Salon: How ECI is “Lying”

David Streeter — August 31, 2010 – 3:35 pm | Election 2010 | Foreign Policy | Israel | Republicans | Stop the Smears Comments (0) Add a comment

The Emergency Committee for Israel is back with another attack-ad against an incumbent Democrat. This time though, ECI’s ad is full of even more blatant distortions aimed at promoting their partisan agenda.

According to Salon:

Bill Kristol’s new group the Emergency Committee for Israel is out with another TV ad attacking another Democrat, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), for supposedly being unfriendly to the Jewish state. But it turns out a key fact in the ad—that a purportedly Hamas-linked Muslim advocacy group gave Holt a 100% approval rating—is, if you scratch just a little below the surface, so misleading as to be essentially a lie.

And not only that, there’s evidence that ECI didn’t even know what the 100% rating was based on (not very much, as it turns out) when the group produced the ad attacking Holt for the rating.

The 100% rating represented something related to immigration policy:

A curious thing happened when we asked CAIR about this “100% rating” for Holt: the group told us that it does not issue legislative scorecards ... When we asked Emergency Committee for Israel spokesman Michael Goldfarb for a source on the “100% rating” he pointed us to this page at Project Vote Smart, a group that tracks issue groups’ scorecards.

Now note that every member of Congress on that page has either a 0% rating or a 100% rating from CAIR, but the Vote Smart site does not indicate what issue or issues the ratings are based on.

What’s going on here? 

An official at Vote Smart told us that the page was created automatically based on CAIR’s position on a single piece of legislation in 2005: the REAL ID Act, a sprawling bill that addressed, among other things, immigration and a new national ID system. Holt voted against the REAL ID Act, as did several of Republican members of Congress, thus earning each of them the same “100% rating” from CAIR. Other REAL ID opponents included Mike Huckabee and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The objections have to do with the cost of the law and civil liberties concerns surrounding what the Journal called a “de facto national ID card decree.”

The vote on the REAL ID Act had absolutely nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But this vote—and this vote alone—is the basis for one of the central claims of the Emergency Committee’s new anti-Holt spot: that the congressman sports a “100% rating” from CAIR.

The author concluded:

The remarkable thing is that ECI leaders seemingly did not even know themselves what the 100% rating was based on when they made and broadcast the ad.

In short: ECI based the attack ad on a number floating around on the Internet without even bothering to find out what it meant. Reporters would do well to keep that in mind when covering the group in the future.

Please click here to view NJDC’s fact sheet about ECI and its past actions.

Please click here to download NJDC’s fact sheet about ECI.

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