Seth Hettena has done some interesting research into Clarion Fund’s 990 report.  He’s discovered that a number of the group’s board members have longstanding and deep ties in partisan Republican circles:

Peter Feaman, a Florida trial lawyer. He’s also the author of Wake Up America! about the dangers of fundamentalist Islam. Feaman has been active in GOP political circles. He has run for the Florida house and serves as the Republican state committeeman for Palm Beach County. He was a delegate to the 2008 GOP convention.

Nina Cunningham, founder of Quidlibet, a legal research consulting firm in Illinois. She has given more than $33,000 to GOP candidates and causes in the past three election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. She is the Illinois State chair of the Republican Jewish Committee’s women’s committee.

I’ve reported previously here on various Republican connections with Clarion Fund:

1. the Republican Jewish Coalition mailed free copies of Obsession to every Jewish and Christian clergymember in the U.S.
2. Clarion hired Republican consultants to arrange screenings of the film in Arizona and Michigan
3. Clarion distributed 28 million copies of Obsession in the weeks prior to the election, after one of Clarion’s websites derided Obama’s national security experience and praised McCain’s.
4. Aish HaTorah’s co-founder has extensive business and political ties with Republican national leaders, especially Tom Ridge as well as Ileana Ros Lehtinen and others.

In other words, Clarion Fund is practically a bought and paid for arm of the Jewish wing of the Republican Party.  Aish HaTorah, in turn, as Jeffrey Goldberg has noted, is practically an arm of the rightist settler movement.  All this leads one to believe that a group of far-right Israeli-American Orthodox Jews have teemed up with Republicans in order to kill two birds with one stone.  They can exploit fears of Muslims and Islam to drum up American Jewish support for a pro-settler/pro-Israel political agenda AND flay the Democrats, who allegedly are soft on terror, specifically Muslim terror.

It’s seamy and nasty, but utterly in keeping with the lies and histrionics which characterize the Republican Jewish right and the Orthodox pro-settler right.

Among the dumb concepts that George Bush created (or his speechwriters) was an “Axis of Evil” consisting of three countries.  An axis only has two ends, not three.  So rhetorically what Bush said seems a mangling of the language.  In this post, I originally wanted to include Clarion Fund, Aish HaTorah, the Settler movement, and GOP in my Jewish Axis of Evil.  But that was way too many axes, so I had to slim it down to only two.