April 02, 2008 06:14 PM UTC

Nasty Spat in Meaningless GOP HD-6 Race

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Rocky Mountain News reports:

A Middle Eastern native running for a state House seat faces a challenge from a blogger who called her “a terror apologist and an avowed enemy of Israel with no credible conservative credentials.”

Republican Rima Barakat Sinclair said she has been unfairly labeled because she is a Muslim of Palestinian descent.

“I absolutely deny that,” she said, of claims she supports terrorism. “What is behind that? Where is the proof? This is nothing but mudslinging.”

Her campaign finance manager, who is Jewish, also dismissed the criticism, but some Republicans are leery.

Congressional candidate Mike Coffman’s campaign on Tuesday informed Sinclair they were going to return her campaign donations because of an interview she gave where she called Israel “an occupier.”

At the Denver County Republican assembly last month, Sinclair won enough support to get her name on the ballot in House District 6.

Her candidacy so alarmed Republican blogger Joshua Sharf, an orthodox Jew, that he now is collecting signatures to try to get on the ballot to run against her in the August primary…

Our view: we’re not going to step on any Middle East landmines by taking a side, but there ought to be room to debate the issues affecting the region without being branded as a “terror apologist,” and Republicans ought to be able to debate them too. Some of what we’ve read of Sharf’s attacks on Sinclair seem a little shaky tolerance-wise (“What we don’t need is a Barakat in Sinclair’s clothing” comes across a bit shallow and xenophobic), and that’s not a good message for the Colorado GOP to have front and center in the news.

This is particularly true since none of this nastiness will matter at all in the general election–we’re talking about a GOP primary in a heavily Democratic Denver district where Republicans have zero chance of winning in November. Which makes this potentially embarrassing sound and fury, but not much else.