The Washington Post has this to say about Carter's book.

Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem

By Deborah Lipstadt
Saturday, January 20, 2007;

It is hard to criticize an icon. Jimmy Carter's humanitarian work has saved countless lives. Yet his life has also been shaped by the Bible, where the Hebrew prophets taught us to speak truth to power. So I write.

Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," while exceptionally sensitive to Palestinian suffering, ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion and murder committed against Jews. It trivializes the murder of Israelis. Now, facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes in defense.

One cannot ignore the Holocaust's impact on Jewish identity and the history of the Middle East conflict. When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them. Jimmy Carter either does not understand this or considers it irrelevant.

His book, which dwells on the Palestinian refugee experience, makes two fleeting references to the Holocaust. The book contains a detailed chronology of major developments necessary for the reader to understand the current situation in the Middle East. Remarkably, there is nothing listed between 1939 and 1947. Nitpickers might say that the Holocaust did not happen in the region. However, this event sealed in the minds of almost all the world's people then the need for the Jewish people to have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. Carter never discusses the Jewish refugees who were prevented from entering Palestine before and after the war. One of Israel's first acts upon declaring statehood was to send ships to take those people "home."
A guiding principle of Israel is that never again will persecuted Jews be left with no place to go. Israel's ideal of Jewish refuge is enshrined in laws that grant immediate citizenship to any Jew who requests it. A Jew, for purposes of this law, is anyone who, had that person lived in Nazi Germany, would have been stripped of citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws.

Compare Carter's approach with that of Rashid Khalidi, head of Columbia University's Middle East Institute and a professor of Arab studies there. His recent book "The Iron Cage" contains more than a dozen references to the seminal place the Holocaust and anti-Semitism hold in the Israeli worldview. This from a Palestinian who does not cast himself as an evenhanded negotiator.

In contrast, by almost ignoring the Holocaust, Carter gives inadvertent comfort to those who deny its importance or even its historical reality, in part because it helps them deny Israel's right to exist. This from the president who signed the legislation creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Carter's minimization of the Holocaust is compounded by his recent behavior. On MSNBC in December, he described conditions for Palestinians as "one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation" in the world. When the interviewer asked "Worse than Rwanda?" Carter said that he did not want to discuss the "ancient history" of Rwanda.

To give Carter the benefit of the doubt, let's say that he meant an ongoing crisis. Is the Palestinians' situation equivalent to Darfur, which our own government has branded genocide?
Carter has repeatedly fallen back -- possibly unconsciously -- on traditional anti-Semitic canards. In the Los Angeles Times last month, he declared it "politically suicide" for a politician to advocate a "balanced position" on the crisis. On Al-Jazeera TV, he dismissed the critique of his book by declaring that "most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish-American organizations." Jeffrey Goldberg, who lambasted the book in The Post last month, writes for the New Yorker. Ethan Bronner, who in the New York Times called the book "a distortion," is the Times' deputy foreign editor. Slate's Michael Kinsley declared it "moronic." Dennis Ross, who was chief negotiator on the conflict in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, described the book as a rewriting and misrepresentation of history. Alan Dershowitz teaches at Harvard and Ken Stein at Emory. Both have criticized the book. Because of the book's inaccuracies and imbalance and Carter's subsequent behavior, 14 members of the Carter Center's Board of Councilors have resigned -- many in anguish because they so respect Carter's other work. All are Jews. Does that invalidate their criticism -- and mine -- or render us representatives of Jewish organizations?

On CNN, Carter bemoaned the "tremendous intimidation in our country that has silenced" the media. Carter has appeared on C-SPAN, "Larry King Live" and "Meet the Press," among many shows. When a caller to C-SPAN accused Carter of anti-Semitism, the host cut him off. Who's being silenced?

Perhaps unused to being criticized, Carter reflexively fell back on this kind of innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government. Even if unconscious, such stereotyping from a man of his stature is noteworthy. When David Duke spouts it, I yawn. When Jimmy Carter does, I shudder.

Others can enumerate the many factual errors in this book. A man who has done much good and who wants to bring peace has not only failed to move the process forward but has given refuge to scoundrels.

Deborah_Lipstadt's analysis explains in what ways Carter's book is a travesty of justice and truth. Her analysis of what can only be seen as a deliberate Carter omission sheds further light upon the mind of a person who intervened on behalf of a Nazi criminal on the grounds of "humanitarian concerns" .

Of course some people, some self-confessed "Liberals" are heartily fed up with the subject of the Holocaust. It is so démodé! It is a relic from the past the Jews simply refuse to forget. And it really interferes with the smooth selling of the "New Left"s ideological fashions such as criminalizing Israel for its active (checkpoints) or passive (the fence) and vigorous defence against genocidal-minded organizations. Of course, if only the Holocaust could be erased from the history books, in the manner that Carter's book attempts, then delegitimization of Israel's existence (and Jewish criticisms) could proceed in full swing ahead, leading to the desirable result of its eradication.

I hope Carter's presentation of his book at Brandeis University on Tuesday will be followed by some hardball questions from the students who attend this event. It is absolutely imperative to make this man realize the perversion that he has authored.

American Thinker has this to say about the fiasco, and the UN's role in it, called Human Rights in the Israel-Palestinian conflict:

"Therein lies the rub, the incredible rub, the impossible-to-explain-otherwise-than-as-anti-Semitism rub. The one Israeli missile that struck the Beit Hanoun apartment house was: 1) launched in justifiable self-defense; 2) reasonably produced and targeted; and 3) absolutely not intended to kill civilians. The daily Palestinian bombs, meanwhile, are 1) acts of aggressive war; 2) callously launched without any effort to aim them accurately at military targets (in fact, legal experts long ago concluded that the use of the notoriously inaccurate Qassams are ipso facto a war crime since they simply cannot be targeted); and 3) in fact meant to kill and terrorize civilians.

This asymmetry is well understood by Palestinians. The Jabaliya Refugee Camp in Gaza was the scene of Palestinian celebrations earlier this week. Locals celebrated the victory of female "human shields" in thwarting an air strike against the home of murderous terrorist Wail Barud. Note the implications of this celebration: it demonstrates that Palestinians know that Israel does not seek to kill civilians wholesale. Palestinians do not believe their own propaganda about the Zionist thirst for blood -- otherwise they would not have been able to recruit those human shields. Human shields are worthless in the face of the heinous enemy Israel is supposed to be. If Israel placed "human shields" in front of Hamas, they would be mowed down."


And coming to the assistance of a failed UN and Palestinian myth-makers is none other than former American President Jimmy Carter, whose recent book is an anti-Israel screed. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer today* he was asked plainly why his version of Camp David II is so different from Bill Clinton's. Clinton puts the onus of the failure directly on Arafat. He was there. He quotes a conversation with Arafat in which he makes his judgment clear. But Clinton's word is not good enough for Carter. He just smiled and shrugged off the quote from Clinton's book. what was he suggesting, with that smile and that shrug? That Clinton is lying? That he, Carter, surely knows better? Too bad the pusilanimous Blitzer did not press the point.

So that's probably what we can expect from Carter's book to be: No matter what the records tells you, what the testimony is, what the law says, he, Carter, knows better what's what.

Alan M. Dershowitz lists here some of the many deliberate sins of omission and commision which characterize this immoral account of Israel's plight vis a vis the Palestinians. (A reminder: Palestinians are Arabs, part of the 400 million strong Pan-Arab nation which is part of the 1.4 Billion Muslims in this world. There are 13 million Jews in the world, 5.2 of whom live in Israel).

He concludes with this disturbing thoughts:

"And it’s not just the facts; it’s the tone as well. It’s obvious that Carter just doesn’t like Israel or Israelis. He lectured Golda Meir on Israeli’s “secular” nature, warning her that “Israel was punished whenever its leaders turned away from devout worship of God.” He admits that he did not like Menachem Begin. He has little good to say about any Israelis—except those few who agree with him. But he apparently got along swimmingly with the very secular Syrian mass-murderer Hafez al-Assad. He and his wife Rosalynn also had a fine time with the equally secular Yasir Arafat—a man who has the blood of hundreds of Americans and Israelis on his hands. . .

The Carter book is so biased that it inevitably raises the question of what would motivate a decent man like Jimmy Carter to write such an indecent book. Whatever Carter’s motives may be, his authorship of this ahistorical, one-sided and simplistic brief against Israel forever disqualifies him from playing any positive role in fairly resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That is a tragedy because the Carter Center, which has done much good in the world, could have been a force for peace if Jimmy Carter were as generous in spirit to the Israelis as he is to the Palestinians."

*BLITZER: But the government, the current government of Prime
Minister Olmert...
CARTER: Yes.
BLITZER: ... the previous government of even Sharon and before that...
CARTER: Netanyahu.
BLITZER: But -- Netanyahu, but Barak, Ehud Barak, they offered,
under the last days of the Bill Clinton administration, a deal which
would give up most of the West Bank, including parts of Jerusalem
itself. And Clinton said Arafat missed a major opportunity to resolve
this crisis right then.
CARTER: That is not quite an accurate description of it, which the...
BLITZER: Well, let me read to you what
CARTER: ... the accurate description...
BLITZER: Let me read to you what Jim -- what Bill Clinton wrote in
his book, "My Life." He was the president who as negotiating at Camp
David...
CARTER: OK.
BLITZER: ... and then at Taba, trying to resolve this. And Barak,
the prime minister...
CARTER: Right, (UNINTELLIGIBLE) yes.
BLITZER: ... who made some major...
CARTER: OK. Go ahead.
BLITZER: ... major concessions. He said: "Right before I left
office, Yasser Arafat thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a
great man I was. 'Mr. Chairman,' I replied, 'I am not a great man, I am
a failure and you have made me one.' Arafat's rejection of my proposal
after Ehud Barak accepted it was an error of historic proportions."
CARTER: OK, well...
BLITZER: That's what the former president wrote in his book.
CARTER: All right. Well, in my book, which I think is accurate --
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...
CARTER: I don't know.
BLITZER: ... if he said Barak accepted it?
CARTER: I don't know...
BLITZER: And Arafat rejected it.

NogaNote: I'm puzzled by this contradiction between Clinton's and Carter's versions. It is safe to assume that Carter researched some material for his book, and that surely he read Clinton's autobiography and was well aware of Clinton's account. Why has he not made the effort, then, to reconcile Clinton's statements with his own perceptions of the truth? Why didn't he go to Clinton and ask him about the facts? He preferred to write his book, knowing full well that there was a differing record, written by another former president.

When Blitzer asked him about it, Carter just said he didn't know why Clinton made the statement he did, and that his book makes other claims. But Clinton was speaking from a position of authority as an eye witness and a present participant in the Camp David talks while Carter is merely observing from afar, selecting whom to believe and whom to disbelieve without even explaining the reasons for his selection.

This is most puzzling.

_______________________

A disturbing insight into the purpose of Carter's book, here (emphasis- mine) :

Carter isn't writing for Arabs or Jews; he's aiming at American Christians, particularly the evangelicals who are among Israel's most ardent supporters.

Carter repeatedly refers to Israeli oppression of Christians, destruction of Christian holy sites and imprisonment of Bethlehem. He emphasizes Israel's secular nature in 1973 and makes dark allusions to the powerful pro-Israel lobby.

He asserts that Israel's security fence is a grotesque violation of international law but ignores its success at stopping suicide attacks; he praises Hamas for maintaining a cease-fire for two years and ignores the Qassam rockets raining on Sderot.

And he uses that buzzword, apartheid, which resonates with religious folks who fought to divest from South Africa in the 1980s. Carter hopes his book will inspire a similar grass-roots movement to undermine Israel and ruin the U.S.-Israel relationship.

"Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" is a poorly written, poorly argued, nonsensical little book, and it's the most dangerous weapon Israel has faced in a year full of fighting.

That was a bit premature.

Irshad Manji takes on Jimmy Carter's thesis:

Modern Israel is a far cry from old South Africa

Here are some choice paragraphs:

Which is why Carter's new book disappoints so many of us who champion co-existence. Entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, the book argues that Israel's conduct towards Palestinians mimics South Africa's long-time demonisation of blacks. Of course, certain Israeli politicians have spewed venom at Palestinians, as have some Arab leaders towards Jews, but Israel is far more complex - and diverse - than slogans about the occupation would suggest. In a state practising apartheid, would Arab Muslim legislators wield veto power over anything? At only 20per cent of the population, would Arabs even be eligible for election if they squirmed under the thumb of apartheid? Would an apartheid state extend voting rights to women and thepoor in local elections, which Israel didfor the first time in the history of Palestinian Arabs?

Above all, would media debate the most basic building blocks of the nation? Would a Hebrew newspaper in an apartheid state run an article by an Arab Israeli about why the Zionist adventure has been a total failure? Would it run that article on Israel's independence day? Would an apartheid state ensure conditions for the freest Arabic press in the Middle East, a press so free that it can demonstrably abuse its liberties and keep on rolling? To this day, the East Jerusalem daily Al-Quds hasn't retracted an anti-Israel letter supposedly penned by Nelson Mandela but proven to have been written by an Arab living in The Netherlands.

I disagree: some people still need to be told that Arab "freedoms" don't compare to those of Israel. The people who need reminding are those who now push the South Africa analogy a step further by equating Israel with Nazi Germany. To them, Zionists are committing hate crimes under the totalitarian nightmare that they dub "Zio-Nazism" (like neo-Nazism).

(Via: Normblog)

And so on and so forth. Manji's principled thinking and disciplined passion are always illuminating. I like the cool heat she projects in her words. Clearly she cares deeply for her beliefs but she is always en guard against sentimentality or dogma.

But will Pres. Carter pay the slightest heed? He will say that she never mentions the "apartheid wall". Maybe that she, too, came under the powerful silencing machine of the Jewish Lobby.

"Would an apartheid state ensure conditions for the freest Arabic press in the Middle East, a press so free that it can demonstrably abuse its liberties and keep on rolling? " (I. Manji, above)

Ex.

To illustrate that Tibi's words do not merely express the solidarity of the "Arabs of the Interior", as the Israeli Arabs are called in Palestinian discourse, Tibi detailed the activities which he supports:

"Our struggle will continue until the liberation of the land. Al-Quds [is] the capital of Palestine". Tibi thrice shouted the last sentence as his master Arafat had commanded. The crowd responded to him with the rhetoric which his mentor, Abu-Amar had bequeathed - "Millions of shahid-martyrs are marching to Jerusalem".

This of course is not the first time that Tibi and other Arab Members of Knesset have openly identified themselves with a war against Israel. Knesset Member Tibi achieved stardom in identifying with Hezbollah and against Israel during the last war in Lebanon, and even visited Lebanon once hostilities ceased. However beyond support for terror there is a clear allusion that in the eyes of the Arab Members of Knesset, Palestine does not end with the Green line, and neither does the occupation.

_______________

There is a campaign going on trying to shut down criticism of Carter's book, so far not too successfully:

Amazon.com has refused to bow to pressure to remove a critical review of Jimmy Carter’s book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" from its Web site, but that hasn’t stopped activists from claiming a victory in the struggle against Israel.

Amazon added an interview with Carter above the critical review, which New Yorker correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg wrote for the Washington Post.

Henry Norr, a fiercely anti-Israel technology journalist from Berkeley, Calif., celebrated the addition of the Carter interview as a victory for his boycott campaign. He had launched a petition demanding that Amazon remove the Goldberg review because it was "unabashedly hostile to Carter’s viewpoint."

What I find interesting is the argument provided for the demand to remove Goldberg's review, that it was "unabashedly hostile to Carter’s viewpoint". As though Carter's viewpoint is so sacred and authoritative that an open challenge to it borders on the blasphemous. I'm sure Carter, well known for his devout religiosity, would agree.

Here's Goldberg's review:

Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based.

On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made.

"With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."

Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins -- and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew -- he is on a mission from God.

Carter's interest in the Middle East is longstanding, of course; he brokered the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979, and he has been rightly praised for doing so. But other aspects of his record are more bothersome. Carter, not unlike God, has long been disproportionately interested in the sins of the Chosen People. He is famously a partisan of the Palestinians, and in recent months he has offered a notably benign view of Hamas, the Islamist terrorist organization that took power in the Palestinian territories after winning a January round of parliamentary elections.

There are differences, however, between Carter's understanding of Jewish sin and God's. God, according to the Jewish Bible, tends to forgive the Jews their sins. And God, unlike Carter, does not manufacture sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed.

This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The "imprisonment wall" is an early symptom of Israel's descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that "the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land."

In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state. True, some Israeli leaders have used the security fence as cover for a land-grab, but Carter does not acknowledge the actual raison d'etre for the fence: to prevent the murder of Jews. The security barrier is a desperate, deeply imperfect and, God willing, temporary attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from detonating themselves amid crowds of Israeli civilians. And it works; many recent attempts to infiltrate bombers into Israel have failed, thanks to the barrier.
The murder of Israelis, however, plays little role in Carter's understanding of the conflict. He writes of one Hamas bombing campaign: "Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996." That spree of bombings -- four, actually -- was unfortunate for the peace process, to be sure. It was also unfortunate for the several dozen civilians killed in these attacks. But Israeli deaths seem to be an abstraction for Carter; only the peace process is real, and the peace process would succeed, he claims, if not for Israeli intransigence.

Here is Carter's anti-historical understanding of the conflict. He writes:

"There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East:
"1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and

"2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories."

In other words, Palestinian violence is simply an understandable reaction to the building of Israeli settlements. The settlement movement has been a tragedy, of course. Settlements, and the expansionist ideology they represent, have done great damage to the Zionist dream of a Jewish and democratic state; many Palestinians, and many Israelis, have died on the altar of settlement. The good news is that the people of Israel have fallen out of love with the settlers, who themselves now know that they have no future. After all, when Ariel Sharon abandoned the settlement dream -- as the former prime minister did when he forcibly removed some 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip during Israel's unilateral pullout in July 2005 -- even the most myopic among the settlement movement's leaders came to understand that the end is near.
Carter does not recognize the fact that Israel, tired of the burdens of occupation, also dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements (the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was elected on exactly this platform) because to do so would fatally undermine the thesis of his book. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is being marketed as a work of history, but an honest book would, when assessing the reasons why the conflict festers, blame not only the settlements but also take substantial note of the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.

Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, "It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities -- the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier."

There are, of course, no references to "Israeli authorities" in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it "ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians." He goes on, "In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples." One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis -- in their deviousness -- somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry.

There is another approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, of course -- one perfected by another Southern Baptist who became a Democratic president. Bill Clinton's Middle East achievements are enormous, especially when considering the particular difficulties posed by his primary Arab interlocutor. Jimmy Carter was blessed with Anwar al-Sadat as a partner for peace; Bill Clinton was cursed with Yasser Arafat. In his one-sided explication of the 1990s peace process, Carter systematically downplays Clinton's efforts to bring a conclusion to the conflict, with a secure Israel and an independent Palestine living side by side, and repeatedly defends the indefensible Arafat. Carter doesn't dare include Clinton's own recollections of his efforts at the abortive Camp David summit in 2000 because to do so would be to acknowledge that the then-Israeli prime minister, the flawed but courageous Ehud Barak, did, in fact, try to bring about a lasting peace -- and that Arafat balked.

In a short chapter on the Clinton years, Carter blames the Israelis for the failures at Camp David. But I put more stock in the views of the president who was there than in those of the president who wasn't. "On the ninth day, I gave Arafat my best shot again," Clinton writes in My Life. "Again he said no. Israel had gone much further than he had, and he wouldn't even embrace their moves as the basis for future negotiations." Clinton applied himself heroically over the next six months to extract even better offers from Israel, all of which Arafat wouldn't accept. "I still didn't believe Arafat would make such a colossal mistake," Clinton remembers, with regret. According to Carter, however, Arafat made no mistakes. The failure was Israel's -- and by extension, Clinton's.

Carter succeeded at his Camp David summit in 1978, while Clinton failed at his in 2000. But Clinton's achievement was in some ways greater because he did something no American president has done before (or since): He won the trust of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He could do this because he seemed to believe that neither side was wholly villainous nor wholly innocent. He saw the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for what it is: a tragic collision between right and right, a story of two peoples who both deserved his sympathy. In other words, he took the Christian approach to making peace.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Dutch Version of Jimmy Carter

This story on Haaretz:

He speaks at controversial solidarity events alongside Hamas officials, lamenting the Dutch government's boycott of the Islamist organization branded by numerous governments as terrorist. He is also outspoken in accusing Israel of state-terror.

Van Agt says: his "eyes were opened" during a catholic pilgrimage to the Holy Land."

Here is what he is quoted to have said:

"All the other Arabs, in some way or another, happy or unhappy, dictatorial or not, have their only states. The only Arabs that never got a state were the Palestinians. "

Arabs have an inalinable right to their own states, you see. But not the Jews. The Jews have no rights, even when he openly admits that

"without the worst crime in the history of humanity, the Holocaust, Israel would not have come into existence in that time and in that formula."

You see, Palestinians who became refugees during a war (and have inexplicably remained so for 60 years) are fully justified and should be supported in the quest for their own statehood, even if it means the destruction of Israel. But the Jews who lost a third of their numbers in the "the worst crime in history of humanity" have enjoyed a gratuitous, unwarranted gain by getting their own state. Note please the easy and cold dismissal of the exterminated 6 millons...

>>>>>>

The similarities between this person and Carter are striking. Both former heads of states, both old, both fanatically religious, both have religious-type "epiphanies", after which they feel they finally see clearly and penetratingly and are in a moral position to preach to the unconverted and prescribe insufferable and dangerous solutions. But the similarities go even further: They are also both possessed of great human compassion, directed exclusively towards the enemies of the Jews. The selectiveness of their compassion is really the definitive symptom of their disease.

In the case of Van Agt: In 1972, when he was justice minister, Van Agt told a journalist: "I am only an Aryan" in speaking about his intention to bring about the release for health reasons of the last three Nazi war criminals still in Dutch prisons.

In the case of Carter: “One day, in the fall of ’87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading ‘Jimmy Carter.’ I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn’t. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch’s daughter sent to Carter, after Bartesch had already been deported.“

In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old.“

.... On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted ‘special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.’

Of course, like Jimmy Carter, Van Agt denies that he is motivated by any antisemitic sentiment. I wonder what these people think antisemitism means. They seem to really believe in their own words, as if antisemitism begins and ends with the desire to see Jews in gas chambers. As if the kind of words they use, they kind of causes they advocate or excuse, do not eventually lead, as they know very well from history, to the kind of antisemitism from which they feel exonerated.

For my past posts about Jimmy Carter, scroll down here.

Jimmy Carter's book has largely achieved what it set out to do: It has impeached Israel' image as a beleauguered state surrounded by enemies and laid the entire responsibility for the Israeli-palestinian conflict at Israel's feet. A side product is the buttressing of Arab sense of historical grievance against Israel and its greatest ally, the USA.

This achievement was calculated to weaken moral support for Israel's existence. Considering Carter's statement that Israeli abuses of Palestinians is worse than South African Apartheid, or the Rwandan genocide, Carter's de-facto intimation is that Americans must not be too heart- broken were Israel to be wiped off the map. What American in his right mind would support such a genocidal criminal state?

I hope he is happy with these results. When the next suicide bomber kills Israeli kids, he can have pride of place in the public indifference that his book has engendered.

Here's Kenneth Stein's patient, detailed, and thoughtful consideration of Carter's book.


The Roots of Carter's Anger

Carter's grievance list against Israel is long: He believes the Israeli government's failure to withdraw fully from the West Bank is illegal and immoral; he condemns settlement construction; and he lambastes its current human rights abuse in the West Bank, which he labels "one of the worst examples of human rights abuse I know."[5] From the time he was president, he has criticized Israel's confiscation of Palestinian land, usurpation of water rights, and retaliatory bulldozing of Palestinian houses. Such policies, he has argued, are responsible for the moribund Palestinian economy. Carter holds particular animus toward the security barrier, first proposed by the late prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin,[6] as the latest example of what he believes to be a policy of de facto annexation of the West Bank.

Carter sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the root of both U.S. unpopularity in the region and the wider problem of Middle East instability. Once the historic injustice done to the Palestinians is resolved, he believes, other issues plaguing U.S. foreign policy will dissipate, if not disappear.

Carter believes the conflict's resolution to be simple: After the Israeli government agrees in principle to withdraw fully from the West Bank, a dedicated negotiator like himself can usher in an independent, peaceful Palestinian state. That this has not happened is, in Carter's view, primarily due to the legacy of late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, not the fault of poor Palestinian decision-making or the Palestinian embrace of terrorism. The intransigence of Begin and his successors, Carter believes, was compounded by a failure of U.S. political leaders to pressure the Israeli government to correct its policy. Washington's failure to lead, he believes, is heavily due to the failure of American supporters of Israel to criticize the Jewish state.

Carter believes that if the U.S. government reduces or stops its support for Israel, then the Jewish state will be weakened and become more malleable in negotiations. His underlying logic is based upon an imperial rationality that assumes Washington to have the answer to myriad issues besetting Middle Eastern societies. This plays into the notion in Arab societies that the cause of their problems lies with Western powers and other outsiders. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid will feed that belief.

In the book, Carter does not mention the counterproductive judgments made by Palestinian leaders or their embrace of terrorism over the last many years. While nineteenth- and twentieth-century European, Ottoman, Arab, and Zionist leaders all sought at various times to stifle Palestinian self-determination, the claim that the establishment of a Palestinian state rests only in the hands of Jerusalem and Washington is rubbish. By adopting so completely the Palestinian historical narrative, Carter may hamper diplomatic efforts enshrined in the "Road Map" and elsewhere that attempt to compel the Palestinian leadership to accept accountability for its actions. In pursuing this path, Carter violates the advice he gave eighty Palestinian business, religious, and political leaders on March 16, 1983, when, speaking to a gathering at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, he said, "Unless you take your own destiny into your own hands and stop relying on others," you will not have a state.[7]

Carter's distrust of the U.S. Jewish community and other supporters of Israel runs deep. According to former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Carter's feelings on Israel were always ambivalent. On the one hand, he felt Israel was being intransigent; on the other, he genuinely had an attachment to the country as the ‘land of the Bible.'"[8]

In a 1991 research interview with Carter for my book Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace,[9] Carter recollected that:

[Vice president] Fritz Mondale was much more deeply immersed in the Jewish organization leadership than I was. That was an alien world to me. They [American Jews] didn't support me during the presidential campaign [that] had been predicated greatly upon Jewish money ... Almost all of them were supportive of Scoop Jackson—Scoop Jackson was their spokesman … their hero. So I was looked upon as an alien challenger to their own candidate. You know, I don't mean unanimously but ... overwhelmingly. So I didn't feel obligated to them or to labor unions and so forth. Fritz … was committed to Israel … It was an act just like breathing to him—it wasn't like breathing to me. So I was willing to break the shell more than he was.[10]

The gap between many American Jews and Carter grew during his presidency as Carter increased pressure on Jerusalem. In the 1980 general election, Carter received a lower proportion of Jewish votes than any Democratic presidential candidate since 1920.

From: My Problem with Jimmy Carter's Book
by Kenneth W. Stein
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2007

______________

Linda Young of The Y Files makes some additional pertinent points (the second paragraph is a deadpan satirical hit):

I don't think Carter is an anti-Semite. However, I think that his book is a very skewed treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that some of his rhetoric is disturbing -- such as a passage that draws a parallel between the Pharisees of the New Testament and modern-day Israeli authorities. And I agree with historian Deborah Lipstadt's charge that in defending his book, "Carter has repeatedly fallen back -- possibly unconsciously -- on traditional anti-Semitic canards"; for instance, he has equated criticism from Jewish commentators who write for mainstream publications such as The New Yorker or The New York Times with criticism from "Jewish organizations."

Incidentally, social liberals might be startled to learn that in the book, Carter chronicles the fact that on a trip to Israel in the 1970s he remonstrated with then-Prime Minister Golda Meir for the overly secular nature of the Labor government. He even took it upon him to lecture Meir about the fact that in the Bible, "a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God." (Paging Pat Robertson?) But I digress.

Carteritis

The old boy is at play, again. He is visiting Lebanon, pleads with Hezbollah leaders to meet him, though professes profound understanding as to why they would shun him:

"I understand that some of the leaders of Hezbollah have said they were not going to meet with any president or former presidents of the United States," Carter said upon his arrival at Beirut airport, adding that he would meet other leaders.

Carter has a new book coming out soon.

Carter is a member of the "Elders" who got around, finally, to acknowledge the horrific humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe in their latest pronouncement :

President Robert Mugabe's government cannot lead Zimbabwe out of its current humanitarian crisis, the Elders group of influential statesmen has said....

The Elders include former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former US President Jimmy Carter and international advocate for women and children's rights Graca Machel.

Mugabe was once described by Jimmy Carter as "exemplifying the finest aspects of humanity in achieving liberty and justice".

Remember, It was the Carter administration that pressed Zimbabwe to include Robert Mugabe in the 1980 elections that brought the guerrilla leader to power, despite the fact that he - like the leadership of Hamas - had also not renounced violence or pledged to respect democratic norms.

Mugabe is still the dictator Carter helped to install in power, and Carter is an itinerant peace-laureate in search of ways to drown the furious and loud noises generated by his presidential foreign policy decisions. And isn't it just like the wont of the angel of history to reward such hapless, touchy-feely leadership with his own brand of special irony:

Zimbabwe has barred former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and other prominent figures from visiting the country to assess the humanitarian crisis, the group said on Saturday. They were denied travel visas to Zimbabwe....

"Our purpose in coming here was never to be involved in the political issues that have been so controversial in the establishment of a new government in Zimbabwe, but only to help with the humanitarian issue and we will continue to do that," Carter said.

Walter Benjamin once mused:

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

God preserve us from any progress midwifed through the good offices of former President Carter.

Carter's Dyslexia

This is a sharp article, especially the first half, about the cognitive dissonance in Carter's thinking:

Former President Jimmy Carter has an interesting way of saying more than he intends. He lusts in his heart. He turns to his 13-year-old daughter for foreign policy wisdom. He titles a book, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid." What Mr. Carter means to say is that he is a flesh-and-blood human being, a caring father, a missionary for peace. What he actually communicates is that he is weirdly libidinal, scarily naive and obsessively hostile to Israel.

.... "In a democracy, I realize you don't need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels," he said over the weekend, responding to a question from an Israeli journalist who noted that Mr. Carter had been snubbed by most of Israel's top leadership and reprimanded by its president, Shimon Peres. "When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's the dictator, because he speaks for all the people."

... ponder what he could possibly have meant by this statement. On a charitable view, what Mr. Carter had in mind is that in a democracy it is the people who ultimately make the policy, whereas in a dictatorship it is only the dictator's opinion that counts. Or as W.H. Auden put it, "Only the man behind the rifle [has] free will."

That's not quite what Mr. Carter said, however. He said the dictator "speaks" for "all" the people, just as the people in a democracy speak for themselves. Taken at face value, this is a reflection of every dictator's conceit: that his will is also the general will, whether the people agree with him or not...

Yet ...a dictator speaks for none of the people. A dictator speaks only for himself, while "the people" are transformed, through force and fear, into an abstraction, an instrument, a rhetorical trope. .... it is only in a democracy where the government can morally and lawfully be said to speak for the people, since it was morally and lawfully chosen by the people to speak for them. Which means that Mr. Carter has matters precisely backwards: It is in democracies such as Israel where the views of the leadership matter most, and in dictatorships such as Syria where they matter least.

....Hamas... fairly won a parliamentary election... nobody elected Mr. Mashal to his position... ...Hamas has never accepted the Oslo Accords that are the legal basis of the Authority they seek to govern, much like other totalitarian parties of yore that participated opportunistically in a democratic process – cf. Weimar Republic. They do not seek an entente with the Jewish state but its elimination. In meeting with a former U.S. president, they seek to burnish their reputations as legitimate Mideast players, not outlaws. Perhaps Mr. Carter knows this, or perhaps he doesn't. Whichever the case, his actions bespeak more than he intends.

Israelicool's Elder of Ziyon adds:

...Egyptian officials invited Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shalah to visit Cairo to meet Jimmy Carter but Shalah refused...

It would appear that Carter initiated this request to meet with the arch-terrorist. All of the reasons that Carter uses to justify meeting with Hamas - that Hamas has supposedly offered a truce, for example, or that most attacks are not initiated by Hamas - do not apply to Islamic Jihad, yet Carter apparently wants to give legitimacy to Islamic Jihad terrorists anyway.

It becomes increasingly impossible not to suspect that Jimmy C. is motivated by anything but a malign will towards Israel. However, seeing as he is an old man, some allowance must be made. Given his great age, it would be too unkind, and patently unfair, to pay too much attention to the rationality of his actions or his innermost intentions. Lisa Goldberg's article, here, reports about the good-manners of Israelis in this respect:

"The visit of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and author of Peace, Not Apartheid, to Israel and the Palestinian territories was simply a non-story here. Even the evening news gave the visit only a fleeting mention, with 40-seconds of footage, accompanied by toneless voice-over narration, toward the end of the broadcast.

My feeling is that the media’s lack of interest in the story is a reflection of the Israeli public’s apathy toward ... self-appointed private-initiative peace makers with dubious credentials specifically."

I assume that due to Israel's delicacy of mind, Carter's age problem was thus euphemized to the more politically-correct "dubious credentials".

Here is an apocalyptic scenario which is sure to please Arabs and other antisemites:

Benny Morris: The second Holocaust will not be like the first

"Benny Morries believes that the Iranian regime will annihilate Israel withnuclear weapons, and nobody will stop it in doing so. Morris used to have thereputation of being an Anti-Zionist, but he rejects the accusation that hequestions Israel's right of existence. In this article written for DIE WELT,Morris explains why he is convinced that sometime in the future millions ofIsraelis will be murdered." (DIE WELT, translated by Ursula Duba)

And somewhat related:

The presidential apologist for terrorism:

Josef Farah, is definitely not reading between the lines here, when he furnishes a few paraphrased versions of the following statement in Jimmy Carter's book:

"It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel."

Terrorists, according to Jimmy Carter, will be under a moral obligation to stop their suicide attacks on helpless, innocent civilians, including women and children, only when Israel takes certain political steps.

Stated another way, Arab and Muslim terrorists are justified in continuing their terrorist attacks as long as Israel doesn't take certain political steps.

Stated another way, Arab and Muslim terrorists are under no moral obligation to stop the bloodshed until Israel yields to its pressure.

Stated another way, Israel's behavior and actions are the real cause of the terror.

Stated another way, Israel remains the principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Let's face it, all of these statements mean essentially the same thing.

This is what Jimmy Carter believes.

.... Melvin Konner.. an anthropology professor at Emory University who was asked to be part of an academic group advising the former president and the Carter Center on how to respond to criticism of the book.

Konner: "I cannot find any way to read this sentence that does not condone the murder of Jews until such time as Israel unilaterally follows President Carter's prescription for peace. The sentence, simply put, makes President Carter an apologist for terrorists and places my children, along with all Jews everywhere, in greater danger."

It is conceivable, of course, that Farah was overcooking his chicken. Maybe he was too eager to read into Carter's statement an intent that acquits Palestinian terrorism. Let's see how Carter clarifies the misunderstanding in a recent interview to Al-Jazeera:

"Well, I don’t really consider, I wasn’t equating the Palestinian missiles with terrorism. But when the Palestinians commit terrorist acts, and I mean when a person blows himself up within a bus full of civilians, or when the target of the operation is women and children – such acts create a rejection of the Palestinians among those who care about them. It turns the world away from sympathy and support for the Palestinian people. That’s why I said that acts of terrorism like I just described are suicidal for the popularity and support for the Palestinian cause. "

So let's see what I understand from these comments:

- that Qassams lobed at the residents of Sderot, or Ashkelon, cities, not military bases, causing damage to houses and killing people as they cross streets, or work , killing and maiming kids playing in backyards, these are not terrorist attacks.

- that he, Carter, only used the term "terrorist" to describe a suicide bomber because this is how such an act is perceived by "the world".

- that he, Carter, does not consider such acts to be profoundly immoral and criminal, but rather counterproductive, because they are not good for the Palestinian image.

Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

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.

The Perpetually Smiling Insouciance of Jimmy Carter

I mentioned here the astounding news that he considers the use of the "term genocide to describe the situation in Darfur, where international estimates say 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million driven from their homes... unhelpful."

Apparently, the systematic killing of 200,000 (by a very cautious estimate) human beings, the institutionalized meticulous rape of women and girls, the expulsion of 2.5 million Africans do not meet the necessary onus that the term "genocide" requires. Sez President Carter.

Eric Reeves, on The New Republic, takes apart this insouciant position in an article entitled, with uncharacteristic vehemence "Jimmy Carter's Shamefully Ignorant Statement on Darfur":

Last week, Jimmy Carter toured Sudan as part of a group of international celebrities who are calling themselves "the Elders." Founded by Nelson Mandela, the Elders aim--in the modest words of one member, British billionaire Richard Branson--to address "problems in the world that need a group of people who are maybe...beyond politics, beyond ego, and who have got great wisdom."

Great wisdom? Let's just say the group is off to a rocky start....

In short, it seems doubtful that Carter has read the textbooks he claims to have read, or the vast body of human rights literature on Darfur--or even the Genocide Convention itself. If he had done any of these things, he would not speak so ignorantly.

But Carter isn't just wrong on the facts. His prescriptive point--that it is unhelpful to label Darfur a genocide--is foolish as well. No doubt Carter's statement was the quid in some ghastly quid pro quo he hopes to arrange with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. But Sudan's leaders are realists, and our only hope of changing their behavior is to credibly threaten them. The calculus is simple: If they believe the west--the United States, Europe, human-rights activists--now see the Darfur conflict as a chaotic civil war, not a genocide, they will feel less threatened. Which means they are more likely to dig in their heels on the diplomatic front--refusing to negotiate a political solution to the crisis--while waiting for the final cleansing of Darfur to run its course. The upshot is that Carter, a man who is so fond of lecturing others about the need for diplomacy, has managed to make a diplomatic solution to Darfur's bloodletting less likely. Great wisdom, indeed.

(Via: Normblog)

Out of control political analogies:

A Trotskyite thinks he knows Sarah Palin:

"Obama — ‘Terrist’ — ‘mahzlem’ — scary Black man — vote for me, the Alaska Taliban, youbetcha, dang-goshdornit."

Indeed. Sarah Palin's religious faith can only be analogized to Taliban zealots, an example of whose ethics we can find here:

"Reports of Taliban terrorism are widespread. In one case, scores of Taliban fighters confronted Iqbal Ahmed Khan, the brother of Waqar Khan, a member of the provincial assembly. The fighters ordered Mr. Khan, who was with two of his sons, to choose the son he wanted killed, said the president of the Awami National Party, Senator Asfandyar Wali. After Mr. Khan was humiliated into choosing one son, the Taliban killed both boys, Mr. Khan and seven servants, Mr. Wali said."

Why travel so far afield, to Taliban territory, when a much more plausible American homegrown religious fanatic could be offered by way of analogy, like Jimmy Carter and his demonstrably- insane religious beliefs?

Here is where Carter’s faith takes him:


“On his first visit to the Jewish state… Carter writes…” I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government.”

Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his “temerity.” He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God’s work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins — and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew — he is on a mission from God.”

Here’s Hitchens on same:

“Here is a man who, in his latest book on theIsrael-Palestine crisis, has found the elusive key to the problem. The mistakeof Israel, he tells us (and tells us that he told the Israeli leadership) is to have moved away from God and the prophets and toward secularism. If you ever feel like a good laugh, just tell yourself that things would improve if only theIsraeli government would be more Orthodox. Jimmy Carter will then turn hisvacantly pious glare on you, as if to say that you just don’t understand what itis to have a personal savior.”

Why choose to call Sarah Palin "'an Alaska Ttaliban"? If Christian faith is what animates her politics (something as yet to be plausibly shown to be true), why compare her to the most irrational, unhistorical, brutal bunch of religious zealots currently adorning parts of our world? Why not compare her to that other famous American in thrall to his Jesus? Why not call her "a Conservative Jimmy Carter"? Can anyone argue, in good faith, that Palin's reported belief in Creationism is not about the same level of intellectual sophistication as Carter's belief that Israel's problems are a result of Israeli Jews choosing secularism over devotional adherence to the ten commandments?

Jimmy Carter Update, here too:

If former President Jimmy Carter was a university
professor engaged in scholarly research, he’d be laughed off campus. Carter
apparently doesn’t have enough faith in his own work to defend it.
---
In making the speaking tour rounds to promote his book,
Carter has insisted on carefully controlled situations, with little or no
opportunity for critics to confront him on the book’s conclusions. That led 11
faculty members at Emory University to suggest formally that when Carter appears
there this week, he should not be permitted to escape without engaging in
debate..... unless he agrees to answer the critics, he should not expect his
conclusions to be accepted.

_______________

A Reply to Carter

Where did former president Carter get the comparison between the racial segregation in his country and the South African apartheid regime? The answer lies in the funding for the Carter Center. As it emerges from an article published by lawyer and law professor Alan Dershowitz from the United States, the Center receives generous contributions from Arab rulers.

Israel is the victim of anti-Israelism, which is nothing more than a camouflage for anti-Semitism and a refusal to recognize the historical link between the Jewish People and the Land of Israel, and the right of the Jewish People to self-determination. Carter’s allies are Iranian president Ahmadinejad and the Palestinian terror organizations, which are not interested in the solution which Israel is interested in—two states for two peoples—but for the destruction of Israel.

__________

And sure enough, ... les fleurs du mal...

Beryl Wajsman on a Week of Infamy

Overlapping this display of expedient hypocrisy that has sadly become the defining feature of EU response to international Islamist butchery, were the Israel Apartheid Week manifestations of the usual collection of Islamo-Fascist gauleiters from the Arab world and their fellow-travellers in academic and diplomatic circles in the west. These events sought to portray Israel as an apartheid-era South Africa in relation to its Arab citizens. They took place in eight cities from Oxford to New York to Montreal.

More here

As predictable as mosquitoes in summer,

so is former President Carter, a cowboy who refuses to ride into the sunset.

Having schmoozed, broken bread and exchanged hugs with the horrorists of Hamas, he is now seeking to stabilize his rickety reputation as Miss Nosey Parker's asshole-in-chief by scheduling a meeting with Hezbollah:

Lebanese press reports over the weekend indicate that former US President Jimmy Carter is expected to meet with leading officials from Hizbullah over the course of the summer. This visit would come on the heels of Carter’s visit to Damascus two months ago, in which he met with the head of the Hamas terrorist organization’s political wing, Khaled Mashaal. (Source)

While Carter, with his vapid, fixed smile and undentable sense of superior righteousness, often moves his lips to say the right things, such as condemning suicide bombings against Israelis or insisting that he is chiefly concerned with bringing peace to the Middle Eastern, in his heart he has compassion only for Palestinians.

When he explains why he wants to engage with Hamas, according to this interview

"Carter does not simply say that Hamas have an electoral mandate, that they represent part of the Palestinian people and therefore have to be engaged with. He goes further, praising them, speaking of their "glorious" election victory or suggesting their backgrounds in medicine makes them men of peace (thereby giving his enemies an easy shot, as they point out that, for example, Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to Osama bin Laden, is himself an eye surgeon). When the former president praises Assad's "intelligence, competence and strength" or speaks of Hamas's "superb" record in municipal government, he walks into the same trap: he is no longer making the case for dialogue with Assad and Hamas. He is making the case for Assad and Hamas.

Carter is aware of this danger. I ask whether he detects an in-the-gut conversion to the path of peace in the Hamas leaders he met: "I do, but I may be naive and I may be mistaken."

What about Hamas's founding charter, replete with antisemitic imagery, some of it drawn from the notorious Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? "It's terrible," he says. "I despise antisemitism in anyone. I think anti-Jew is a violation of the basic principles on which my life is built. I grew up with it in the south with anti-black, so I saw the ravages of racial discrimination." But when the charter was raised in those talks with Hamas's top echelon: "They ridiculed it as being ancient, passé, an inconsequential document. But I don't speak for anyone else."

Norm on Normblog points out:

"Can it be that Carter failed to follow up here in the obvious way: if the document is no longer of any account, why not revoke it and replace it with something else? Can Hamas have missed this idea? Can Jimmy Carter?"

Is anyone holding their breath to see whether Carter will ask Hezbollah the same question?