A full 62% of both the Jewish and the Arab public expect Hillary Clinton to win the November elections, while fewer than 25% think the winner will be Donald Trump; the rest do not know, according to the August Peace Index, a monthly survey of 400 Jews and 100 Arabs in Israel, conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, which is an independent, leftwing think tank located in Jerusalem.

On the question of which of the two candidates will be better for the current Israeli government, 38.5% of the Jews in Israel pick Trump, compared with only 33% who think Clinton and Netanyahu are a good match. However, on the question of “whom would you want to win the US presidential elections?” 43% prefer Clinton, 34% pick Trump.

On the Jewish left, 86% prefer Clinton over Trump (9%); in the center 57% want Clinton over Trump (23%); the right prefers Trump (49%) over Clinton (23%), but more than 25% of rightwing Israelis said they did not know who was better.

In the Arab public, 40% think Clinton will be better for the Israeli government’s policy, while 31% think both candidates will be good for Israel and only 14% expect Trump to be better. On the question of “Whom would you want to win the elections?” 58% of the Arab public want Clinton over Trump (11%), with a whopping 31% saying they don’t know which candidate to support.

The August survey also inquired about the trial of Sgt. Elor Azaria, who is accused of killing an Arab terrorist who had already been neutralized in Hebron last March. 65% of the Jewish public justify Azaria’s action and uphold his claim that he shot the terrorist in self-defense out of fear that the latter was wearing an explosive belt. Only 25% support the military establishment’s position that Azaria violated the rules of engagement and shot the terrorist for vengeance. The rest, 10%, preferred not to answer.

Rightwing Jews support Azaria at an overwhelming rate of 83%. 51% of centrist Jews, and even 20% of leftwing Jews also support Azaria. Support for Azaria is at 84% among army-age (18-24) Jews, and even more, 95%, among Haredim, and 79% among national religious Jews. A majority of traditional and secular Jews also support Azaria.

51.5% of the Jews support a group of reserve soldiers who recently announced that they will not report to duty when called as long as Azaria has not been completely exonerated. 43.5% oppose the group. On this question, 71% of rightwing Jews support the protest; but only 31.5% of centrist Jews and 14% of leftwing Jews do.

The survey notes that these political camps are not equal in size, and the rightwing now constitutes more than half of the Israeli Jewish public.

One of the greatest sins of the Obama administration has been the absolute destruction of the Department of Justice. Once the agency tasked with keeping American government honest, the DOJ has now become a designated political hit squad led by the White House. The latest evidence: three separate DOJ field offices wanted to fulfill the FBI’s request to investigate the Clinton Foundation, but the DOJ turned them down.

The Clinton Foundation has, of course, been under heavy fire for its significant coordination with the State Department. The Clintons used the Foundation as a slush fund; big donors were then granted special access to Hillary and her aides at the State Department.

And the DOJ doesn’t care.

Most Americans now shrug at such improprieties.

That’s because Barack Obama has hollowed out whatever moral core was left at the DOJ. As early as 2011, former DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams revealed that the DOJ had dumped its investigation into the Black Panthers for voter intimidation for racial reasons. According to Adams, “The end result when racial extremists dominate such a powerful division of federal law enforcement is, in a word, lawlessness.” Adams reported that the DOJ hierarchy implemented a “long campaign of political resistance to the Panther lawsuit that ultimately resulted in the dismissal of most of the case – after we had effectively won it.”

And of course, the DOJ, headed by Eric Holder was involved in corrupt dealings from Fast and Furious gunwalking to the racially-motivated investigations into the Trayvon Martin shooting and the Michael Brown shooting. The Holder DOJ spied on journalists from both the Associated Press and Fox News. They refused to prosecute the IRS’ Lois Lerner for clearly abusing her power in targeting conservative 501(c)3 applicants. In June 2012, Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress, and Obama promptly defended him by utilizing executive privilege.

Now, Loretta Lynch’s DOJ has become the rightful heir to Holder’s dishonorable legacy. But that’s no surprise: when government is this big and this powerful, Democrats will use that power to their own advantage.

No wonder Hillary Clinton can sleep well at night. She knows that no matter what she does, her defenders at the DOJ will shield her from harm.

As the Trump campaign is surrounding itself with strong, anti-Hillary voices from well established conservative media — Stephen Bannon and Roger Ailes, to name but two, WNYC’s All Things Considered host Richard Hake last week said that “the Clinton campaign has been looking for a surrogate to play Trump so she can practice and they are bringing in the well-known criminal and constitutional law attorney Alan Dershowitz.”

Hake was interviewing former New York City Public Advocate Mark Green, who said that of the two components required to win a presidential debate, knowledge and the ability to react quickly and sharply, Hillary possessed the former to a degree close to her own husband’s and to President Obama. But how should she react to an offensive criticism from her attacker in real-time?

“With Roger Ailes and Stephen Bannon advising Trump, Hillary’s team has to guess at what off-the-wall questions, attacks, about her or Bill are coming her way, and how to response with one phrase, one over-arching ribbon,” Green said.

Green, who used to be a student of Dershowitz’s at Harvard, said “Alan Dershowitz is quick-talking, New Yorkish, loud, of course a liberal, and he can mimic Trump pretty well.”

Green said the Democratic candidate should have one overall debate manager, one surrogate, and a team of ten advisers who would micro-analyze her answers during the practice bouts, and remind her to remain poised and, most important and “cheesy,” as Green put it, smile a lot.

“If you’re ideologically neutral and you see Trump yelling and angry, and self-centered, he never smiles, he never laughs, he’s too self-referential,” Green said, and then you turn to Hillary, and “Hillary is the tough mother you want, and if she smiles periodically and is always poised, she conveys empathy. Remember, Kennedy beat Nixon not on points but on appearance.”

So far, Dershowitz denied the story about his playing Trump, writing “Not that I’ve heard,” in response to a Jewish Insider email asking if he’ll do Trump in Clinton’s debate prep.

The first presidential debate is scheduled for Monday, September 26 at Hofstra University in New York.

A pizza parlor in the Old City of Jerusalem is running an election tip poll.

Trump seems to be a tiny bit ahead of Clinton, but the truth is, the tip jars were all pretty empty – could that be indicative that people don’t plan to vote? Or just that they don’t like leaving tips in pizza parlors?.

‘America is already great,’ U.S. President Barack Obama told a packed house at the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia Wednesday night, taking a direct swing at the GOP presidential contender.

“America is already strong. Our strength and greatness does not depend on Donald Trump.

Boos filled the hall of the Democratic National Convention, as Obama began to double down on the Republican opponent.

“Don’t ‘boo,'” he advised. “Vote.”

That advice was a recurring theme throughout his 45 minute speech — the importance of getting out to the polls to vote — because the apathy that has affected the American voter over the past several elections has made the difference more than once. “If you’re serious about our democracy, you can’t afford to stay home,” he said.

As for Clinton, the words “steady and strong” were threaded throughout the speech. He admitted she had made mistakes, as he had.

Obama talked about all the “different shades of humanity” that are seen in the United States due to the great mix that is America, and who are seen in the American military. He said that is why “fascists and jihadists and homegrown demagogues will always fail in the end.”

The latter was again another shot at Clinton’s opponent, Donald Trump.

Obama also gave a ‘shout out’ to the supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, some of whom still remained outside the hall, demonstrating against the exposed bias of the leadership that had rigged the primary vote against their candidate.

“We all need to be as organized and as persistent as Bernie Sanders’ supporters,” Obama said.

“We all need to get out and vote for Democrats up and down the ticket, and then hold them accountable until they get the job done,” he said.

"There has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president." —@POTUS https://t.co/5xI4BTop7Y

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 28, 2016

Cheers from the hall. “That’s right,” he nodded. “Feel the Bern!”

Long applause.

Through all the talking points, the barbs fired at Trump, the praise of Clinton’s persistence, there was the acknowledgement that America is on the right track but the grudging acknowledgement there was still work to be done.

Hillary Clinton is the right candidate for the job, he said. “She’s been there for us, even if we haven’t always noticed,” he said, and affirmed there has “never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president. She is fit and she is ready to be the next Commander-in-Chief.”

As for the now-metastasizing Islamic State (Da’esh/ISIS) terrorist organization: “I know Hillary won’t relent until ISIL is destroyed.”

He also insisted her geopolitical credentials would stand her in good stead — perhaps an oblique reference to Benghazi — and an affirmation of her experience in foreign affairs. “Hillary Clinton is respected around the world, not just by leaders, but by the people they serve.”

But it was the echo of former President Bill Clinton’s speech the night before that seemed to get the loudest laughter and cheers: “No matter how daunting the odds, no matter how much people try to knock her down, she never, ever quits.”

Obama made it clear that he knows it’s not “all good,” that there is plenty still left to be done.

“My time in this office, it hasn’t fixed everything,” Obama said. It was clear that the stress of the office had finally caught up to him — perhaps had caught up to him long before, in fact.

“For all the places where I’ve fallen short …. I told Hillary and I’ll tell you, what’s picked me up has been you,” he said, with eyes just slightly wet.

“I am so proud of all the change that YOU made happen… Time and again you’ve picked me up and I hope sometimes I picked you up too, and tonight I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me.

“It was you 12 years ago I was talking about when I was talking about hope,” Obama said, thanking Democrats for eight years of faith in the “audacity of hope” for the “change” he had promised in the days of his own campaigns.

“Thank you for this incredible journey, let’s keep it going.”

The new WikiLeaks Democratic National Committee e-mail dump seems certain to keep alive the issues of Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server while secretary of state, the probability that her e-mails were hacked  by those acting for foreign governments, her dubious responses to investigators, her failure to provide subpoenaed documents, and the extraordinary non-prosecution pass she nevertheless received from the FBI.

Not only did the 20,000-plus e-mails sent or received by top committee officials contain information about attempts, despite committee neutrality rules, to scuttle Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the party’s presidential nomination, but they were apparently obtained through hacker penetration of the DNC computer system.

In addition, the FBI announced on Monday that it is investigating whether hackers had penetrated or tried to penetrate the e-mails of senior Clinton aides. This, despite the statement by FBI Director James B. Comey last month that there was no “direct evidence” that any foreign power had “successfully hacked” Mrs. Clinton’s computers – although there was evidence that attempts had been made and that highly skilled hackers would not have left any traces.

Among the released e-mails were some messages that describe the efforts of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to run interference for Hillary Clinton at the expense of Sen. Sanders. But what was particularly intriguing was a somewhat garbled discussion about using Mr. Sanders’s faith – or lack thereof – to dilute support for him.

The discussion went as follows in an e-mail exchange involving DNC CFO Brad Marshall, Mark Paustenbach, a DNC communications official, and Amy Lacey, DNC CEO:

Mr. Marshall initially said,

It might may [sic] no difference , but for KY [Kentucky] and WVA [West Virginia] can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.

A few minutes later, Mr. Marshall e-mails Ms. Lacey: “It’s these [sic] Jesus thing.”

Several hours afterward, Mr. Dacey responds with “Amen.”

Unclear though the exchange may be, it seems they wanted to somehow make the “Jesus thing” work for them in terms of how the “peeps” would view Sen. Sanders – preferably through the prism of his perceived atheism (for the record, he denies being an atheist) but at the very least by putting, however subtly, the issue of Sen. Sanders’s Jewishness on the table.

The possibility that Mr. Sanders’s ethnic background might become a public issue for at least some of Mr. Marshall’s “peeps” did not seem to suggest to the DNC officials involved in the e-mail exchange that perhaps they should abandon the effort.

We would think that Mrs. Clinton, with all her talk of diversity, freedom of thought, etc., would quickly condemn the very notion of attempting to capitalize on a candidate’s alleged atheism. She has yet to do so.

My thoughts…mine alone. Not meant to interfere. No money was distributed, no attempt is being made to infiltrate the US to undermine any campaign (as compared to what the Obama administration did during the last Israeli elections).

I’m smart enough to know that if we were stupid enough to attempt this, America…or what is left of it…would respond to us as we responded to Obama (A Message to America).

So, I offer my thoughts…and mine alone…on the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton:

I am more amazed by the endless need to attack the other person that typifies almost all Facebook posts. And the only posts I’ve seen the have been positive about either candidate are usually lies. The best single post I’ve seen is quite simple “We’re Screwed, 2016.”

I have been accused of being interested in only one aspect of the US elections – how the candidate relates to Israel. I can’t totally deny this because while I believe which candidate you choose will impact on your future economic situation and perhaps some personal freedoms, I don’t think the very lives of most Americans hangs on the balance of how the next election goes.

Potentially every Israeli life, including and especially the soldiers of Israel, could be on the line. I am proud of my country, Israel, for taking the necessary steps and cultivating other relationships outside the one with the US. This will be needed if Clinton is elected.