The Obama Derangement Never Ends At WND

WorldNetDaily has spent the past three years obsessing over an Obama-era non-scandal -- and now a right-wing legal group is helping keep WND's obsession alive well after Obama has left office.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 7/18/2018

This particular WND obsession started in a March 2015 column by Joseph Farah, which begins with a lie:

First, Barack Obama provided taxpayer dollar [sic] to a nonprofit group he assembled to sabotage the re-election campaign of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In fact, the OneVoice Movement -- the group that spearheaded a political movement in Israel to oppose the re-election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- was founded in 2002, and Obama did not "assemble" it. While the group did receive $350,000 in federal grants for a project unrelated to the election, State Department officials said the funding stopped in November 2014, before the Israeli election was announced.

The second sentence of Farah's column is a lie as well: "He never liked Netanyahu for standing firmly for the security of his country."

Not only does Farah not know this, he cannot know this, and Obama is not on record ever saying such a thing. Therefore, Farah is lying again.

We'd go through the rest of Farah's column, but when the first two sentences are lies, and they're coming from a inveterate liar, it's unnecessary to further prove the point. (Though it is worth noting that Farah goes on to bizarrely accuse Obama of "latent anti-Semitism," adding: "In fact, it’s no longer latent – if it ever were. It’s open. It’s active. It’s visible for all to see.")

After a Senate investigation into the grant to OneVoice was concluded in July 2016, WND's Bob Unruh responded with an article that started, like Farah's column, with a raft of lies:

A new report released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations concludes the Obama administration funded an effort to overthrow Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, one of America’s closest and most ardent allies.

The investigation concerned about $350,000 in grants given by the United States to a group called OneVoice to “support peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine.”

The organization pursued that goal but later used the grant money to campaign against Netanyahu, with whom President Obama had been at odds.

But the rest of Unruh's article disproves that assertion. Unruh quotes the report as saying the following:

• "The subcommittee found no evidence that OneVoice spent grant funds to influence the 2015 Israeli elections."
• "OneVoice Israel fully complied with the terms of its State Department grants."
• "OneVoice’s use of government-funded resources for political purposes was not prohibited by the grant agreement because the State Department placed no limitations on the post-grant use of those resources."

In other words, two assertions by Unruh are lies: the Obama administration did not fund OneVoice's campaign against Netanyahu, and OneVoice did not use grant money to do so.

Unruh is mad that OneVoice used the infrastructure paid for with the grant money for its anti-Netanyahu campaign -- which, by the way, was not an "overthrow" attempt. It was part of the 2015 Israeli election process.

Even the headline of Unruh's article -- "Obama funded secret strategy to oust Netanyahu" -- is a lie. It was so "secret," apparently, that it didn't even happen.

Despite that, Farah used an October 2017 column to insist that "The U.S. government, in the hands of Barack Obama, intervened in a foreign election with the express purpose of impacting the results" -- never mind that this claim has never been proven.

(Farah then ridiculously claimed: "But I have no doubts that someone actually colluded with the Trump campaign to bring it victory in 2016. That someone was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel who repeatedly promised in the Bible to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse it.")

The fact that WND will tell lies about a report detailing the exact opposite of what it's claiming is just another reason WND has no credibility.

And as that lack of credibility contributed to its near-death experience earlier this year, WND was feverishly trying to revive this bogus anti-Obama conspiracy.

Enter the right-wing legal group

An anonymous WorldNetDaily writer really desperately to ramp up the scandal angle in a Jan. 17 article headlined "New scandal in Obama's war against Netanyahu," with the help of a partisan right-wing legal group:

Democrats in Washington have expressed outrage over still-unproved allegations the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to defeat their candidate, Hillary Clinton.

But Democrats and their media allies have been virtually silent regarding evidence of interference by Democrat Barack Obama in Israel’s elections.

Last October, WND CEO Joseph Farah pointed out the Obama administration sent money in 2015 to a non-profit U.S. group that sought to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from forming a coalition government to remain as prime minister.

A probe by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that the Obama State Department gave $349,276 in U.S. taxpayer-funded grants to a political group in Israel called OneVoice to build a campaign operation that, subsequently, was used to try to persuade Israelis to vote against Netanyahu.

Now there’s new information, according to the American Center for Law and Justice, that the Obama administration’s intervention was even worse.

ACLJ said that in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, it “uncovered a startling revelation.”

“Yasser Mahmoud Abbas, son of Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the terrorist-allied Palestinian Authority, was also a senior leader and advisor to OneVoice – and, as demonstrated by the contents of the documents themselves, the Obama administration knew this,” ACLJ said in a report Wednesday.

“In short, the Obama State Department gave U.S. taxpayer dollars to a terrorist-affiliated organization (the PA recently united with the terrorist group Hamas) to unseat the democratically elected leader of the only free democracy in the Middle East and a vital U.S. ally.”

Just one problem -- something WND and the ACLJ would have known it if they bothered to do a basic Google search: This isn't "new information" at all, and OneVoice is the farthest thing from a "terrorist-affiliated organization."

Abbas was publicly listed as a member of OneVoice as far back as 2003, when OneVoice was founded to encourage a negotiated settlement to Israeli-Palestinian violence. When someone tried to make an issue of this in 2015 -- more evidence that this is not "new information" and that ACLJ is lying -- OneVoice issued a statement:

"Mahmoud Abbas' son is a member of the Advisory Council of OneVoice in the Palestinian Authority, which is working toward a diplomatic agreement and two states for two peoples. Just as Michi Ratzon, who ran in the Likud primaries, served on the Advisory Council in Israel, and David Azoulay, Avraham Michaeli, Yitzhak Vaknin and Yitzhak Cohen from Shas serve in the movement's lobby in Knesset, as do MK Elazar Stern, MK Rabbi Dov Lipman and many others.

"Any attempt to tie his influence to the movement in Israel is foolish and untrue. We do not recall any such claims or complaints about the issue when OneVoice led a campaign in support of Prime Minister Netanyahu when he was considering the option of a diplomatic arrangement."

Likud is the political party to which Netanyahu belongs -- and it blows the ACLJ's bogus "terrorist-affiliated organization" claim out of the water.

Unruh did more stenography on behalf of the ACLJ in a May 7 article:

It’s been confirmed now – there WAS election interference.

By the Barack Obama administration.

The American Center for Law and Justice has revealed it has uncovered documents showing the Obama State Department even misled Congress about U.S. tax money being used to try to manipulate the results of an election in Israel, America’s strongest ally in the Middle East.

The organization confirmed that through its Freedom of Information Act case involving the U.S. State Department’s support for OneVoice Israel and OneVoice Palestine, it obtained revealing details.

“While the United States regularly issues grants to international organizations that provide services such as humanitarian relief, educational opportunities, and even opportunities and activities aimed at encouraging democratic voter participation, it turns out the OneVoice organizations went well beyond such measures and actively campaigned against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 2015 elections – using resources established and developed with grant funds from the Obama State Department,” the ACLJ has reported.

And, the ACLJ found, “one of the senior advisers to OneVoice Palestine was none other than the son of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority – something the Obama Administration clearly knew (since these documents were in its possession).”

Again, it's been public record since 2003 that Abbas' son was an adviser to OneVoice -- as were Israeli politicians from across the political spectrum, including Netanyahu's Likud party.

And the ACLJ's hyperventilating and heavy implication about this non-scandal doesn't change the fact that the money paid to OneVoice by the State Department paid for a separate project, a Senate subcommittee found that OneVoice fully complied with the terms of the original grant, no grant money was used in the election, and the State Department placed no limitations on the post-grant use of infrastructure the grant paid for.

As expected, Unruh quoted only the ACLJ and couldn't be bothered to contact OneVoice or anyone else involved in this non-story for a reaction.

An anonymously written June 12 article took yet another stab at this on behalf of the ACLJ:

The U.S. government was informed of the overtly political agenda of OneVoice Israel and OneVoice Palestine – to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – but gave the groups American taxpayer money anyway.

The report from the American Center for Law and Justice comes in its ongoing Freedom of Information Action case against the government over the Obama administration’s granting of taxpayer funds to groups trying to intervene in the election of a close U.S. ally.

[...]

“These are the nonprofit organizations that used digital infrastructure built with U.S. government funds to orchestrate an attempt to unseat the government of Israel in 2015,” ACLJ explained. “The records we obtained include further confirmation of the bias of the OneVoice organizational leadership against Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and in favor of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.”

First: The ACLJ is engaging in some seriously fallacious bias by portraying criticism of Netanyahu as being "against Israel."

Third: WND and the ACLJ continue to gloss over the fact that a congressional investigation found that OneVoice fully complied with the terms of the original grant, no grant money was used in the election, and the State Department placed no limitations on the post-grant use of those resources.

Fourth: WND and the ACLJ continue to whine about the fact that the son of Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas was an official with OneVoice -- something the ACLJ has portrayed as a recent revelation but has been publicly known since 2003 -- even though the group also included members of Netanyahu's Likud party.

Obama left office well over a year ago, guys. Time to give up the obsessive Obama derangement.