Joe the Plumber’: Israel’s a goner if Obama wins

By JTA Staff · October 29, 2008

“Joe the Plumber” believes the election of Barack Obama would bring “death to Israel.”

Samuel Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber,” at a McCain rally in Columbus, Ohio, was asked by a Jewish McCain supporter – identified by the Associated Press as Stan Chapman – whether he agreed that “a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel.”

Wurzelbacher replied, “I’ll go ahead and agree with you on that.”

Later, in an interview with Fox News’ Shepard Smith, Wurzelbacher said he was simply offering his “personal opinion that I’ve come up with by looking into different facts,” but that “you don’t want my opinion on foreign policy. I know just enough about foreign policy to probably be dangerous.”

After the interview, Smith said “it just gets frightening sometimes” and stressed that Obama “has said and demonstrated repeatedly that Israel will always be a friend of the United States.”

The McCain campaign issued a statement saying that “while he’s clearly his own man, so far Joe has offered some penetrating and clear analysis that cuts to the core of many of the concerns that people have with Barack Obama’s statements and policies.”

Wurzelbach became famous after the final presidential debate when McCain referred repeatedly to a question the plumber had asked Obama about the Democrat’s tax plan.