Freedom’s Watch Goes Out of Business

[I wrote this and the following 2 posts 3 days ago while traveling and haven’t had the ability to upload them or provide all the links, something I hope to do in the next few days, as I find the time and technical capacity. Please bear with me.]

Readers of this blog will be interested to learn, if they haven’t already, that Freedom’s Watch, a spin-off of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) funded mainly by casino king Sheldon Adelson, has gone out of business, as reported in Tuesday’s Washington Times. The article is well worth reading, but, among other interesting facts, it discloses that the group spent a mere $30 million – or perhaps $45 million dollars its 2007 ad campaign on behalf of the Surge in Iraq – in this election cycle, far short of the $200 million that it had reportedly planned to raise and disburse.

As has been reported elsewhere, Adelson, who can be expected to be a major funder for the Likud campaign in the February elections, has suffered huge losses over the past year. “Only a year ago, Mr. Adelson, 75, was the third-richest man in America, with a net worth of $28 billion. But since then, Mr. Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., has lost 95 percent of its stock value,” according to the Times.

The Times also reported, amusingly, that the group, whose public face was former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, was so dependent Adelson’s largess hat “over the summer all staffers were herded in front of a video camera to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Mr. Adelson.”

Freedom Watch’s roots clearly lie in the leadership of the RJC which, as can be seen through the “Search” function on “The Forward’s” or the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s websites actively propagated some of the most damaging smears (and lies) about Obama during the campaign but were fortunately challenged every step of the way by the Jewish media and its Democratic counterpart. Thankfully, their efforts proved to be largely ineffective, with Obama winning close to 80 percent of the Jewish vote,, as I expected he would after McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running-mate. As I noted at the time, I thought the choice probably cost the ticket at least ten percent of the Jewish vote.

Jim Lobe

Jim Lobe served for some 30 years as the Washington DC bureau chief for Inter Press Service and is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy and the influence of the neoconservative movement.

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2 Comments

  1. Any info on the giant fraud of Mr. Maddow (sp?) would be interesting to know. Will AIPAC etc. be affected?

    CM

  2. On what is perhaps a related note to the Madoff scandal, Jim, what do you suppose is the Israeli support for Likud. I imagine that there is far greater support for Likud here than in Israel.

    I guess that brings up another question, are American Jews who wish to allowed to vote in Israeli elections? What are the residency requirements, if you’ve ever lived there? Ever a Resident of Israel?

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