is jimmy carter an anti-semite?

^ fuck an adl

xpost - yeah, reviews have found plenty of substantive stuff to pick on w/r/t his presentation of history and his interpretations of things. Substantive political matter-of-fact stuff, not accusations of anti-Semitism.

Did anyone read that James Traub profile of Abe Foxman in the NYTimes Magazine?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here -- Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew -- had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of thousands and sallied forth to buy up every copy of Carter’s book and toss each one into the Charles River, would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?

Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. He has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs who “flatly condones mass murder” of Israeli Jews. (This last was from Murdoch’s New York Post editorial, relayed to its mailing list by the Zionist Organization of America.)

Any day now I expect some janitors at the Carter Center to resign, declaring that they can no longer in all conscience mop bathrooms that might have been used by the former President, their letter of protest duly front-paged by the New York Times, just like the famous fourteen members of the Carter Center’s Board of Councilors. Actually there were, at the time of resignations, 224 people on this board, where membership is mostly a thank you for a financial donation to the center. So the headlines could be saying, “Nearly 95 per cent of Carter Center Board Members Back Former President.”

But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter’s book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, reaching number 4 on Amazon itself. This doesn’t prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Adroit lobbying consists in preventing unpleasing material reaching the light of day. Lobbying thrives in furtive darkness: slipping language into a bill at the last moment, threatening to back a campaign opponent, making quiet phone calls to the Polish embassy. Pressure is now being exerted on Farrar, Straus and Giroux to abandon its impending publication of Mearsheimer and Walt’s attack on the lobby.

The Israel lobby retains its grip inside the Beltway, but it’s starting to lose its hold on the broader public debate. Why? You can’t brutalize the Palestinian people in the full light of day, decade after decade, without claims that Israel is a light among the nations getting more than a few serious dents. In the old days, Mearsheimer and Walt’s tract would have been deep-sixed by the University of Chicago and the Kennedy School long before it reached its final draft, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux wouldn’t have considered offering a six-figure advance for it. Simon & Schuster would have told President Carter that his manuscript had run into insurmountable objections from a distinguished board of internal reviewers. But once a book by a former president with weighty humanitarian credentials makes it into bookstores, it’s hard to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse.

The trouble with the lobby and the Christian zealots who act as its echo chamber is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel’s equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations with the Palestinians. Use the word apartheid and they howl with indignation. The shock is about thirty years out of date. Israeli writers have used the word apartheid to describe arrangements in the occupied territories for years. Hundreds of prominent South African Jews issued a statement six years ago making the same link.

As in so many things, conventional elite opinion lives in a bubble, believing mere assertion and ranting about anti-Semitism will carry the day. The New York Times featured a spectacularly disingenuous hatchet job by its deputy foreign editor, Ethan Bronner, and another assault by former Clinton-era Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross. The latter rolled out the ritual accusations about Arafat’s rejection of Clinton’s proposals in December 2000, which is nonsense, as Ross surely knows. Clinton himself acknowledged in 2001 what later historians have substantiated, that both sides accepted his proposals in principle, while filing reservations. (Israel’s amounted to 20 single-spaced pages.)

The Times’ attacks were matched in the Washington Post by Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly of the IDF and a notorious trafficker in fictions, such as the supposed terror ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Amazon ran his vulgar ravings under the “Editorial Reviews” heading—a space usually reserved for short blurbs from Publishers Weekly and the like.

But if the lobby is fighting rearguard and increasingly futile actions to suppress all discussion here of what Israel is doing to Palestinians, it continues to exercise very serious clout in such enclaves of timidity as the U.S. Congress. Bush was not foolish in singling out Iran for threats in his January 10 address. The Democratic reaction to Bush’s escalation against Iraq and Iran has mostly been confined to nervous talk of “symbolic votes.” This temperate posture is surely not unconnected to the fact that the lobby’s prime foreign policy task, joined by Israeli hawks like Bibi Netanyahu, has been to rally support for an assault on Iran.

What an irony! Desperate for an end to the war, the voters hand Congress to the Democrats. Barely more than two months later Bush is kidnapping Iranian diplomats from in their consulate in Irbil, Iraq -- a calculated provocation arousing scant tumult here. Bush is also deploying a larger naval force to the Persian Gulf, as Israel plants stories about its possible recourse to nuclear weapons. Some provocation, maybe a seizure by the U.S. of an Iranian tanker, is easy to imagine in February. In the Congress, there’s barely a whimper out of the Democrats amid these terrifying prospects. It may have made a mess of its war against Carter’s book, but as a ferryman across the Styx toward Armageddon the lobby is doing a competent job.

Here are some links to analyses you may not find in your other sources of information on line or in the mainstream or alternative media. We recommend you read them. We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) have not forgotten that peace in the Middle East is central to building peace in the world. Naturally, as with all articles we send out or post, we don't necessarily agree with everything we send out—but we do think that the immense control that the right-wing Israel-can-do-no-wrong forces have over American media, and their ability to distort or suppress voices like that of Tikkun when it presents a more balanced pro-Israel AND pro-Palestine perspective, needs to be countered by giving our readers information that you might not get elsewhere.

Jimmy Carter: What My Book is Really About
Carter's book has been the occasion for an assault on him personally. ADL leader Foxman was reported to describe Carter as "a bigot" and rabbis from the Reform movement cancelled a trip to the Carter Center while Jewish members of a 200 member advisory board resigned—all in protest of Carter's book title "Palestine: Peace or Apartheid." As the interview with Carter in the Jan/Feb Tikkun issue makes clar, Carter was warning that in the West Bank Israel either had to make peace or it would be eventually establishing an apartheid reality, not claiming that Israel itself was an apartheid reality. But Carter's substantive analysis has been largely ignored as assailants attack on nit-picking details of his historical account. In this article, Carter explains the kind of discourse he had sought to develop (unfortunately not realizing that in the Jewish mainstream even the most liberal Jews often resort to attacking the legitimacy of the person raising questions about Israeli policy rather than dealing with the substance of those criticisms. That's how Tikkun got to be perceived as radical by many Jews who have never actually read our magazine or Rabbi Lerner's book Healing Israel/Palestine, which would have dispelled any claim that we are anything but moderate centrists who are both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, seeing both as having many legitimate points, and both acting in ways that are cruel and provocative.
Click here or copy this address and paste it in to whatever program you use to surf the internet:
http://tikkun.org/rabbilernerarticles/Document.2007-01-20.0856/document_view?portal_status_message=Document%20changes%20saved.

Apartheid in Israel? by Shulamit Aloni
Indeed, there IS Apartheid in Israel says former Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni, challenging the American Jewish establishment's ferocious assault on Jimmy Carter for having suggested that such a think might happen in the future in the West Bank. Please read this before thinking that Carter's fears are groundless. Then listen to the assaults on Carter from people in the organized Jewish community and decide what YOU think.
To access this article, please click here , or copy this address and paste it into whatever program you use to surf the internet. http://files.tikkun.org/current/article.php?story=20070105080344465

The Second Holocaust by Benny Morris
Iran may eventually take a decision to do a first nuclear strike against Israel—that's the worry that leads some Israelis to currently favor a "preemptive nuclear strike" against suspected nuclear targets in Iran. Benny Morris presents a scenario for how the worst fears of a "2nd Holocaust" could become real, in an article first published Jan. 6th in Die Zeit. Please read the accompanying Tikkun Editor's note to see how one could validate the fears but arrive at very different conclusions about what to do.
Click here or copy this address and paste it into whatever program you use to surf the internet http://tikkun.org/rabbilernerarticles/Document.2007-01-14.0304/document_view?portal_status_message=Document%20changes%20saved.

Israeli and Palestinian Peace Activists Strategizing Together by Uri Avnery
Veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery reports on a recent meeting of
Israelis and Palestinians to strategize together about how best to build peace. Such meetings have not happened for a long time, and represent a significant sign of hope.
Click here or copy this address and past it into whatever program you use to surf the internet: http://tikkun.org/rabbilernerarticles/Document.2007-01-14.5834/document_view?portal_status_message=Document%20changes%20saved.

http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.org/tour/gifts_of_state/images/portrait.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h874BPSnbWc

http://www.omegaletter.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/jimmy_carter_palestine_book_love_the_intifada_hate_israel.jpg

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/images/Jimmy%20Carter.jpg

http://img.search.com/thumb/4/48/JimmyCarteronBicycle.jpg/200px-JimmyCarteronBicycle.jpg

http://dererumnatura.us/archives/2009/07/24/mrjimmy.jpg

http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/56500/Jimmy-Carter--56932.jpg

http://www.zclyw.com/2007/wp-content/uploads/121397.jpg

Okay there seems to be a little cottage industry based around the photoshopping of Jimmy Carter's face.

"Jimmy Carter inspires great art"

http://www.neoconnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/when_carter_met_hamas1.jpg

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/uncyclopedia/images/0/06/Jimmy-carter.jpg

Jimmy looks great in curls.

Also: fuck him and his non-charm.