Friday, December 08, 2006

And the Carter manifiasco continues. I've just watched him on CNN blaming the Israeli Lobby for intimidating him and trying to silence him and his truth.* He also admitted that he never read Dennis Ross's book on Camp David, a most surprising admission coming from someone who claims to be sooo very interested in exposing the truth. No doubt Carter believes that he, Carter, knows and understands better than Ross what went on in CDII, just as he knows better than Clinton who accepted/rejected what proposals, when and why.

These recent developments suggest to me that Carter's book is not accidentally following the
Mearsheimer and Walt "scholarly paper" on The Israel Lobby. They prepared the public mood for his book. He all too easily fell back on this perpetual antisemitic accusation. That is the meaning of his smile and repeated "I don't know" to Wolf Blitzer's question, which I recounted in an earlier post.

It would appear that Carter's mind thinks like this: Israel is an illegitimate country with no legitimate point of view whatsoever. People like Clinton are either dupes of the American Jews or are so intimidated by them that whenever they present an account favourable to Israel's side, they just lie. Now about Dennis Ross, he is a Jew. Need more be said about anything he writes or says? What facts are those? That the Israeli government voted to accept the Clinton proposal in December 27, 2000? False! Why? Because he, Carter, president of presidents, said so!

* Transcript of: THE SITUATION ROOM
Dennis Ross Interview;
Aired December 8, 2006 - 17:00 ET


And joining us now is Dennis Ross, he's the former chief U.S. Middle East negotiator. He's the author of "The Missing Peace, The inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace." An important book on the subject. Dennis thanks very much for coming in. So who is right, the former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, or Ken Stein who worked with him for a long time, a man you know quite well?

DENNIS ROSS, AUTHOR, "THE MISSING PEACE": Well, look, I'm not going to get into a debate over who is right, other than to say that in terms of what I have seen from the book, and I have to be clear, I haven't read the book, but I looked at the maps.

BLITZER: You haven't read "Palestine Peace not Apartheid"?

ROSS: I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I looked at the maps and the maps he uses are maps that are drawn basically from my book. There's no other way they could -- even if he says they come from another place. They came originally from my book.

BLITZER: We're going to put them up on the screen on the wall behind you. But the whole notion, what's the big deal if he lifted maps from your book and put them in his book?

ROSS: You know, the attribution issue is one thing, the fact that he's labeled them as an Israeli interpretation of the Clinton idea is just simply wrong. The maps were maps that I created because at Camp David and then with the Clinton ideas, we never presented maps, but we presented percentages of withdrawal and we presented as well criteria for how to draw the lines. So after I left the government, when I wrote this book, I actually commissioned a mapmaker, to take those and produce them for the first time.

BLITZER: And then he put virtually the same map in his book without saying this came from you. I want you to listen to what he said specifically about this. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARTER: I've never seen Dennis Ross' book. I'm not knocking it, I'm sure it's a very good book, but my maps came from an atlas that's publicly available. And I think it's the most authentic map that you can get. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: You heard his explanation how-- would you say your maps wound up in his book.

ROSS: Well, the reality is the place he got it from, had to get it from mine. I published it before, number one. Number two, you would think that if you wanted to write about the facts of what went on, you would go to a book where a participant actually wrote them and then developed the maps in light of what we had put on the table. Now, again, if the purpose is to say, you're presenting facts, then you should present facts. To say that his map is an Israeli interpretation of the Clinton ideas is simply not true. These were the Clinton ideas. If he were to say that...

BLITZER: On that point, he's told me that he understands better what happened at Camp David, where you were one of the principal negotiators, than the former president himself. I want you to listen to this exchange that we had the other day, right here in THE SITUATION ROOM.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARTER: I hate to dispute Bill Clinton on your program, because he did a great and heroic effort there. He never made a proposal that was accepted by Barak or Arafat.

BLITZER: Why would he write that in his book if he said Barak accepted and Arafat rejected it?

CARTER: I don't know. You can check with all the records, Barak never did accept it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROSS: That's simply not so.

BLITZER: Who is right, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton on this question which is so relevant as to whether or not the Israelis at Camp David at the end of the Bill Clinton administration accepted the proposals the U.S. put forward?

ROSS: The answer is President Clinton. The Israelis said yes to this twice, first at Camp David, there were a set of proposals that were put on the table that they accepted. And then were the Clinton parameters, the Clinton ideas which were presented in December, their government, meaning the cabinet actually voted it. You can go back and check it, December 27th the year 2000, the cabinet voted to approve the Clinton proposal, the Clinton ideas. So this is -- this is a matter of record. This is not a matter of interpretation.

BLITZER: So you're saying Jimmy Carter is flat wrong.

ROSS: On this issue, he's wrong. On the issue of presenting his map as an Israeli interpretation of the Clinton ideas, that's simply not so.

BLITZER: What about this issue that is part of the title of his book that Israel in effect has created an apartheid on the West Bank in the Palestinian territories?

ROSS: You know obviously I disagree with that. You know I would, as a general point, Wolf, I would say everybody's entitled to their own opinion. They are not entitled to their own facts. One of the reasons I wrote this book was to lay out what had actually happened. We live in a world, especially in the Middle East, where part of the reason we have a conflict is because we have mythologies and you can't reconcile the mythologies. You want to make peace, you have to reconcile to reality.

BLITZER: The -- and when I interviewed him, he said he hopes this book does spark a serious debate. Earlier today, though, he says that U.S. politicians, the news media are intimidated by the Israel lobby in the United States and they really don't speak out forcefully on the Palestinian question. Listen precisely to what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARTER: There's a tremendous intimidation in this country that has silenced our people, and it's not just individuals, it's not just folks that are running for office. It's the news media as well. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: What do you say to that charge, that's a very serious charge.

ROSS: Well, has it silenced him at this point or did it silence him up until now? Are we to presume that everything he has said up until today was a function of intimidation and now he's not intimidated?

BLITZER: So your bottom line on his book, "Palestine Peace not Apartheid", because it is sparking a lot of controversy out there.

ROSS: My bottom line is if you put something in here that I can see without question is not what the reality was, not what the fact was, that is in a sense, helping to promote a mythology, not a fact. I can -- look, we have to understand a certain history here. President Carter made a major contribution to peace in the Middle East. That's the reality.

BLITZER: In 1978 and '79, the Camp David Accords.

ROSS: And the Egyptian/Israeli Peace Treaty, there's no question about that. I would like him to meet the same standard that he applied then to what he's doing now.

BLITZER: Dennis Ross, thanks very much for coming in.

ROSS: You're welcome.

http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0612/08/sitroom.02.html
______________________



Here's the latest from Allan Dershowitz:

Last Tuesday, Jimmy Carter, while promoting his new book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,* went further in his anti-Israel rhetoric than even most hard-left extremists would go. Asked whether he believed that Israel's "persecution" of Palestinians was "[e]ven worse ... than a place like Rwanda," Carter answered, "Yes. I think - yes." (You can find the transcript here.)

---- The idea of uttering Israel and Rwanda in the same sentence - and citing Israel as the greater offender of human rights - is obscene. It is also deeply insulting to the memory of those Rwandans who were murdered, raped, and mutilated in what could only be characterized as genocide. This is precisely the sort of exaggeration that caused Congressman John Conyers, D-Mich. and founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, to take Carter to task for using the word "apartheid" in the title of his book, thereby belittling the horror of real racial discrimination and apartheid. As Conyers said, accusing Israel of apartheid "does not serve the cause of peace, and the use of it against the Jewish people in particular, who have been victims of the worst kind of discrimination, discrimination resulting in death, is offensive and wrong."
Conyers's logic should be extended beyond the realm of the rhetorical. There are real world consequences to Carter's - and the far left's - obsessive focus on Israel. What happens is that, when those entrusted with identifying and combating human rights violations around the world choose to focus largely or exclusively in on Israel, the real human rights violators, war criminals, and despots get away with murder. Indeed, the Rwandan genocide is a perfect example of what happens when the United Nations refuses to condemn any country but Israel, and the so-called international human rights organizations put so much of their energy and resources into a country with one tenth of one percent of the world's population (6 million Israelis out of the world's current population of 6 billion people) while ignoring the real and devastating atrocities happening elsewhere.


Carter's comparison can be explained in only two ways: extraordinary ignorance or a bigotry so deep-seated that it blinds one to reality. The burden is on him to explain.


Yes, indeed. Let Carter explain. He may clarify and support his opinions and factoids by quoting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That will clinch his status as a hero to 1.4 billion Muslims who are taught that Jews are apes and pigs and that the "Protocols" is a bona fide historical document. It's inevitable.

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