Fox's anti-Semitic anti-Obama source--updated!

I'm loathe to give even bad publicity to Sean Hannity's bogus anti-Obama infomercial. But this South Florida Sun-Sentinel post on Andy Martin, who played a starring role in the program, deserves to be quoted in full:

On an hourlong documentary over the weekend, Fox News aired an innuendo-driven program narrated by Sean Hannity called "Obama & Friends: The History of Radicalism."

Their star witness was Andy Martin, whose incendiary, unsubstantiated claims about Obama's past were allowed to go unchallenged.

What Fox didn't tell viewers: Martin has long been a fringe gadfly in the Florida political scene, an anti-semite repudiated by his own party.

In 1996, while running for a Palm Beach County state Senate seat, Martin was arrested after attacking a WPTV-Ch. 5 camerman during an attempted interview at the station's headquarters, while the cameras were rolling. In jail, he went on a hunger strike, claiming to be a "political prisoner." And after the election ended, he was given a one-year sentence and ordered to attend anger management classes.

That same election year, the Republican Party of Florida denounced Martin (who was running as a Republican) becuase of his platform in a prior political bid to "exterminate Jew power in America."

"There is no room in our party for someone who holds these type of views," said Tom Slade, then the GOP chairman for Florida, at the time. "Anthony Martin will receive neither support, nor encouragement, from our party." [emph. added]

That's just the start. Martin has run for offices ranging from Florida state Senate to governor to offices in Obama's home state of Illinois. (Gov. Charlie Crist trounced Martin in the Republican primary for the 1998 U.S. Senate race. Crist went on to lose the general.)

But on Fox Sunday, Martin was presented as a credible character on the question of Obama's personal and political associations in a program that got some 2 million viewers, according to this morning's New York Times.

 Want to learn more about Martin's anti-Obama quest? Here's some additional reading. 

UPDATE: Salon's Glenn Greenwald has quite a bit more on Martin here, and what he's got is damning. A sampling:

In 1986, he [Martin, then using a slightly different name] ran for Congress in Illinois under this campaign committee: "The Anthony R. Martin-Trigona Congressional Campaign to Exterminate Jew Power in America," and he wrote sympathetically of the Holocaust. As The Washington Times described this year:

In a New York bankruptcy case, he referred to a judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew." During the bankruptcy dispute, he filed a civil-rights lawsuit claiming Jewish bankruptcy judges and lawyers were conspiring to steal his property. He asked a court to bar "any Jew from having anything to do with plaintiff's property."

In another motion in the case, he wrote: "I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property."

As Greenwald notes, during Hannity's program, Martin got the following understated ID: "Andy Martin, Author & Journalist."

Incredible.