December 15, 2006--Fanaticism LXXVIII--Telling It Like It Is
Jimmy Carter’s in trouble again. This time it’s not for moping in the Rose Garden while Americans are held hostage in Iran or turning down the heat in the White House and needing to wear cardigans to keep warm or even for lusting in his heart.
This time he’s in hot water for his use of just one word--Apartheid.
He would be all right, even praised, if he had used it to describe the old days in South Africa, when it was politically and morally correct to apply it to the conditions there. He is being vilified now because he applied it to the emerging situation in the Middle East where, he contends, in a new book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, that Israel, by its policies, is moving in a direction that will create an Apartheid situation where Palestinians will be kept in separate, segregated, fenced-in enclaves. His crime, thus, is equating conditions in Israel with those in racist South Africa.
To compound this political and moral crime, Carter also contends that the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. is so influential and powerful that it has succeeded in stifling debate about Israel’s alleged human rights abuses.
For this, the former president, as he roams the country promoting the book, has been severely criticized, which is certainly a legitimate thing to do; labeled a racist; and, of course, an anti-Semite. (See NY Times article linked below.)
Gentle soul that he is, though not muting his critique, President Carter the other night in Phoenix met with a group of rabbis and made peace with them—they wound up forming a circle, holding hands, and praying together.
No such luck for University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt when last spring they published in the London Review of Books “The Israel Lobby and the U.S.” Though somewhat flawed in its research, they nonetheless made a strong and persuasive case that a coalition of neoconservatives, Christian Zionist millennialists, leading journalists, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the Israel-Palestine stalemate.
The response to them went beyond outrage. Some called them neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." A University of Chicago colleague, Daniel Drezner called their article, in carefully-reasoned academic rhetoric, "piss-poor, monocausal social science." (Emphasis added.) And of course, Alan Dershowitz chimed in claiming that the men had "destroyed their professional reputations."
As a result of this assault on their characters and motivations they get shouted down almost every time they appear at a public forum.
So much for open discourse. Clearly no circle of rabbis or Kumbaya for them.
This kind of excessive response to the Mearsheimer, Walt, and Carter tells the amateur psychologist and Jew in me that . . . they’re on to something.
This time he’s in hot water for his use of just one word--Apartheid.
He would be all right, even praised, if he had used it to describe the old days in South Africa, when it was politically and morally correct to apply it to the conditions there. He is being vilified now because he applied it to the emerging situation in the Middle East where, he contends, in a new book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, that Israel, by its policies, is moving in a direction that will create an Apartheid situation where Palestinians will be kept in separate, segregated, fenced-in enclaves. His crime, thus, is equating conditions in Israel with those in racist South Africa.
To compound this political and moral crime, Carter also contends that the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. is so influential and powerful that it has succeeded in stifling debate about Israel’s alleged human rights abuses.
For this, the former president, as he roams the country promoting the book, has been severely criticized, which is certainly a legitimate thing to do; labeled a racist; and, of course, an anti-Semite. (See NY Times article linked below.)
Gentle soul that he is, though not muting his critique, President Carter the other night in Phoenix met with a group of rabbis and made peace with them—they wound up forming a circle, holding hands, and praying together.
No such luck for University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt when last spring they published in the London Review of Books “The Israel Lobby and the U.S.” Though somewhat flawed in its research, they nonetheless made a strong and persuasive case that a coalition of neoconservatives, Christian Zionist millennialists, leading journalists, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the Israel-Palestine stalemate.
The response to them went beyond outrage. Some called them neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." A University of Chicago colleague, Daniel Drezner called their article, in carefully-reasoned academic rhetoric, "piss-poor, monocausal social science." (Emphasis added.) And of course, Alan Dershowitz chimed in claiming that the men had "destroyed their professional reputations."
As a result of this assault on their characters and motivations they get shouted down almost every time they appear at a public forum.
So much for open discourse. Clearly no circle of rabbis or Kumbaya for them.
This kind of excessive response to the Mearsheimer, Walt, and Carter tells the amateur psychologist and Jew in me that . . . they’re on to something.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
11:59 AM
3 Comments:
When it all coems down again, we'll have only ourselves to blame. In the meantime, do yourself a favor--get Satillite Radio!
Though somewhat flawed in its research, they nonetheless made a strong and persuasive case that a coalition of neoconservatives, Christian Zionist millennialists, leading journalists, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the Israel-Palestine stalemate.
Somewhat flawed? You mean, as flawed as the research to be employed in treating you when you get cancer? (I only hope).
Strong and persuasive? You mean, to morons and useful idiots?
"Mein Kampf" and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were similarly "somewhat flawed" and "strong and persuasive." In fact, they was so pursuasive, they pursuaded people to mass murder Jews.
To "Anonymous"--First of all stop hiding behind that moniker. You talk tough while hiding in the shadows. Their research is not perfect--whose is? But they still made a powerful case that we are cowed by the Israel Lobby in the US. Do you know anything about The "Left Behind" folks and their ilk and how they exert pressure on the US government to unquestionably support the Israeli government and how this powerful support is at its essence as anti-Semetic as it gets? You need to do a little more research of your own and calm down or you'll give yourself cancer.
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