Don't Let 'Kill Obama' Article Sow Distrust

I moved to East Cobb from North Carolina in 2005 to become editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, so the controversy that has arisen around that once-great publication leaves me sad and angry.

A fellow member of East Cobb’s Jewish community, Andrew Adler, is the owner and publisher of the 87-year-old Jewish Times. What he wrote in the Jan. 13 issue of the weekly didn’t just cross the line of journalistic responsibility; his column destroyed it.

Under the headline “What would you do?” (posted online by Gawker), Adler laid out what he considers Israel’s three options to ensure its survival: Attack Hamas and Hezbollah; destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities; or assassinate President Barack Obama.

Yes, a Jewish publisher writing in a Jewish newspaper speculated on the possibility of Israel killing a U.S. president to get a friendlier administration. (Adler bought the Jewish Times in 2009 long after I left, so we never worked together.)

“The suggestion by anyone, in this case a Jewish newspaper publisher, that Israel should consider assassinating President Obama is shocking beyond belief,” Dov Wilker, the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Atlanta office in Buckhead, said in response Friday.

Wilker should know. He used to work for the in Midtown, and he recently moved back to Atlanta from Israel.

“We are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place,” Wilker added. “How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?”

Israel has one real friend in the world, the United States; turning America into an enemy with such an act of war would be nothing short of national suicide.

But I’m not worried about U.S.-Israel relations. I fear the effects of Adler’s column in Cobb County, metro Atlanta, and communities across the country and around the world.

Adler provided ammunition for the most dangerous slander against Jews: that we aren’t really loyal citizens like the Christians around us.

That idea of Jews as a separate, disloyal element has led to ghettos, pogroms, expulsions and the Holocaust.

Those great crimes won’t happen here, no matter how many stupid things people write, but smaller, subtler crimes can.

The written word has created doubts in our neighbors’ minds and produced discrimination against Jews through the centuries. Usually, the culprit is something vicious written about the Jewish community; how much more harm will come from something written by one of our own?

Adler was not calling for Obama’s assassination. He was using the most extreme example he could think of to shock people into recognizing Israel’s tenuous position.

But that’s not the message spreading worldwide. All the details, the context and the facts are lost.

Even the actual culprit is forgotten: A friend of mine, Marcy Levinson-Brooks, has received nasty email messages and phone calls since Friday because people, including The Jewish Daily Forward and The Jerusalem Post, mixed up her online Jewish publication, AtlantaJewishNews.com, and Adler’s unrelated newspaper.

She has been forced to defend herself while joining the condemnation of Adler’s column and repeating over and over that she has nothing to do with him.

People take away the idea that a Jewish publisher in Atlanta suggested that Israel might try to kill the U.S. president. That easily evolves in the Internet game of virtual telephone into an American Jewish community leader calling for the assassination of our president.

That’s why national Jewish leaders such as the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman and the National Jewish Democratic Council’s David A. Harris rushed to blast the column and Adler.

“An apology cannot possibly repair the damage,” Foxman said.

I fear that Foxman is right.

I can’t and won’t speak for Adler, who apologized in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. And I can’t speak for the East Cobb Jewish community; no one can. We’re a large, diverse group of individuals.

But in case any fellow East Cobbers harbor doubts, let me be clear: Love of America and support for Israel are not in conflict, any more than love of America and support for Ireland cause a conflict for Irish-Americans. 

American Jews are, first and foremost, Americans. This is our country. We love it and appreciate it because it is our home, a place that has been our haven for centuries and, despite an occasional stupid statement, will remain so for centuries to come.