As U.S. Jews disgrace themselves trashing Jimmy Carter for trying to tell the truth, one of the foremost journalists in the Middle East weighs in

This has been bugging me for a couple of days, since a friend passed on a post--picked up from somewhere online where such posts get posted--seeming to raise the question of whether Jimmy Carter is anti-Semitic. The post listed a whole bunch of supporting charges that are made by people who make such charges, purporting to evaluate them, and even purporting to find some of them not notably credible,

Of course, you know it's all bull droppings, that in fact the poster undertook the post convinced that he could prove many times over that Carter is in fact a dirty Jew-hater. I suppose the former president must have known he was inviting this treatment when he published a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

I'm not going to burden you by digging the whole post out. I'll just say that, while I was skeptical, I was prepared to listen. Hey, you never know.

I was skeptical, because my take on Jimmy Carter, which has changed surprisingly little over the decades he's been a public figure, is that he has one of the better, and more ruthlessly honest, hearts on the planet, and that there aren't many people with as powerful an inner aversion to hatred and bigotry. I also suspect that the place where he pounces most ruthlessly on any sign of such things is inside himself. To me he has the hallmarks of a stern moralist, but like any real moralist, the one person he feels totally free to judge is himself.

But, as I say, who knows? By the time this inquisitorial post reached me, it was festooned with comments, mostly of a "Let's lynch the cracker son of a bitch" kind. One of them pointed out sagely that you often don't find out who a person really is until he's older. And I couldn't dismiss any of the proffered "proofs" of Carter's anti-Semitism out of hand. However, they did have a strangely forced, even manufactured quality. One of them in particular struck a suspicious note:

Look at the things he wrote in the L.A Times: "It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine...What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States exercise similar self-restraint...Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations...?

I don't know if it's those discreet ellipsis dots or what, but something about this made me curious to actually "look at the things he wrote in the L.A. Times." The link was there, so I clicked on it. And here is what he actually wrote, with the portions discreetly omitted by our Inquiring Poster in boldface:

It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City or even Bethlehem and talk to the beleaguered residents. What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the United States exercise similar self-restraint, quite contrary to private assessments expressed quite forcefully by their correspondents in the Holy Land.

That leaves the final sentence quoted by the Inquiring Asshole, which has been tacked on (with those discreet ellipsis dots) as if it is more or less continuous with the previous sentences: "...Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations..." In fact, this comes from four paragraphs farther down in Carter's piece, in a totally different context--he's contrasting the official response to his book as reflected in published book reviews with the overwhelmingly positive response he has witnessed from people who actually read the book.

Among the claims the I.A. presents to brand Carter as a possible anti-Semite is that he carefully "selects" from among masses of material only those thngs that are unflattering to Israel, and then that he "suppresses" any possibly exculpatory material. These accusations, the I.A. says solemnly, Carter is surely guilty of.

Of course it isn't Jimmy Carter but this sniveling scumbag who is doing the fraudulent "selecting" and "suppressing." Just look at what he has done to this one paragraph. It's just not possible that these distortions are accidental, or the result of mere stupidity or incompetence. The misrepresentation is so blatant as to amount to deliberate out-and-out lies.

I find the scale of this dishonesty, I have to confess, simply shocking. When you're that ruthlessly deceptive, rather than pretending to honest intellectual inquiry, you really ought to just keep your lying trap shut.

One of the I.A.'s clever poses is to pretend to distinguish between "anti-Zionism" (i.e., opposition to the state of Israel) and broader-based "anti-Semitism." Of course this is a blatant lie too. Because this scumbag isn't measuring support for Israel; he's simply fishing for "evidence" of any deviation from lick-spittle servitude to the looniest and most bellicose factions of the Likudniks, which has, alas, become a general habit of the leadership of many (most?) of the American Jewish organizations. They don't care about a fair or just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem; they just care about having their way.

In fact, Jimmy Carter has been a far better friend to Israel than any of those "spokesmen." (That is, of course, President Carter in the photo with Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David, Sept. 6, 1978.) Their slavish subservience to the most regressive, repressive and generally repulsive forces in Israeli political life seems almost designed to bring about the destruction of the state. You would think that it might be a wake-up call for them to look in the mirror and see themselves in lockstep with the vilest forcest in American political life--the people I like to refer to as "anti-Semites for Israel." (Why? Because these are people who really and truly hate Jews, as their Jewish dupes will find out as soon as push comes to shove.)

After writing the above, I did some quick online searching regarding the new Carter book, and saw a link for a piece called "Banality and barefaced lies" by Robert Fisk. Now Fisk has done an incredible amount of desperately important reporting on the Middle East (for the British newspaper The Independent). I wondered, was he jumping on Carter? This I would take seriously.

Not at all, it turns out. On the contrary, Fisk says he picked up Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at the San Francisco airport "and zipped through it in a day." He calls it "a good strong read" and an "eminently sensible book," then adds, "Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book--until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour--Egypt--secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords."

Robert Fisk: Banality and barefaced lies

Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise

Published: 23 December 2006

I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent--the Middle East--and see a landscape which I do not recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?

I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".

Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".

Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book--until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour--Egypt--secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".

Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States".

But well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's book is now a best-seller--and applause here, by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead of believing Mr Foxman.

But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't The New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his book? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa--one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid--paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter's book.

At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report--which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of Baghdad--dream zone would be a more accurate title--there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks--the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman--full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time is running out".

The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts" consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution and there is Thomas Freedman of The New York Times.

But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good who dragged the United States into this catastrophe. General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not losing". Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting: "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token (sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that--yes--"we're not winning, we're not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.

I pondered this madness during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's a draw!