but for many americans, this nuance will go unrecognized. many people will believe the emails that mccain sends out as opposed to seek any truth.
nyt: For his part, Mr. McCain has taken pride in the enmity with which he regards Hamas. “I think that the people should understand that I will be Hamas’s worst nightmare,” he said late last month in a conference call with conservative bloggers.
Conversely, he has tried to portray Mr. Obama as sympathetic to Hamas.
“I think it is very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States,” Mr. McCain said to the bloggers. “If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas, I think people can make judgments accordingly.”
And in a fund-raising letter sent out in April, a spokesman for Mr. McCain wrote: “We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad.”
In particular, the McCain campaign has explicitly linked Mr. Yousef’s statements to Mr. Obama’s repeatedly stated willingness to talk to so-called “rogue states” like Iran, North Korea and Cuba.
“Well, Iran is obviously an important supporter of Hamas,” Mr. McCain said Friday.
“Senator Obama wants to sit down and have negotiations and discussions with the person who just yesterday called Israel a quote ‘stinking corpse,’ ” he said, referring to Mr. Ahmadinejad, and “who continues to advocate quote ‘wiping Israel off the map.’ ”
Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that “for political purposes, Senator Obama’s opponents on the right have distorted and reframed” his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet “unconditionally” with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called “rogue” state. Mr. Obama believes “that engagement at the presidential level, at the appropriate time and with the appropriate preparation, can be used to leverage the change we need,” Dr. Rice said. “But nobody said he would initiate contacts at the presidential level; that requires due preparation and advance work.”
Mr. Obama has been clear in making a distinction between his willingness to talk “not just to countries we like, but those we don’t,” as he puts it, and Hamas and other political movements similar to it. “Hamas is not a state,” Mr. Obama told a Jewish group last month. “Hamas is a terrorist organization.”
Responding to Mr. McCain’s accusations in an interview with CNN on Thursday, Mr. Obama elaborated on that position. He again called Hamas a terrorist group and said that “we should not talk to them unless they recognize Israel, renounce violence and are willing to abide by previous accords” that Israel has negotiated with its neighbors and with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
That is not a new position for Mr. Obama. In 2006, he, like Mr. McCain, was a co-sponsor of the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, which called on “members of the international community to avoid contact with and refrain from financially supporting the terrorist organization Hamas” until it met all of the same requirements that Mr. Obama enumerated again on Thursday.
