Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin - UPDATE

UPDATE: The website is already up - Jews for Sarah.

From the NY Sun:

President Obama’s recent demarche designed to increase pressure on Israel is having one immediate impact in the Jewish community — it is hastening the formation of an organization called Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin.

Plans for the new group are set to be announced on Sunday by a Philadelphia-based journalist and activist named Binyamin Korn, a former executive director of the Zionist Organization of America. The announcement is unlikely to make big news, as the group is embryonic, with an advisory committee of several journalists and academics.

Its aim, however, is to take advantage of the growing alarm within the Jewish community at what Mr. Korn, in an interview this week with the New York Sun, called an “escalation of rhetoric” criticizing the Jewish state. The group also hopes to counter suggestions — by, among others, such opposite figures as the widely read Atlantic magazine blogger Jeffrey Goldberg and the left-of-center, anti-Israel publication Counterpunch — that Mrs. Palin’s support for Israel is animated by “end of days” theology that believes an in-gathering in Israel will precede the apocalypse and the destruction of the Jews.

Mr. Korn dismisses such talk, saying that there is “a wide range of views about religion within the Jewish Community and an even wider range of views about religion in the Christian community” and that “whatever motives Governor Palin may have or may be imputed to her are entirely within the mainstream of American discourse . . .” He said his group was encouraged by a defense of Mrs. Palin in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by the most famous neo-conservative, Norman Podhoretz, who wrote that he would “rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party” and “would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.”

What Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin is saying, Mr. Korn said, “is that the most articulate person in the public arena today in opposition to the Obama administration’s shift in policies against Israel is Sarah Palin.” He called her “very direct,” particularly on the controversy of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, on terrorism policies, and on the emerging Obama doctrine.

Mr. Korn said his organization, which has not yet been incorporated, has had “no contact with Governor Palin or her campaign” and has no relation to her political action committee, known as SarahPAC. “We would be gratified if Governor Palin considers this a contribution to her efforts to influence American life,” Mr. Korn said. “We hope that she will feel we are supporting her, even though she is clearly not a candidate for any office at this time.”