Under our rights of free speech why should President Carter have to defend his book?. Oh, I forgot. The right of free speech and thought was scrubbed along with habeas corpus.
What’s all the fury about? President Carter dared to call it as he sees it and uttered the A word: A as in APARTHEID.
Carter defends his book: “Palestine: Peace Not apartheid”
“I have been called a liar,”[.]
I have been called an anti-Semite,” he said. “I have been called a bigot. I have been called a plagiarist. I have been called a coward. Those kind of accusations, they concern me, but they don’t detract from the fact the book is accurate and is needed.”
“Not one of the critics of my book has contradicted any of the basic premises … that is the horrible persecution and oppression of the Palestinian people and secondly that the formula for finding peace in the Middle East already exists,” the 82-year-old Carter said.
Carter said he was pleased the book has stimulated discussion of an issue that has been “omitted from the public consciousness” for at least the last six years.
“Israel needs peace and the Palestinian people need peace and justice and I hope my limited influence will help to precipitate some steps,” he said.
My rail is against the dumb Israel lobby – the Israel factor that dominates Western governments, a group that finds the truth most inconvenient. The same group that labels anyone who dares to criticize the policies of any Israeli government as anti-Semite.
They’ve marshalled their forces, pressured directors of The Carter Center to resign. Get this, over his book!
Yes they’re dumb. But not just dumb, they’re evil, vile and ungrateful.
How can anyone call President Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite for telling the truth is beyond me. And before Alan Dershowitz or Daniel Pipes comes at me, honor the Mezuzah as you open my door. My family tree is of Sephardi roots (not Ashkenazi)- we hail from Portugal.
I’m appalled, ashamed of those who support and encourage you, Alan Dershowitz, shame on you for siding with leading proponents of torture. I’m equally ashamed of followers of Ariel Sharon, Avigdor Lieberman, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert.
We Jews need to stop seeing everyone as a threat. Stop the propaganda and make peace. I stand with former President Carter. In fact he did not tell all.
But what do we have here? A little distraction.
First Bomb Carter; Then Nuke Iran!
“The Israel Lobby Trips and Tilts”
“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.)
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.
That headline, “Bomb Carter, Then Nuke Iran” is shocking, isn’t it? The article was posted January 20/21/2007. Tonight, 01/24/07 in The Independent, UK, is this headline:
Israel raises nuclear stakes with Iran
“The Jewish people, with the scars of the Holocaust fresh on its body, cannot afford to allow itself to face threats of annihilation once again,” Mr Olmert said in a speech to a high-level security conference in Herzliya.
“No nation has the right even to consider its position. It is the obligation of every country to act against this with all its might.”
“We can stand up against nuclear threats and even prevent them,” he said.”
Tough talk Ehud. I say to Mr. Olmert there is a greater threat than Iran on your doorstep – on the other side of that wall. The Palestinians are being annihilated, slowly. Oh so slowly. Collective punishment. No medicines. The tax revenues of the Palestinians are confiscated because you Mr. Olmert and your backers, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, did not like the results of the election that brought Hamas to power – an election declared to be free and fair.
After Israel nukes Iran, what then and who is next?
Why should we be grateful to President Jimmy Carter? Let us remind – as rightfully President Carter observes:
“Israel needs peace and the Palestinian people need peace and justice and I hope my limited influence will help to precipitate some steps,”
Also Saturday, Carter, at times emotional, told a town hall meeting of how he saved the 1978 Camp David peace talks when it appeared Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would leave.
Carter said in the first three days of the talks Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin often argued.
After about a week, Carter said, Sadat reached a breaking point and packed his bags to return to Egypt — and Carter “knelt down and prayed and I asked God to help me.”
Carter said he then walked to Sadat’s cabin.
“Sadat and I stood with our noses almost touching and I told him that he had betrayed me and betrayed his own people and if he left our friendship was severed forever and the relationship between the United States and Egypt would suffer.”Sadat agreed to stay, and the Camp David Accords were signed.”
But read on. Racism is alive and well in Israel. Oh yes, it is because Carter “Doesn’t Tell the Half of It”
How Israel Enforces “Demographic Separation”
Not a word is said of Israel quietly putting in place the ethnic cleansing – the plan to deport Arabs. In the march to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state, politicians compete for the title of Pure Zionist-in-chief.
Here is an excerpt from the book, A History of The Jews – by Paul Johnson – on a warning written in 1891 that went unheeded. Mr Johnson writes:
“A few Zionist had foreseen that to use Palestine to settle ‘the Jewish problem’ might in turn create ‘the Arab problem. Ahad Ha’Am, who had visited Erez Israel, had written an article, “The Truth from Palestine” in 1891. He issued a warning. It was a great mistake, he said for Zionists to dismiss the Arabs as stupid savages who did not realize what was happening…..
[The Arabs] see through our activity in the country and its purpose but they keep silent, since for the time being they do not fear any danger for their future. When however the life of our people develop to the point when indigenous people feel threatened, they will not easily give way any longer.
How careful must we be in dealing with an alien people in whose midst we want to settle! How essential it is to practise kindness and esteem towards them!…If ever the Arab judges the action of his rivals to be oppression or the robbing of his rights, then even if he is silent and waits for his time, the rage will stay alive in his heart.”
This warning was largely ignored.[.]
Thankfully, a few Israelis do recognize the slippery slope we’ve taken. Shulamit Aloni, former Education Minister of Israel, puts it best-
Yes, There is Apartheid in Israel – It’s an order–this is Jews-only road”
“Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.
The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies.
Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population’s movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians’ land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.
If that were not enough, the generals commanding the region frequently issue further orders, regulations, instructions and rules (let us not forget: they are the lords of the land).
By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night–all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.
On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order–this is a Jews-only road”, he replied.
And from Uri Avnery, an Israeli writer and contributor to Ha’aretz writes “Israel and Apartheid.”
“Yesterday, a decree of the Officer Commanding the Central Sector, General Yair Naveh, was about to come into force. It forbade Israeli drivers from giving a ride to Palestinian passengers in the occupied territories. The knitted-Kippah-wearing General, a friend of the settlers, justified this as a vital security necessity.
In the past, inhabitants of the West Bank have sometimes reached Israeli territory in Israeli cars. Israeli peace activists decided that this nauseating order must be protested.
At the last moment, the general “froze” the order. The demonstration was called off.THE ORDER that was suspended (but not officially rescinded) emitted a strong odor of apartheid. It joins a large number of acts of the occupation authorities that are reminiscent of the racist regime of South Africa, such as the systematic building of roads in the West Bank for Israelis only and on which Palestinians are forbidden to travel. Or the “temporary” law that forbids Palestinians in the occupied territories, who have married Israeli citizens, to live with their spouses in Israel.
And, most importantly, the Wall, which is officially called “the separation obstacle”. In Afrikaans, “apartheid” means separation.
The “vision” of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert amounts to the establishment of a “Palestinian state” that would be nothing more than a string of Palestinian islands in an Israeli sea.
It is easy to detect a similarity between the planned enclaves and the “Bantustans” that were set up by the White regime in South Africa–the so-called “homelands” where the Blacks were supposed to enjoy “self-rule” but which really amounted to racist concentration camps.[.]
SOME PEOPLE in Israel and around the world follow the Apartheid analogy to its logical conclusion: the solution here will be the same as the one in South Africa
There, the Whites surrendered and the Black majority assumed power. The country remained united. Thanks to wise leaders, headed by Nelson Mandela and Frederick Willem de Klerk, this happened without bloodshed.
American tax dollars – billions per year spent in shame – building ghettos. No health care for the poor, the under-insured here in America.
Billions to Israel, well spent in shame. And we affirm by our silence.
The wall will not save us as a people or the promised land, the State of Israel.
South Africa has Mandela. Who will be his equal in Israel?
“The poorest deserve the best – when you hear that, I wonder if you can take in just how revolutionary it is”
“Every wall we build to defend ourselves and keep out what may destroy us is also a wall that keeps us in and that will change us in ways we did not choose or want”
So said Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, England, on his recent Christmas pilgrimage with Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor.Dr. Williams told the BBC the Israel’s wall- security barrier was causing problems, preventing people from going about their lives.”
More voices are raising an outcry but as yet, there’s is no ‘Coalition of The Willing’. Maybe soon. Had the Palestinians erected that Wall of Shame, a coalition to tear it down would have been assembled before the first bag of cement was mixed.
Israeli separation barrier is cutting off Palestinians from their livelihood
“A British government-funded report says the route of Israel’s separation barrier is trapping 250,000 Palestinians in enclaves designed to protect Jewish settlers in the occupied territory.
It says that creation of the enclaves cutting Palestinian communities off from the rest of the West Bank “almost totally ignores the daily needs of the Palestinian population” and is “focused almost exclusively on the desire to maintain the fabric of life of Israeli settlers”.
The critical report – which says the existence of some Palestinian communities is threatened by the barrier – was produced by the Israeli planning and rights organisation Bimkom. The research was jointly funded by the New Israel Fund and the British Embassy in Tel Aviv. [.]
‘Enclaves’ that’s a 21st century sanitizing of words: less odious than “ghettos” “Bantuslands” “concentration camps”
Less we forget. Flashback: “It’s December 1938. Himmler has just reduced Jewish mobility, to assist the concentration process, simply by revoking all Jewish drivers licences.” – The History of The Jews – Paul Johnson (Harper & Row).
How history does repeat. Never thought I’d have to call upon the late President Reagan.
Mr. Olmert, Tear down that Wall!
(emphasis added throughout)