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NJDC vs. Sheldon Adelson

Much ado about an apology

by
Unknown Author
August 10, 2012

The head of the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) called on Sheldon Adelson to drop his “silly” $60M defamation lawsuit against the organization. Adelson’s attorneys filed the suit after the NJDC accused him of profiting from prostitution and called on Republicans to stop accepting his donations.

In an op-ed on the website of the Forward, Marc Stanley wrote, “It appears that Adelson, with his billions of dollars, not only wants to control political speech and buy the election for the Republican side. He also wants to stifle the exercise of free speech by a small group of Democratic Jews.”

Adelson had threatened litigation against the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the NJDC last week, when both organizations repeated allegations that the casino magnate condoned prostitution at his resort in Macau. The allegations were made by a former Adelson employee in a wrongful-termination suit. The DCCC retracted and apologized for its statements. The NJDC removed the post from its website but refused to apologize.

Defending the NJDC’s original post, Stanley wrote, “the petition itself only came after weeks of allegations about Adelson in the news media and on the Internet. Indeed, a Google search for such reports as of August 7, 2012 yielded almost 1 million results.”

We’re not quite sure we follow Stanley on his last point. Did he try Googling “Adelson + prostitution”? As of this post, that combination generates 244,000 results. Just for good measure, we tried to fact-check some other word combinations using the search volume method of accreditation. “Obama + muslim” generates 121,000,000 results. “Romney + warlock” generates another 8,180,000.

In any case, Stanley also challenged Adelson to two public debates and offered him the choice of “the forum and the structure of the first.” The topics, he said, would range from education to religion to social security.

Call us skeptics, but we doubt Adelson will bite. The famously press-averse billionaire—who joined Romney at his recent fundraiser in Israel—rarely grants interviews, let alone speaks at public forums.

Earlier: All Eyes on Mitt [Tablet]

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