Is Obama good for the Jews?

NY Times:

As he battles for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama is trying to strengthen his support among Jewish voters and in doing so, is navigating one of the more treacherous paths of Democratic politics.

The challenge of meeting the concerns of the Jewish electorate, a cornerstone of the Democratic base, was evident Tuesday when Mr. Obama was asked at the Democratic debate in Cleveland about Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has endorsed him.

Mr. Obama called Mr. Farrakhan an anti-Semite and denounced his support, but was pressed to go further by his rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, an experienced hand at Democratic politics who herself has been on the defensive with Jewish voters after an encounter in 2000 with Suha Arafat, the wife of the Palestinian leader.

Mr. Obama has also faced criticism over remarks he made about the suffering of Palestinians — remarks he says were incorrectly reported — and about who is advising him on foreign affairs. And he has had to beat back false tales, spread in viral e-mail messages, that he is a Muslim who attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a boy and was sworn into office on the Koran. In fact, he is a Christian who was sworn in on a Bible.

Winning the trust of Jewish Democratic voters is all the more difficult for Mr. Obama because of the tenuous relations between blacks and Jews. He addressed that very issue at the Cleveland debate when he used the answer to the Farrakhan question to call for a renewal of the ties between blacks and Jews.

...

His real problem is that he is a Democrat, not that he is black. Democrats have been less robust in their support for Israel's right to self defense than have Republicans. Israel has never had a better friend in the White House than President Bush. The comparison with President Clinton is striking. Democrats reflexively tend to fall for the Palestinian victim offensives that follow Israeli responses to Palestinian attacks. They are likely to call this a cycle of violence when in fact it is part of an ongoing campaign by elements in the Palestinian community who are determined to destroy Israel.

Democrats have also been critical of the Bush administration for not pushing for a peace agreement, but they forget the fact that early efforts in that regard were met by exploding Palestinians who did so to murder Israelis. The Palestinians have proven themselves wholly unworthy of sympathy.

Jews really need to reevaluate their relationship with the Democrat party.