The center-right political advocacy organization Emergency Committee for Israel published an ad on Thursday in 23 Jewish newspapers spotlighting “liberal criticism” of President Barack Obama’s record.
Noah Pollak, the committee’s executive director, said the ad will reach some 600,000 Jewish voters in major marketplaces like New York, Florida, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore and New Jersey.
Pollak declined to comment on the cost of the ad buy, but said the ad features “liberal criticism” of the president because the Obama campaign likes to allege that conservatives are cynically using Obama’s record on Israel as a wedge issue.
“We hope the impact of this ad is to show that the Obama campaign rhetoric about his record doesn’t match up to reality,” Pollak said. “There’s been an extensive effort by the Obama campaign to rewrite the president’s record on Israel.”
Pollak cited White House spokesman Jay Carney’s refusal to identify the capital of Israel as either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem on Thursday as evidence that “the Obama campaign doesn’t recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”
Tel Aviv is home to the United States Embassy in Israel, and somewhere former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk became very familiar with. Some of Indyk’s comments, made to Nahum Barnea of the daily Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in May, are featured in the ad: “From his [Obama’s] first day in the White House, he put the Middle East at the top of his political agenda,” Indyk said. “Unfortunately for him, his personal involvement only made things worse.”
The ad also features comments from columnist Ari Shavit and comments that have appeared in the Washington Post. It asks, “What will they be saying after another four years of Obama?”
This ad’s launch comes just ahead of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s trip to Israel on Sunday, which the Obama campaign has publicly attacked.