I'll qualify this by saying that it's always a bit of a cheap stunt to pull comments off a website and hold them up as representative of the website as a whole, or indicative of the kind of ideas that drive that particular online community. On any given day, if one were to take a sampling of comments from the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post, there would almost certainly be a good number of vile and violent statements that ought to embarrass the site's proprietors (though they rarely do). But there is something different about the website of a presidential candidate, especially a candidate like Barack Obama, whose campaign has taken such pride in the building of a massive online community of supporters. Which is why I don't feel so bad about noting the anti-Israeli tone of the comments that appeared on his site under his statement on the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence. The statement itself is fine (not quite as strongly worded as McCain but neither did it look like Rev. Wright had written the thing) and was linked on the front page of Obama's website, garnering nearly 250 comments as of this writing. And keep in mind, each comment has a button that allows readers to report objectionable content to a moderator, so one wonders if there were perhaps more offensive comments that have since been expunged. A commenter going by the handle 'Sam from Cambridge' starts a thread titled "Israel was founded on genocide," and which admonishes his fellow Obama supporters to "educate yourself" on the fact that in 1948 "Palestinian women were raped by the zionist militias," and "Israel is based on this process of genocide." Sam says "I support Obama but not on this issue." A commenter going by the name Marlene declares that "celebrating 'Israel at 60' is tantamount to dancing on Palestinian graves." And another commenter, UBI BAMA, compares Zionism to Nazism:
The heroic resistance of the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto is mirrored in the reistance of the Palestianian people to the attempts of the Zionist state to lock them into a similar ghetto.
A frequent commenter named Jamil even evokes Rev. Wright as he accuses Obama of pandering:
Sadly, on this issue, he shows that he is, as Rev. Wright says, "a politician" and will say what he has to as a politician! I'm voting for Sen. Obama and have donated time and money to his campaign, but I'm not blindly loyal to the man - I call things as I see them.
I'm sure there are loathsome individuals supporting both presidential campaigns, but only Obama has given his a platform from which to spew this kind of garbage. And while some of the commenters do chastise their fellow Obama supporters for writing such things, it seems no one is so concerned as to remove the comments.