(CNSNews.com) – America’s Jewish community appears to be more concerned about partisan politics than about the threat posed by Iran, according to some Jewish representatives.
 
They point to the controversy stemming from Monday’s “Stop Iran Now” rally in New York City, an event that both Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin were invited to attend. 
 
The rally, organized by groups led by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, coincides with a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who plans to address the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
 
Accusations continued to fly late last week over the decision by the rally organizers to withdraw an invitation to Palin on Thursday, after Democratic groups protested that her presence would turn the rally into a partisan affair.
 
Republicans fired back that it was an earlier decision by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) to pull out of the rally that turned what would have been a bipartisan event into a partisan one. Clinton, who had accepted an invitation last month, withdrew on Tuesday after learning that Palin had been invited.
 
The row was a skirmish in the broader battle for Jewish votes. The Conference of Presidents, a coordinating body representing 51 Jewish agencies across the religious and political spectrum, found itself caught in the middle.
 
Jewish political organizations – the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) – are seeking to persuade Jewish voters that their presidential candidates are stronger on issues important to Jews, including support for Israel and concern about Iran.
 
The NJDC and other liberal Jewish groups led the calls for the Iran rally organizers to disinvite Palin last week, and claimed the outcome of their lobbying as a victory.
 
“We won!” declared the liberal peace organization J Street, which said it collected more than 20,000 signatures in 24 hours calling on the organizers to drop the Palin invitation.
 
Conference of Presidents head Malcolm Hoenlein “caved to our pressure,” the group said in a statement.
 
“A unity rally to express communal solidarity is no place for partisan politics,” it said. “And to give such prominence to Sarah Palin alone would have spoken neither to, nor for, the American Jewish community.” The statement did not mention Clinton’s earlier withdrawal.
 
‘Dividing ourselves in front of our enemies’
 
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a Conference of Presidents member organization, said Ahmadinejad’s visit was the perfect opportunity for all Americans to tell him that they “reject him, his government, his ideology and his threats.”
 
“Sen. Clinton’s appearance at a rally with Gov. Palin would have sent a strong message to Ahmadinejad and his cronies – that Americans understand the threat and stand together against it. Instead we have divided ourselves in front of it.”
 
JINSA executive director Tom Neumann also sent Hoenlein a letter condemning the decision to withdraw Palin’s invitation and asking why member organizations had not been consulted first.
 
He told Neumann his first instinct on hearing the news had been to pull out of the rally in protest.
 
“Nothing, however, could be more important on the American agenda than preventing Ahmadinejad’s Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Therefore, we must remain united in opposition,” he said.
 
Nonetheless, Neumann said, those member organizations “who chose to impose their narrow partisan agenda on a very important undertaking” should step forward and explain themselves. “In disgracing themselves they disgrace us all.”
 
RJC executive director Matt Brooks also had strong words about the situation, calling it “one of the biggest black marks on the Jewish community that I’ve seen in my 20 years of working with the Jewish community.”
 
“It diminishes what should be an extraordinary event … in terms of sending a clear and unambiguous message to the Iranians and the international community about our resolve on this issue,” he said in an interview on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show.
 
Brooks said after Clinton pulled out the organizers asked the Obama-Biden campaign to put up either Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama or his running mate, Sen. Joseph Biden, but “they chose not to when given the opportunity to share the platform with Gov. Palin.”
 
The campaign instead offered Rep. Robert Wexler, a Jewish lawmaker from Florida but – according to Brooks – “these partisan [Democratic] groups said ‘you know, it’s not a fair fight. You can’t have the number two on the [GOP] ticket against a junior member of Congress.”
 
Senior Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in a conference call on Friday, said the rally organizers had made “basic mistakes” in the issuing of invitations “and it became awkward,” the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported.
 
Last Wednesday – the day after Clinton pulled out – the organizers asked the Obama campaign to send a representative, Durbin said.
 
As Biden could not attend, the campaign offered Wexler, until organizers decided on Thursday that no American elected officials would take part.
 
‘Attempt to garner Jewish votes’
 
The motivation of the Republican campaign in putting up Palin for the rally also stirred debate.
 
Hoenlein told The Jewish Week that the organizers had approached Republicans who could not make it to the rally, “and since Governor Palin was coming to the United Nations to meet world leaders, her staff agreed to have her speak.”
 
But, writing on the liberal Huffington Post blog, former president of the Labor Zionist Alliance (also a Conference of Presidents member organization, now known as Ameinu), Menachem Rosensaft, citing Palin’s thin foreign policy credentials, suggested that the decision to invite her “was little more than a not particularly subtle attempt to help her win Jewish votes for the GOP ticket.”
 
“Contrary to the McCain campaign’s insinuation,” he said, the Obama campaign had nothing to do with the subsequent decision to disinvite her, he said.
 
McCain in a statement last Thursday did not accuse the Obama campaign of being behind the decision, saying Palin had been disinvited “under pressure from Democratic partisans.”
 
McCain did accuse Obama of choosing “politics rather than the national interest,” by not taking “the opportunity to join us” in making a statement against Ahmadinejad.
 
Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, speaking on Fox News’ Hannity and Colmes on Friday, said the Conference of Presidents “have never done anything, in my view, that was partisan. So they must have come under extraordinary pressure from Democratic activists to cancel that invitation.”
 
When co-host Alan Colmes suggested that the organizers had politicized the rally by inviting Palin, Bolton disagreed.
 
“It became a political event because Democrats pressured the Conference and the other sponsoring agencies to withdraw the invitation,” he said. “That’s where the real outrage is.”
 
At a campaign rally in Blaine, Minnesota on Friday, Palin condemned what she said was Tehran’s attempt to acquire nuclear weapons and said it must not be allowed.
 
A commentary on Iran’s state-funded Press TV, quoting Palin’s remarks, said that they “suggest that she either seeks to gain the full-fledged support of the powerful Israeli lobby or that she is in need of brushing up on major foreign policy issues in the five remaining weeks before the U.S. general elections.”
 
Iran denies charges by Washington and its allies that the nuclear program is a cover for attempts to develop nuclear weapons capability.