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.

Rachel Abrams

ECI board member Rachel Abrams — wife of George W. Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams — litters her blog, “Bad Rachel,” with homophobic, anti-Palestinian, innuendo-filled screeds about political opponents.

Last year, she focused on Christopher Hitchens’ bisexuality in a post titled “Giving Homosexuality a Bad name.” She wrote:

Wherever one stands on the homosexuality question—I’m agnostic, or would be if the “gay community” would quit trying to shove legislation down my throat—there can be no denying bisexuality’s double betrayal—you never know, whether you’re the man of the hour or the woman, when the ground on which you’re standing is going to turn to ashes—nor any denying the self-admiring “nourishment” its promiscuous conquests afford.

And following the death of Sen. “Teddy” Kennedy (D-MA), she offered the following innuendo-filled limerick:

An amorous sot name of Teddy
Lost control when things got a bit heady.
He went over the side,
Left his ride in the tide,
And his squeeze giving head to an eddy.

But Abrams saves her harshest, most dehumanizing, words for Palestinians. Abrams writes that after Israel finishes celebrating the release of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, they should:

…round up his captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.

Abrams’ violent fantasies are protected under the first amendment, but the organization’s leadership might want to look in the mirror before smearing the Occupy Wall Street protests as intolerant. (HT: Media Matters)

Daniel S. Loeb

The ad, which was faithfully promoted by ECI’s go-to media outlets — Politico’s Ben Smith, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary — alleges that Democratic party leaders are “turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” and urges President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to “stand up to the mob.” Watch it:

While the anti-Semitic signs and clips shown in the commercial are deeply offensive, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have consistently rejected the attempts of a small number of extremists to hijack the movement. In fact, on Friday, “new media activist” Daniel Sieradski organized over 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters to participate in Kol Nidre, the prayers that begin Yom Kippur.

ThinkProgress reported in June that two-thirds of ECIPAC’s contributions in the past election cycle came from Daniel S. Loeb, CEO of Third Point Management, a New York based hedge fund.

Loeb’s $100,000 in support for ECI follows his track record of falling out of love with Obama after the White House pushed for financial regulatory reforms.

On April 26, the Wall Street Journal reported on Loeb’s change of heart and quoted from an email Loeb wrote and circulated in late 2010.

“I am sure, if we are really nice and stay quiet, everything will be alright and the president will become more centrist and that all his tough talk is just words,” Mr. Loeb wrote in an email about four months ago expressing frustration with the president’s posture toward Wall Street. “I mean, he really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it.”

Indeed, in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, Loeb has contributed nearly $170,000 to a stable of Republican candidates including radical Islamophobe Rep. Allen West (R-FL).

And last week, the New York Times reported that Loeb had signed on to support Mitt Romney.

While the ECI appears to be in the business of taking any and all opportunities to paint the Obama administration and the Democratic party as anti-Israel, their attempts to smear the Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic closely aligns the right wing pro-Israel group with the domestic political and business interests of its biggest financial backer.

Last time ThinkProgress examined the non-story that is President Obama’s faltering Jewish support — as yet unsupported by any concrete facts or on the record sources — it was to contrast two articles on the same day that said the exact opposite things: One had Obama’s Jewish support holding steady, and another recorded serious discontent among Jewish Democratic donors.

This week, a similar set of events occurred. Gallup released a poll showing that Jewish voters were not in fact fleeing Obama. Just a day later, conservative pollster Dick Morris released the results of a survey with a larger sample size that suggested Obama was indeed losing Jewish support.

Neoconservatives, who kicked off the Jews-Against-Obama meme in this election cycle, began to celebrate. The Republican Jewish Coalition gloated that “the GOP is making consistent inroads with the Jewish vote” and “Obama’s actions have ensured that a wide swath of the Jewish vote is ‘in play’ for 2012.” At Commentary, Alana Goodman compared the Gallup and Morris polls and predictably found Morris’s more compelling. She took up Morris’s question about Obama’s Israel policy and took heart:

And unlike the Gallup poll, Morris asked respondents their opinions on Obama’s Israel policy. Needless to say, the results were not encouraging for the president.

The only problem with these analyses? While the sample size in the Gallup poll was indeed small — perhaps too small, as Politico’s Ben Smith contended, to draw significant conclusions — no one bothered to apply the same methodological inquiries to Morris’s poll (other than noting the sample size).

Enter Adam Kredo of the Washington Jewish Week. Kredo, declaring himself a polling “nerd,” was curious about the exact questions Morris was asking American Jews, cross tabs of the results, and some other basic information on the poll. So he asked for the information from Morris’s people. The reply? Nada. “That, in itself,” writes Kredo, “is the first major issue.”

Kredo, calling the Morris poll “a completely partisan exercise devoid of scientific objectivity,” took issue with the construction of some questions:

He claims to have asked interviewees: Is President Obama is “too biased against Israel?” [...]

The question, though, is constructed in a completely partisan fashion — which is fine if you’re conducting a push poll or some other form of statistical hackery. It doesn’t fly, however, in a serious survey.

Really, how is a person supposed to answer this type of question? Is Obama “too biased,” not biased enough, or sufficiently biased? C-mon.

Kredo went on to dispute the poll question on Obama’s Israel policy — the results of which Commentary’s Goodman found so informative. Morris writes in his questions: “President Obama says that Israel should give up the land it occupied after the 1967 war except for some adjustments.”

Not quite. Obama said those lines should be the basis for negotiations and a settlement — as past administrations have — not an imposed solution as Morris presents it. Furthermore, Morris credulously states the opposing straw man view that “returning to the pre-’67 borders” would “make it easier” for “the Arabs” to “destroy Israel.”

Kredo called these renderings “inaccurate” and added, “The description of Obama’s policy doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

With neoconservatives furiously pushing the Jews-quit-Obama narrative, one might also smell a little smoke. But, for the meantime, there doesn’t appear to be any fire.