Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Wisconsin Tommy Thompson on Sunday said his opponent, Democratic congresswoman Tammy Baldwin is “anti-Jewish” and “anti-Israel.”

“Tammy Baldwin, her whole record is anti-Israel,” Thompson said at a press conference in Wauwatosa. “She voted for the first time for the sanctions three months ago because she knew she was running for the U.S. Senate. That is the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.

“She’s anti-Israel, she’s anti-Jewish and she’s trying to now somehow obfuscate her views and her intentions,” the former governor added.

Thompson’s comments come on the heels of an attack ad released last week by the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel, claiming Baldwin accused Israel of “war crimes” and said “terrorists who attacked Israel” are “innocent victims.”

Thompson didn’t provide any evidence to Baldwin’s purported anti-Semitism (her campaign pointed out that she recently spoke before a the Jewish Community Center in Whitefish Bay, WI). However, Thompson himself has a history with anti-Jewish rhetoric. In 2007 he was forced to apologize after saying that making money “is part of the Jewish tradition.”

“I just want to clarify something because I didn’t [by] any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things,” he said, making his apology. “What I was referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the accomplishments of the Jewish religion. You’ve been outstanding business people and I compliment you for that.”

Mitt Romney’s recent visit to Jerusalem drummed up a few controversies: his top adviser upped the war rhetoric on Iran, Romney suggested Palestinian culture is “inferior to Israeli culture,” and he proclaimed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — a designation no U.S. administration has made in more than six decades.

Now, a right-wing pressure group is out with an ad lauding Romney’s Jerusalem position. But the group appears to be getting “a little ahead” of Romney himself — as an aide put it when a top neoconservative adviser staked out an especially hawkish position on Iran. The group, the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), released an ad praising Romney for declaring that Jerusalem is the “capital of Israel.”

But in a press release accompanying the ad, ECI head Bill Kristol said Romney’s position on Jerusalem was even father to the right than anything the candidate has said:

Mitt Romney understands the meaning of Jerusalem, whole and free, the capital of Israel.

The division of Jerusalem is a key sticking point in the stalled peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. While Israel annexed the whole city — a move the U.S. and international community don’t recognize — Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Campaigning in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama dove into this territory by telling an audience that Jerusalem “must remain undivided,” but walked the statement back shortly thereafter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, generally regarded as a hard-liner, has gone back and forth on the issue. He told PBS last year that, while he wanted Jerusalem to remain “united,” the city’s final status would only be decided “after a negotiation.” But earlier this year, Netanyahu said, “Jerusalem will remain forever the united capital of the State of Israel.”

Declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, while breaking with long-standing U.S. policy, is one thing. But declaring that Jerusalem will not be divided — even if that could potentially kill any dimming hopes for a two-state solution — is quite another. As the vociferous Romney supporter and Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin has written in the past about merely moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem:

If we want to maintain our role as a future broker in the (however presently dormant) “peace process,” we’re not going to make a move that will be read as a fait accompli on the final status of Jerusalem.

Rubin is (was) right, and some intrepid campaign reporter should ask Mitt Romney if he agrees with Kristol’s characterization of his position and whether Jerusalem’s division is, as Netanyahu has claimed before, on the table for negotiations.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney held three fundraisers in the Hamptons, the exclusive beach towns known as a playground to super-rich New York City financiers. According to the Los Angeles Times, one event was co-hosted by Daniel Loeb, a hedge-funder who turned against President Obama and bankrolled a neoconservative pressure group that called last month for the U.S. to attack Iran. The Los Angeles Times reported:

At Romney’s luncheon with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the Creeks, supporters were asked to contribute or raise $25,000 per person for a VIP photo reception. Among the co-hosts were lobbyist Wayne Berman, a former bundler for George W. Bush, as well as financiers Lew Eisenberg and Daniel Loeb.

Loeb supported Obama’s first run for president, raising $200,000 for him in 2008. But, comparing Obama to an abusive spouse to the hedge-fund industry — “[Obama] really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it,” he told friends in an e-mail — he turned away from Obama and began supporting partisan, right-wing causes.

Among the beneficiaries of Loeb’s shifting political allegiances was a right-wing pressure group called the Emergency Committee For Israel (ECI). According to FEC filings, Loeb remains the largest single overall donor to ECI’s PAC.

Led by neoconservative don Bill Kristol, ECI is best known for publishing patently dishonest attacks on Obama, smear campaigns against its ideological opponents, and attempting to paint the Occupy Wall Street Protests as anti-Semitic (trying to discredit Occupy seems a natural move for a hedge-funder).

Last month, ECI launched a television ad calling on Obama to bomb Iran. Watch it here:

Kristol quickly followed-up on ECI’s pro-war ad with a long article in the Weekly Standard calling for Congress to authorize war with Iran — only the latest in a long line of such calls from Kristol.

Romney’s Iran policy is more difficult to nail down. The presumptive GOP nominee regularly employs militaristic rhetoric toward the Islamic Republic, and many of his top foreign policy advisers often call for war with Iran. But when asked how Romney’s Iran policy would be a change from Obama’s, his campaign has a hard time trying to differentiate.

One wonders, though, how quickly the divide will be bridged now that Romney and Kristol are feeding from the same trough.

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) released a new ad today suggesting that the U.S. should immediately bomb Iran. Among those behind the ECI and its ad are the same people who pushed the U.S. into the Iraq war.

The ad from ECI, a group which aims to push pro-Israel voters away from President Obama and is headed up by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, tells viewers in its new commercial that Obama is insufficiently committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and concludes, “Now it’s time to act,” followed by an explosion. Watch it:

ECI’s reflexive hawkishness stems from its hard-right neoconservative disposition. The organization was even born in the same Washington office as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a short-lived right-wing pressure group that pushed for an Iraq invasion. A major player in the Iraq war push, Kristol, for his part, already called for a war with Iran last October.

ECI, whose board members and director have a history of exhorting acts of violence, ignores U.S., U.N., and Israeli intelligence findings in their efforts for yet another U.S. war in the Middle East — this time with Iran.

In Israel, meanwhile, a growing consensus has emerged among former top security officials that a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be counterproductive to Israeli interests. And a report last month suggests that the consensus opposing an Israeli attack on Iran extends all the way to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense chiefs.
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In a debate last night with Jeremy Ben Ami of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, neoconservative don Bill Kristol told the audience in the New York synagogue that he had no problems with President Obama’s Israel policies. But just two months ago, a right-wing pro-Israel group Kristol heads rolled out the latest of its serial attacks on Obama’s policies toward Israel.

The Weekly Standard editor praised Obama and said the difference between Obama’s Israel policies and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s “is not that great.” Kristol stated that he was “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree.” He went on:

I’ve been mostly supportive of the Obama administration in the last couple of years…

I think President Obama has moved sufficiently on these issues from the Cairo speech in 2009 to the AIPAC speech of two months ago, that the difference between the parties is less than it was.

But as Haaretz and WNYC pointed out, the Kristol-led Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) consistently lambasts Obama on Israel. The group ran ads in Washington around its campaign asserting Obama was “not pro-israel.” In December, Kristol, in an ECI statement, said Obama “keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.” (Earlier that year, right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Kristol frequently praises, said that under the Obama administration “our security cooperation is unprecedented.”)

Just two months ago — far from the “last couple years” Kristol has been “supportive” of Obama’s policies — the hedge fund-bankrolled ECI released a 30-minute anti-Obama online film, complete with ominous music. In the film, Kristol associate Liz Cheney says Obama attempted to “put distance” between the U.S. and Israel. Neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer says Obama “delegitimized” Israel, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Lee Smith said Obama’s “narrative fit [a] rejectionist and resentful narrative.”

This isn’t the first time ECI’s attacks on the Obama administration’s Israel policies have been revealed as disingenuous political maneuvers. Last May, ECI executive director Noah Pollak, commenting via Twitter, publicly praised Obama’s speech on the Middle East, but ECI later condemned the speech in an attack ad. When ThinkProgress revealed the hypocrisy, Kristol disowned the tweets in comments to the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. Rubin added: “Kristol graciously avoided pointing out that while Pollak has the executive director title, the group is firmly under the control of Kristol and his two co-founders.”

With ECI “firmly under the control of Kristol,” and with Kristol now “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree” on Israel, will the organization lay off its right-wing attacks on the president? “We’re trying to decide,” Kristol told WNYC.

Tensions are high today in Israel-Palestine as thousands of protesters are expected to participate in what organizers have billed a “Global March to Jerusalem.” Activists from neighboring countries will march to the Israeli border, according to organizers, to “demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians and to protect Jerusalem.”

The march coincides with Palestinian “Land Day,” which commemorates the 1976 protests against Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land, in which six Palestinian Israelis were killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli forces. Clashes have already occurred between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces inside the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem earlier today.

While the march was planned as “non-violent civil resistance,” the event has received legitimate criticism because of organizers’ condemnation of Israel as a “racist, Zionist state,” and because of the support it has received from groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the government of Iran. Critics note that the goal of some extremists is to create a crisis by provoking a violent Israeli response.

Unfortunately, some conservatives are also quite happy to encourage that violence. Noah Pollak, the executive director of the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), tweeted his own preferences this morning:

Much like his ECI colleague Rachel Abrams, Pollak has a history of exhorting violence on Twitter:

Pollak also raised eyebrows last year when, after he praised President Obama’s May 19 speech calling for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, ECI turned around and attacked the president for the speech.

The GOP presidential presidential primary candidates and right-wing pressure groups are working hard to cast President Obama as a weak ally to Israel. Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have all challenged Obama’s commitment to Israel’s security. Today, the fringe right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel launched a bus-stop ad campaign asking: “[Obama] says a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Do you believe him? Do they?” above a picture of Ayatollah Khamanei and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But while the far-right attacks Obama’s pro-Israel credentials, their sentiments aren’t shared by Israeli President Shimon Peres. Last night, Peres told Charlie Rose that Obama “is a great president and a great friend of Israel,” during an event at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Security cooperation between the U.S. and Israel is “the best we’ve ever had,” said Peres.

And in an interview on Wednesday with The View’s Barbara Walters, Peres emphasized that “relations with Obama are in good shape. We have the highest respect for the president.” He went on to emphasize Obama’s security guarantees for the Jewish state:

PERES: The most important issue for Israel is our security. I think under President Obama we have the best relationship on the issue of security. Never were the security [...] needs better met than today under president Obama. This is a fact.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, as Peres indicates, Obama has been a firm ally of Israel and upheld security guarantees, but tensions in how to confront Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program is a source of tension. While the Obama administration has committed to pursuing a diplomatic track to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netnanyahu characterized diplomatic outreach to Iran as a “trap,” in comments to the media in Ottawa. In an interview published today, Obama said that “all options are on the table” but emphasized that Iran can be deterred from pursuing nuclear weapons through diplomacy and sanctions.

Today, the Emergency Committee for Israel (headed by Gary Bauer, Bill Kristol, and Rachel Abrams) ran a full-page ad in the New York Times smearing the Center for American Progress as being “anti-Israel” and for purportedly espousing “bigotry and anti-Israel extremism.” As our readers are well aware, these are fabricated smears which completely misrepresent CAP’s established record of incisive analysis and fair, accurate and honest reporting on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

But it is the ECI that has consistently embraced positions on Israel and the Middle East which are outside the mainstream. Don’t just take our word for it.

Last September, the American Jewish Committee’s director David Harris slammed ECI for turning Israel into a partisan wedge issue and exhibiting behavior “counterproductive to its stated aim of supporting Israel.” The head of the National Jewish Democratic Council said, “ECI’s behavior made it crystal clear that the organization is nothing more than a Republican front group bent on turning Israel into a partisan wedge issue.” And today, the Jewish Daily Forward says of the ECI ad: “[It's] one of the most virulent anti-Jewish advertisements I’ve ever seen. And it came from other Jews.”

While the ECI is quick to casually throw around divisive language, it is much slower to condemn its own ties to ethnic and religious intolerance. In October, ECI board member Rachel Abrams raised eyebrows for calling Palestinian militants “savages,” “unmanned animals,” and “food for sharks,” in a blog post.

It should come as no great surprise that ECI would choose to join in on the coordinated smear campaign against ThinkProgress. Previously, ECI has taken out ads ripping Obama for treating “Israel like a punching bag.” The attempts to paint progressives as anti-Semitic or anti-Israel has found little traction outside of fringe groups like ECI. Indeed, the misinformation campaign against ThinkProgress was widely denounced by mainstream political voices and journalists:

David Harris, National Jewish Democratic Council: CAP’s views on Israel and Iran reflect “mainstream positions and concerns of the American Jewish community — and indeed of most Americans.” Washington Post, January 20, 2012

Truman National Security Project: “CAP’s official policy positions stand up well against this smear campaign and are aimed at ensuring a mainstream foreign policy that is strong and principled.” January 20, 2012

Matt Bennett, Third Way: “We are baffled and appalled by the charges of anti-Semitism that some have leveled at CAP.” Washington Post, January 20, 2012

Joe Klein, Time Magazine: I’m not carrying water for CAP or Media Matters. I’ve disagreed with both in the past and both have criticized things I’ve written (although neither accused me of being a bigot). Calling them anti-Semitic is absurd, though. Calling David Petraeus anti-Semitic because he implied that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories made life more dangerous for U.S. troops in the region-well beyond absurd, since he was implying an obvious truth. TIME Magazine, January 19, 2012

Sarah Wildman, the Forward: “When anti-Semitism is falsely applied, we must also stand up and decry it as defamation, as character assault, as unjust.” The Forward, January 5, 2012

After a speech on Friday by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that implored Israel to make moves to thaw its cool relations with strategic partners and overcome its growing isolation, neoconservative commentators went bananas. Former Bush Mideast hand Elliott Abrams, speaking with neocon Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, wondered, “Does anyone wonder why Israelis don’t trust this administration to guard their security?” (In September, Abram’s himself said it was “true” that Israel and the U.S. enjoy “the best military-to-military relationship ever.”)

The most overblown response, though, came from right-wing don Bill Kristol. Speaking through a press release from the far-right-wing pressure group he heads, the Emergency Committee for Israel, Kristol attacked President Obama’s comments last weekend to Jewish donors that his administration’s security cooperation with Israel had reached new heights in the partnership. Kristol said:

Nobody believes President Obama when he claims, as he did last week, that he “has done more for the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.” That’s because he hasn’t — and because President Obama and his administration keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.

The problem with Kristol’s statement, and one he seems to willfully ignore, is that there are at least a few people who don’t hold his stated opinion about the Obama administration’s work on Israel’s security, among them Israel’s leaders.

In a speech delivered to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) national convention in May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called American security cooperation with Israel during the Obama administration “unprecedented”:

Yesterday President Obama spoke about his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security. He rightly said that our security cooperation is unprecedented. He spoke of that commitment not just in front of AIPAC. He spoke about it in two speeches heard throughout the Arab world. And he has backed those words with deeds.

In September, Netanyahu personally thanked Obama in a speech for his attentiveness and support in resolving a crisis when demonstrators overtook Israel’s embassy in Cairo.

The various U.S. security commitments to Israel are legion. In the same speech Kristol criticized, Panetta announced that “the U.S. armed forces and the [Israel Defense Forces] will conduct the largest joint exercises in the history of that partnership.” This spring, Israel used an expanded aid package from the Obama administration to develop the Iron Dome missile defense system that protects citizens of southern Israel from rocket attacks with a 93 percent success rate. And the U.S. has worked closely with Israel in slowing Iran’s nuclear progress, even reportedly partnering up to create the Stuxnet virus that hampered Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and selling Israel bunk-busing bombs. All the work has included unflinching diplomatic support for Israel in international fora.

In August, former Israeli prime minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that he could “hardly remember a better period of support, American support and cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us than what we have right now.” Last month, Barak said Obama is an “extremely strong supporter of Israel in regard to its security” and that his administration was “excelling in this.” He added: “I don’t think that anyone can raise any question mark about the devotion of this president to the security of Israel.” Maybe someone should tell Bill Kristol.

When Rachel Abrams, a board member at a right-wing pro-Israel group and wife of top Bush administration Mideast hand Elliott Abrams, called for Palestinian militants and their children to be made into “food for sharks,” something of a controversy erupted. The defense that Abrams was “clearly speaking about the terrorists” fell apart when she subsequently made the same call about this reporter and wrote that Palestinians of nearly any political stripe are terrorists.

The furor eventually extended all the way to the Washington Post after the neoconservative Post blogger Jennifer Rubin retweeted Abrams’ post. The Post’s ombudsman Patrick Pexton, deluged with complaints, wrote that he was “disappointed” with Rubin’s retweet, adding that it “did damage to The Post and the credibility that keeps it afloat.” The Post’s opinion page editor Fred Hiatt said that Pexton “is entitled to his views,” and refused to comment further on the ombudsman’s post.

Pexton is indeed “entitled to his views.” And, it seems, one of them might be that there exists at the Washington Post a double standard on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a purported e-mail exchange with a reader, who posted the correspondence on an internet message board, Pexton wrote that he thought that if Rubin had retweeted a call to kill Israelis — instead of Palestinians — she would likely be fired from her job. The reader, who went by the name Joe Emersberger, wrote: “Simple question: if the rant had been directed against Israelis, do you think Rubin would have been fired by the Post?” Pexton, in the apparent exchange, wrote back:

Off the record, I think it’s quite possible. But the ombudsman does not hire or fire people here. I only comment.

Asked to confirm the authenticity of the e-mail correspondence, the Washington Post’s public relations department referred ThinkProgress to Pexton, who “operates independently.” Pexton didn’t deny the authenticity of the email and replied only by saying: “My blog post published Monday represents my full comments on this matter.” He hasn’t responded to a follow-up e-mail. Emersberger did not reply to an inquiry by press time. Pexton declared his comments “off the record,” but that confidence was broken by the apparent reader and the e-mails were made public.

Rubin, a Mideast hawk, cut her teeth at Pajamas Media and the neoconservative flagship Commentary — where Abrams’ brother, John Podhoretz, is the editor. This year, she went to Israel and the West Bank (also considering the latter part of Israel) on the dime of the Emergency Committee for Israel, where Abrams sits on the board. Rubin has a history of making errors and misrepresenting reported facts to fit her story. If this wasn’t enough to make the Post question the decision to hire her, perhaps one should not be so surprised that she can retweet calls for mass killings and keep her job — that is, as long as the comment is about killing Palestinians.