Sheldon Adelson backs Trump

(JTA) — Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson said he will back Donald Trump now that Trump has locked up the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. “I think that Donald Trump will be good for Israel,” Adelson, who is Jewish, told the BBC on May 5, appearing at a gala in New York for the World Values Network.

What was unclear is if Adelson, one of the world’s richest men and a major pro-Israel giver, meant he would help fund Trump’s campaign, and to what extent. Trump, himself a billionaire, has mostly self-funded throughout the primaries. However, he has said he would reach out to major donors now that he is heading into a heated general election likely to cost billions of dollars.

Adelson, who donated more than $90 million to federal political races in 2012, is among the Republican Party’s most heavily courted contributors. He was not asked whether that meant financial support.

In a departure from the 2012 race, when he spent heavily to boost Newt Gingrich’s unsuccessful primary bid and then gave generously to nominee Mitt Romney, Adelson had until now remained neutral in the 2016 nomination battle.

He nonetheless had hinted that he backed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and the Israeli newspaper he owns, Israel Hayom, provided Rubio with favorable coverage.

The question of whether Trump would be “good for Israel” surfaced in December, when Trump, addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition — another major Adelson beneficiary — said he would not pander to the group or ask for its members’ money. He also said he would remain neutral on Israeli-Palestinian talks and would not before being elected say whether he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He has since walked back those remarks, most prominently in an appearance in March at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

On eve of her church’s BDS vote, Clinton calls movement ‘harmful’

(JTA) — On the eve of a bid to get her church to divest from companies allegedly profiting from Israel’s control of the West Bank, Hillary Clinton reasserted that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement was counterproductive to peace. Clinton responded on May 8 to an appeal from the Israel Action Network, an affiliate of the Jewish Federations of North America, ahead of the quadrennial United Methodist Church General Conference, starting Tuesday in Portland, Oregon.

In a two-page reply, Clinton, who was raised and remains a practicing Methodist, does not directly mention the church, although it is the focal point of the letter to her from the Israel Action Network. But she says: “I believe that BDS seeks to punish Israel and dictate how the Israelis and Palestinians should resolve the core issues of their conflict.” The position is not new for her; she rejected BDS most recently in her speech in March to AIPAC.

Clinton says her support for Israel dates back to the early 1980s, when she first visited the country with her husband, Bill Clinton, and continued through her term as U.S. senator from New York from 2001-2009 and then as secretary of state in President Barack Obama’s first term.

“I know you agree that we need to make countering BDS a priority, and that we need to work together — across party lines and with a diverse array of voices — to reverse this trend with information and advocacy, and fight back against further attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel,” Clinton’s letter says.

“I stand ready to be your partner as we engage all people of good faith — regardless of their political persuasion or their views on policy specifics — in explaining why the BDS campaign is counterproductive to the pursuit of peace and harmful to Israelis and Palestinians alike,” Clinton wrote.

Among more than a thousand proposals, the Methodists will consider four resolutions calling for divestment from three companies that pro-Palestinian activists have accused of working with Israeli security forces to sustain Israel’s West Bank settlement enterprise. They are Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola.

In January, the Methodists’ pension fund removed five Israeli banks from its investment portfolio, saying the investments were counter to its policies against investing in “high risk countries” and to remain committed to human rights.

BDS activists have scored a series of successes in recent years in advancing similar resolutions, most prominently the United Church of Christ in 2015 and the Presbyterian Church-USA a year earlier.

Trump ‘disavows’ David Duke’s comment on ‘Jewish extremists’

(JNS.org) Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said he “disavows” comments by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke about “Jewish extremists.” “Jewish extremists have made a terribly crazy miscalculation because all they’re really going to be doing by doing the ‘Never Trump’ movement is exposing their alien, their anti-American-majority position to all the Republicans,” Duke said on his radio show on May 5.

“They’re going to push people more into awareness that the neocons are the problem, that these Jewish supremacists who control our country are the real problem and the reason why America is not great,” he said.

Trump responded lby saying he “totally disavows” Duke’s remarks. “Anti-Semitism has no place our society, which needs to be united, not divided,” Trump said.