme Court and defied U.S. Park Police after the Department of Justice issued an injunction barring it from camping on the Mall.

Those evil American soldiers: Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry claimed that U.S. soldiers had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

‘We are not the best’: In his testimony, Kerry claimed there was no communist threat and said: “In 1970 at West Point Vice President Agnew said ‘some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse,’ and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion, and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country ….” U.S. Veteran Dispatch noted in 1996: “Kerry's testimony, it should be noted, occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons. Kerry was a supporter of the ‘People's Peace Treaty,’" a supposed ‘people's’ declaration to end the war, reportedly drawn up in communist East Germany. It included nine points, all of which were taken from Viet Cong peace proposals at the Paris peace talks as conditions for ending the war.”

Throw as I say, not as I do: On that same day he led members of VVAW in a protest during which they threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the U.S. Capitol. Kerry later admitted the medals he threw were not his. To this day they hang on the wall of his office.

Communist stooge: The communist Daily World delightedly published photos of him speaking to demonstrators and boasted that the marchers displayed a banner depicting a portrait of Communist Party leader Angela Davis, on record stating, “I am dedicated to the overthrow of your system of government and your society,” the New American recalled in May 2003. “By frequently participating in VVAW’s demonstrations, Kerry found himself marching alongside what the Boston Herald Traveler identified as ‘revolutionary Communists.’ While noting that known Reds had openly organized these events, the December 12, 1971 Herald Traveler reported the presence of an ‘abundance of Vietcong flags, clenched fists raised in the air, and placards plainly bearing legends in support of China, Cuba, the USSR, North Korea and the Hanoi government.’"

Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry says: “As a national leader of VVAW, Kerry campaigned against the effort of the United States to contain the spread of Communism. He used the blood of servicemen still in the field for his own political advancement by claiming that their blood was being shed unnecessarily or in vain.

“Under Kerry's leadership, VVAW members mocked the uniform of United States soldiers by wearing tattered fatigues marked with pro-communist graffiti. They dishonored America by marching in demonstrations under the flag of the Viet Cong enemy.”

Sen. John McCain revealed that his North Vietnamese captors had used reports of Kerry-led protests to taunt him and his fellow prisoners. Retired General George S. Patton III angrily noted that Kerry’s actions had “given aid and comfort to the enemy.”

In recent years when Kerry has exploited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for photo opportunities on Veterans Day, some veterans, still outraged by his betrayal, have turned their backs on him.

The book he doesn’t want you to see: When Kerry ran for election to the U.S. House of Representative in 1972, “he found it necessary to suppress reproduction of the cover picture appearing on his own book, The New Soldier. His political opponent pointed out that it depicted several unkempt youths crudely handling an American flag to mock the famous photo of the U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima,” according to Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry. “Suddenly, copies of the book became unavailable and even disappeared from libraries. But the Lowell (Mass.) Sun said of the type of person shown on its cover: ‘These people spit on the flag, they burn the flag, they carry the flag upside down, [and] they all but wipe their noses with it in their efforts to show their contempt for everything it still stands for,’” the New American reported.

Even today it is hard to find this infamous photo and book.

Friendly with the enemy: Kerry’s fondness for Vietnam’s communist dictatorship, one of the most oppressive in the world, continues. As chairman of the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, created in 1991 to investigate reports that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam, Kerry badgered the panel into voting that no American servicemen remained in Vietnam.

“[N]o one in the United States Senate pushed harder to bury the POW/MIA issue, the last obstacle preventing normalization of relations with Hanoi, than John Forbes Kerry,” noted U.S. Veteran Dispatch.

“But Kerry's participation in the Committee became controversial in December 1992,” reported the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, “when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry's cousin.”

The “odd coincidence,” according to FrontPageMagazine.com, involved a deal worth $905 million.

Jeff Jacoby, the token conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, notes that Kerry continues his apologia for Vietnam's never-ending atrocities. "Far from taking the lead on the Vietnam Human Rights Bill, he has prevented it from coming to a vote. He claims that making an issue of Hanoi's repression would be counterproductive."

Kerry is also a fan of China’s communist dictatorship. “On May 19, 1994, five years after Tiananmen Square, Kerry spoke on the Senate floor against linking China's Most Favored Nation trade status to its human rights record,” Slate reported.

Kerry said: “China is the strongest military power in Asia. We need China's cooperation. We cannot afford to adopt a cold-war kind of policy that merely excludes and pushes China away.”

Limiting China's MFN status “would make us a bit player in a production of enormous proportions. We possess no stick, including MFN, which can force China to embrace internationally recognized human rights and freedoms.”

More extreme than Hillary and Kucinich: Among the White House wannabes, long-shot Rep. Dennis Kucinich has the reputation of holding the most left-wing congressional voting record. In fact, this “honor” goes to Kerry. According to American Conservative Union, Kerry has a lifetime rating of 6 percent, compared to 13 for the demolished Rep. Dick Gephardt, 14 for Sen. John Edwards, 15 for Kucinich and 19 for Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle score 13 percent. Only the likes of Sens. Teddy Kennedy and Barbara Boxer have more left-wing records than Kerry. In contrast, Sen. John Breaux, one of the upper chamber’s few remaining moderate Democrats, has a 46.

Drive as I say, not as I do: Like Al Gore and other self-described environmentalists, Kerry has a radical agenda that would devastate the U.S. economy in favor of the likes of communist China, yet he enjoys the gas-guzzling modern conveniences that greens denounce. Kerry, a delegate to the environment-destroying Earth Summit in 1992 (where he met his future wife, left-wing activist Teresa Heinz, the multimillionaire widow of GOP Sen. John Heinz), the Kyoto climate talks in 1997 and the Hague Conference of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2000, has attacked President Bush for withdrawing from the anti-U.S. Kyoto Protocol. This treaty, which then-President Bill Clinton had signed, would impose severe restrictions on the United States but not Third World polluters that already enjoy huge trade surpluses with the U.S. However, although Kerry spouts the party line on anti-U.S. ecopolicy, he doesn’t like to practice what he preaches. Kerry was humiliated in April 2002 when photographed attending a rally against energy independence and then heading back to his SUV, the symbol of all that is evil to greens.

Bone to pick: Bush-hating conspiracy theorists find it alarming that the president, like his father, was a member of the secretive Skull and Bones society at Yale University. Another alum of this club: John Kerry.

Waffling on Iraq: Kerry has the tough job of wooing Howard Dean’s anti-war Democrats despite his support of the war in Iraq. His favorite tactic, claiming the president outfoxed him, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. On “Meet the Press” in late August, Tim Russert played a tape of Kerry addressing the Senate in October 2002 with a hard-line speech declaring Iraq “capable of quickly producing weaponizing” of biological weapons that could be delivered against “the United States itself.”

Kerry insisted: “That is exactly the point I’m making. We were given this information by our intelligence community.”

However, as columnist Robert Novak noted, “as a senator, Kerry had access to the National Intelligence Estimate that was skeptical of Iraqi capability. Being tricky may no longer be as effective politically as it once was.”

No doubt Dean, Lieberman, Clark and other rivals will now use these and other details to do to Kerry what the Democrats did to Dean.

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