Deconstructing Jimmy Carter: Former president visits Israel with the “Elders”, and gets a drubbing
“Could it be,” asks columnist and writer Michael D. Evans in today’s Jerusalem Post, “that Jimmy Carter’s ideals are formulated by the number of zeros before the decimal on the contributions to the Carter Center by oil-rich Gulf States?”
That’s right. This is not going to be a hagiography of the former president, and his supporters would be advised to read no further. But just what has Jimmy Carter been playing at? I don’t just mean in the last couple of days where he has turned up in Israel with Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson to tell “apartheid” Israel to start behaving itself. He is visiting as part of a delegation of “The Elders”, a designation which is either ludicrously pompous or, in the Israeli context, just plain crass (Elders? Protocols? Zion?), according to your taste. Set up with funding from Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson, the Elders say that they “amplify the voices of those who work hard to be heard, challenge injustice, stimulate dialogue and debate and help others to work for positive change in their societies.”
In other words, it’s a UN talk-fest gone freelance. We know what to expect then. But back to Jimmy Carter and his record in the Middle East. Evans has a few gems to offer.
His piece takes the form of a review of Carter’s latest book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan that Will Work. In it, Evans tells us, Carter comes up with the startling innovation that all sides should embrace the Road Map advanced by the so called Quartet: The US, the EU, the UN and Russia. But that Hamas, Hizbolloah, Iran and Syria should also be involved.
Quoting the British, Menachem Begin is described as the “most notorious terrorist in the region”. It is also alleged that at one point Begin agreed to divide Jerusalem, a point which Evans ridicules:
‘I found that to be astonishing, especially since Begin had given me a copy of the letter he penned to Jimmy Carter on September 17, 1978, in which he wrote, “Dear Mr. President, on the basis of this law, the government of Israel decreed in July 1967 that Jerusalem is one city indivisible, the capital of the State of Israel.” According to Begin, Carter informed him that the US government did not recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
‘Begin told me he responded, “Excuse me sir, but the State of Israel does not recognize your non-recognition.”‘
There is plenty more of this sort of thing (see article below). But Jimmy Carter’s ability to be taken in any way seriously in the Middle East peace process died the day he published, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid thus legitimising a form of hate-speech against the Jewish state which has now entered the mainstream and in no small part due to the former American president’s own efforts.
Carter has tried to wriggle and squirm his way out of this. But to no avail. In an online interview with Amazon.com in January 2007 he gave the following absurd response to a question as to whether he had been surprised by the reaction his wording elicited:
“Forced segregation in the West Bank and terrible oppression of the Palestinians create a situation accurately described by the word,” said Carter. “I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land. This violates the basic humanitarian premises on which the nation of Israel was founded. My surprise is that most critics of the book have ignored the facts about Palestinian persecution and its proposals for future peace and resorted to personal attacks on the author. No one could visit the occupied territories and deny that the book is accurate.” (My Italics)
So if it is “not about racism” why did Carter use the term which more than any other in the post-Holocaust era is synonymous with brute racism and white supremacy? There is no rational come-back to that question. His use of the word “apartheid” was a term of abuse: nothing more and nothing less.
As for his latest foray into peace-making in the Middle East, Evans has a simple piece of advice:
“The best thing President Obama could do is completely ignore Jimmy Carter and his plan.”
Enough said, I think.
To read the piece from the Jerusalem Post, click here:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251145115888&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Tags: Israel
August 26th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
When I saw Carter and Tutu’s names on the list of “elders”, I was left wondering exactly what they could achieve if they couldnt look pastt their own personal bias against Israel?
As you already state, this is nothing but a talk fest gone freelance…so the reality is that this group will do a lot of huffing and puffing but wont blow down any new barriers any time soon.
What we need is someone with intestinal fortitude to clearly state what needs to be achieved for peace. Namely the renounciation of Arab agression and a desire to live in peace with Israel.
Once those two things happen, I think people will be surprised at just how quickly peace will descend upon the middle east.
However, as long as any number of Arab regimes require the Jewish boogie man to channel the discontent of their own people away from their own misrule and , peace will remain elusive.
Mailman
August 27th, 2009 at 4:59 am
An utterly despicable comment from Richard Branson about this:
“I think it’s something similar to what happened after 9/11. You know after 9/11 the world had enormous sympathy for America, and you know that sympathy was somehow lost. And obviously after the Second World War, the world had enormous sympathy for the Jewish people. Over a number of decades, that sympathy has been lost …. You’ve got a great country, but you’ve just got to hold the hands of your neighbors, and then you’ll get back on top again.”
http://tinyurl.com/ry4yvb
In this, he echoes the words of Matthew Parris who wrote pretty much the same thing in a now notorious piece in the Times in 2006:
“The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast. My opinion - held not passionately but with little personal doubt — is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was”
http://tinyurl.com/5wtgeg
August 27th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Thanks for that quote Joshua. “We felt very sorry for those 1 million Jewish children who were gassed and stuck in ovens” Branson and Parris say so nobly from on high. “But now actually we don’t feel sorry for them being gassed and stuck in ovens. They really paid the penalty in advance for the sins of their descendants.” And, what’s more, Branson and Parris make this incredibly patronising and sickeningly brutal judgement on the basis of sheer ignorance of the historical facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
August 28th, 2009 at 10:31 am
So much for Richard Branson’s little experiment in promoting peace. This from an article in today’s Haaretz:
Tutu to Haaretz: Arabs paying the price of the Holocaust
‘ “The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns,” Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa told Haaretz Thursday.
Commenting on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement in Germany Thursday that the lesson of the Holocaust is that Israel should always defend itself, Tutu noted that “in South Africa, they tried to get security from the barrel of a gun. They never got it. They got security when the human rights of all were recognized and respected.”
The Nobel Prize laureate spoke to Haaretz in Jerusalem as the organization The Elders concluded its tour of Israel and the West Bank. He said the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, “as it should be.”
“But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians.”
He also slammed Jewish organizations in the United States, saying they intimidate anyone who criticizes the occupation and rush to accuse these critics of anti-Semitism. Tutu recalled how such organizations pressured U.S. universities to cancel his appearances on their campuses.’
Tutu also appears to be supporting the various calls to boycott Israel:
‘Tutu also commented on the call by Ben-Gurion University professor Neve Gordon to apply selective sanctions on Israel.
“I always say to people that sanctions were important in the South African case for several reasons. We had a sports boycott, and since we are a sports-mad country, it hit ordinary people. It was one of the most psychologically powerful instruments.
“Secondly, it actually did hit the pocket of the South African government. I mean, when we had the arms embargo and the economic boycott.”
He said that when F.W. de Klerk became president he telephoned congratulations. “The very first thing he said to me was ‘well now will you call off sanctions?’ Although they kept saying, oh well, these things don’t affect us at all. That was not true.
“And another important reason was that it gave hope to our people that the world cared. You know. That this was a form of identification.” ‘
http://tinyurl.com/lv7eoa
From an article Tutu wrote for the Guardian in 2002 (”Apartheid in the Holy Land”):
‘People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.’
And how about this little bit of wisdom from an “Elder”:
“But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic.”
http://tinyurl.com/2bbqaj
August 30th, 2009 at 1:06 am
Would any other nation in the world stand silent in the face of guests visiting the country for the sole purpose of trashing it?
September 6th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Carter was the most failed US President since Herbert Hoover! Carter presided over a dreadful economy, 22% interest rates, gold costing over $1,000 per ounce, American hostages being taken by Iran, making “nice” with American’s adversaries, and even more. He was an incumbent that lost in a landslide. And unlike all the other ex-Presidents, Careter refuses to give up any ‘power.’ His presidency was such a failure, there is no question that he is doing everything he can to increase the stature his “legacy.” Carter is no human rights advocate, as he aggressively lobbied for a sale of F-16 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, who at that time just beheaded a princess. Carter refused to debate his books “Palestine, Peace not Apartheid,” and even set as condition for his talk at Brandeis University, that Alan Dershowitz not be allowed into his lecture. Bob Shrum quit Carter’s campaign shortly after it started. Carter’s Presidency also was the reason behind Republican dominance in US government for the past 28 years! Carter refused to even debate John Anderson in the primaries. relatives of mine whio were leftists who were for henry Wallace in the 1948 elections, voted for Reagan while holding their noses. They did not like Reagan, but feared Carter and they felt Carter was in no uncertain terms, a theological anti-semite. Carter is anti-American and too bad he was not the one who got a one way ticket to North Korea for the two journalists.