AP Fact Check: GOP Claims on Israel Funding “Make No Mention” of Increase

NJDC — February 18, 2012 – 9:03 pm | Barack Obama | Budget | Election 2012 | Israel Comments (1) Add a comment

In recent days Republicans in Congress and partisan Republican Jews have been making desperate claims regarding President Barack Obama’s largest-ever military assistance request for Israel contained in the recent FY2013 budget request. Yesterday we authored our own “Fact Check” documenting the reality that the President has increased military assistance to Israel in the FY2013 budget, despite what some have implied.

Today, the Associated Press created a “Fact Check” to more closely examine GOP claims about the President’s largest-ever request for Israel. And their findings track closely with our own.

They note that despite how some members of Congress have protested, their “election-year claim fails to take into account the billions the administration wants in aid for the Mideast ally and ignores a few Washington realities.”

Looking at charges leveled by Republican Jews specifically, the Associated Press reports:

“That charge and the complaints from Ros-Lehtinen and McKeon, who are backers of Obama’s GOP rival Mitt Romney, make no mention of the president’s request of $3.1 billion in military assistance for Israel next year. That’s a slight increase over the $3.075 billion in the current year.”

The Associated Press adds another crucial point, helping to emphasize that Republicans knew about the funding levels long before their feigned sudden shock - and indeed those same congressional Republicans supported the deficit-cutting plan that helped make these cuts necessary:

“The sudden GOP outcry over the missile defense request one day after Obama released his proposal belied the fact that the administration had told Congress how much it wanted - last year…. The $6 million cut in Obama’s request, a small amount in a $614 billion defense budget, is part of the deeper reductions in projected military spending dictated by the deficit-cutting plan that the president and congressional Republicans, including Ros-Lehtinen and McKeon, backed last August.”

Read the entire AP Fact Check here.

 

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