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The nightmare of every American public
figure is to be seen as anti-Semitic. It is a charge lethal
enough to snuff out a political career and earn the man who
has been so accused public opprobrium. No one will come to
his aid in the press and the rightwing talk radio, with
which the airwaves in this country are thick, will heap so
much abuse and scorn on the man as to make his name mud and
render him unfit to seek public office ever again.
The hypocrisy of it all is that privately many agree that
the anti-Semitism charge has been used to denounce anyone
who has dared speak critically of Israel. In one-to-one
conversations, people who wouldn’t dream of being quoted in
public, will admit that the pro-Israeli lobby exercises
undeserved power and much influence. They would also concede
that such blind support of all Israeli causes, right or
wrong, does not serve the American national interest.
However, there are few who would even dream of taking a
public position on any issue where they have to criticize
Israeli policy or Israeli actions. Ironically, there is far
more criticism of Israeli statecraft and Israeli treatment
of Palestinians and Israeli occupation of Arab land in
Israel itself than there is in America.
Every American administration has gone out of its way to
defend every Israeli policy and action, be it massacres of
Palestinians, wanton bombing of civilians, or military raids
into Palestinian settlements. There has been no
administration more pro-Israel than that of George Bush.
Under him and his cabal of pro-Israeli advisers and members
of the cabinet, such as the Warrior Princess Condoleezza
Rice, Israel has never had it better. Perhaps that is only
natural because the state of Israel was brought to birth by
President Harry Truman. If anyone should have guilt about
how the European Jewry was treated, it should be the
Germans. Why should America carry this burden when it has
played no part in the persecution of the Jews?
Given this backdrop, President Jimmy Carter is to be
commended for having written a book that upholds the
trampled rights of the Palestinians. Since the publication
of the book, which uses the word ‘apartheid’ in its title,
thus likening the treatment of Palestinians at the hands of
the Israelis to that of black South Africans by the racist
white state that today lies in the dustbin of history,
Carter has been subjected to great abuse. But the man has to
be saluted. Because of what he has accomplished since he
left the White House, he has become the world’s most
respected and its most trusted statesman.
One of the attacks mounted on Carter said, “Even as Islamic
Hitlerites gather in Iran to deny the first Holocaust of the
Jews and to plot the second, former president Jimmy Carter
tours America with a new book that describes Jews as racists
and oppressors, and suggests they are also a conspiratorial
mafia that intimidates ‘critics,’ controls America’s media
and war policy, and are therefore also the source of Islamic
terrorism and the Arabs’ genocidal campaign to eliminate
them from the map of the Middle East. In other words,
Americans beware of the Jew in your midst.”
Now, where did Carter say that Americans
should be beware of the Jews who live in America? Nowhere.
But you have to call a man a dog before you hang him.
Carter wrote, “The Palestinians have had their own land,
first of all, occupied and then confiscated and then
colonized. They’ve been excluded from their own gardens and
fields, and pastures and churches. They have been severely
restrained in their movements. They have to have different
kinds of passes to go through different checkpoints inside
their own lands on their own roads. The Israelis have built
more than 200 settlements inside Palestine. They connect
these settlements with very nice roads for the Israeli
settlers, and then superhighways and so forth going into
Jerusalem. Quite often the Palestinians are prevented from
even riding on those roads that have been built in their own
territory. So this has been in many ways worse than it was
in South Africa.” Carter’s critic calls what the former
President wrote “more than a lie”, in fact, “a blood libel.”
It is another matter that not a word of what Carter wrote is
untrue.
One of the great supporters of the Israeli causes is Harvard
law professor Alan Dershowitz, whom Carter was due to debate
at the Brandeis University. Carter declined to go and when
asked why, replied, “I don’t want to have a conversation
even indirectly with Dershowitz. There is no need for me to
debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the
situation in Palestine.” Carter told Boston Globe, “There is
no debate in America about anything that would be critical
of Israel.”
If Gen. Musharraf wants the world to believe that the 2007
elections in Pakistan are going to be free and fair, as he
and his people claim, then it is Jimmy Carter whose stamp of
approval he should obtain to validate his claim. Such is the
man’s credibility that if he pronounces the elections free
and fair, everybody would believe him, including the people
of Pakistan.
But would Musharraf do that? The jury is out on that one.
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