I thought I was just tweaking Andrew Sullivan with a little irony. But it turns out the Clinton Eavesdropping Regime was no joke.
At least Mickey Kaus is getting a lot of mileage out of it:
The Brit papers are breaking the story that the Clinton-administration “secret service”** secretly bugged Princess Diana “over her relationship with a US billionaire” Ted Forstmann. Initial questions: What was the grave high-level concern about Forstmann, a big-deal investor, Republican, and education activist? … What, were they worried Diana might endorse school choice?*** … And did they have a warrant? … Plus, of course: What did the Clintons know, etc.?… Intriguingly, Forstmann once made noises about running against Hillary Clinton in 2000. … [via Drudge] … Update: Carefully worded U.S. denials here. … More: The NSA is “working on a statement”! …
As I was saying, the Palestinian national cause is not served by Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-Denial Movie of the Week. On the contrary, says a Palestinian activist recently released after spending 18 years in an Israeli jail:
Mr Ahmadinejad has been condemned on the eve of the conference by Mahmoud al-Safadi, who was sentenced to 27 years by Israel for throwing Molotov cocktails during the 1988 intifada [and recently released from prison]. In an open letter to the Iranian president, he says that Mr Ahmadinejad’s stance is a “great disservice to popular struggles the world over”.
“Perhaps you see Holocaust denial as an expression of support for the Palestinians,” he writes. “Here, too, you are wrong. We struggle for our existence and our rights, and against the historic injustice that was dealt us in 1948.
“Our success and our independence will not be gained by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, even if parts of this people are the very forces that occupy and dispossess us to this day.”
Mr Safadi says that reading the works of Arab intellectuals helped convince him that the Holocaust was a historical fact.
About that last point: maybe, maybe not. No doubt Safadi was “turned” during his 18 years in an Israeli jail—turned from a Molotov cocktail-throwing militant into a person with perspective, that is: one no less committed to a homeland for his people. The difference is that he seeks that homeland through legitimate, non-violent means. And very bravely, I might add.
I have no doubt that the uber-punitive Christian former president of the United States James Earl Carter thinks he means well when he brings the little-known cause of the long-suffering Palestinians to the attention of the world in a book called Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.
Carter may have the best intentions toward the Palestinians; he certainly does not mean well when it comes to Israeli Jews or, for that matter, American Jews. Let’s leave aside the question of why Carter chose this particularly sensitive moment in geopolitical upheaval to publish an aggressively provocative and vicious attack on Israel. Let’s just focus on why he lied about the “facts” he printed—about which Dennis Ross, whose work Carter stole and misrepresented in order to publish those “facts,” had this to say on the Situation Room last Friday evening:
ROSS: I haven’t had a chance to read [Carter's book] yet, but I looked at the maps and the maps he uses are maps that are drawn basically from my book. There’s no other way they could — even if he says they come from another place. They came originally from my book.
BLITZER: We’re going to put them up on the screen on the wall behind you. But the whole notion, what’s the big deal if he lifted maps from your book and put them in his book?
ROSS: You know, the attribution issue is one thing, the fact that he’s labeled them as an Israeli interpretation of the Clinton idea is just simply wrong. The maps were maps that I created because at Camp David and then with the Clinton ideas, we never presented maps, but we presented percentages of withdrawal and we presented as well criteria for how to draw the lines. So after I left the government, when I wrote this book, I actually commissioned a mapmaker, to take those and produce them for the first time.
BLITZER: And then he put virtually the same map in his book without saying this came from you. I want you to listen to what he said specifically about this. Listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARTER: I’ve never seen Dennis Ross’ book. I’m not knocking it, I’m sure it’s a very good book, but my maps came from an atlas that’s publicly available. And I think it’s the most authentic map that you can get.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BLITZER: You heard his explanation how– would you say your maps wound up in his book.
ROSS: Well, the reality is the place he got it from, had to get it from mine. I published it before, number one. Number two, you would think that if you wanted to write about the facts of what went on, you would go to a book where a participant actually wrote them and then developed the maps in light of what we had put on the table. Now, again, if the purpose is to say, you’re presenting facts, then you should present facts. To say that his map is an Israeli interpretation of the Clinton ideas is simply not true. These were the Clinton ideas. If he were to say that…
BLITZER: On that point, he’s told me that he understands better what happened at Camp David, where you were one of the principal negotiators, than the former president himself. I want you to listen to this exchange that we had the other day, right here in THE SITUATION ROOM.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARTER: I hate to dispute Bill Clinton on your program, because he did a great and heroic effort there. He never made a proposal that was accepted by Barak or Arafat.
BLITZER: Why would he write that in his book if he said Barak accepted and Arafat rejected it?
CARTER: I don’t know. You can check with all the records, Barak never did accept it. (END VIDEO CLIP)
ROSS: That’s simply not so.
BLITZER: Who is right, Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton on this question which is so relevant as to whether or not the Israelis at Camp David at the end of the Bill Clinton administration accepted the proposals the U.S. put forward?
ROSS: The answer is President Clinton. The Israelis said yes to this twice, first at Camp David, there were a set of proposals that were put on the table that they accepted. And then were the Clinton parameters, the Clinton ideas which were presented in December, their government, meaning the cabinet actually voted it. You can go back and check it, December 27th the year 2000, the cabinet voted to approve the Clinton proposal, the Clinton ideas. So this is — this is a matter of record. This is not a matter of interpretation.
BLITZER: So you’re saying Jimmy Carter is flat wrong.
ROSS: On this issue, he’s wrong. On the issue of presenting his map as an Israeli interpretation of the Clinton ideas, that’s simply not so.
Rick Richman at Jewish Current Issues, in a lengthy, detailed post, explains why Carter had to lie: because it was only by twisting the facts that he could substantiate his extravagant claim—the underlying argument of his book—that it is the Israelis, not the Palestinians, who are and always have been the intransigent obstacle to peace (hat tip Power Line):
But notice that while the map is in identical to Ross’s in almost every respect, Carter has significantly altered its title. Carter calls his map not an illustration of the Clinton Parameters by the U.S. Ambassador who developed them, but rather the “Israeli Interpretation of Clinton’s Proposal” (emphasis added) — as if it were simply one side’s “interpretation.” He also omits Ross’s explanatory note, which made it clear the map “actually understates the Clinton ideas by not showing an additional 1 to 3% of territorial swaps to the Palestinians” (emphasis added).
I know I shouldn’t breathe more life into this—that in all likelihood even the minimal attention it’s likely to get from this lonely blog will be counterproductive, because more controversy only serves Carter’s purpose: it draws attention to his un-Christian cause—which, as Jeffrey Goldberg notes in the Washington Post, is to dismantle American evangelicals’ support for Israel.
Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens.
Interestingly, though, I picked up on Carter’s appeal to evangelicals without knowing quite what I was picking up on when I quoted his outrageous anti-Semitic innuendo the other day:
“There’s a tremendous intimidation in this country that has silenced our people [about Israel]. And it’s not just individuals, it’s not just folks who are running for office. It’s the news media as well,” he said.
Silenced our people? I asked. Which people was he referring to? How exactly are “they” being silenced? I wondered. Indeed I still wonder. Was he referring to “real” Americans? to evangelicals? What did he mean?
I wish an enterprising journalist would pursue the matter. Meanwhile, here’s what it looks like: The oh so pious Carter is using his considerable moral authority as a prominent Christian former president of the United States
1) to smear Israeli Jews with lies;
2) to spread crass anti-Semitic innuendo (undue influence of and intimidation by AIPAC) about American Jews;
3) to cover up for and excuse the braying donkeys and pestilential thugs and murderous gangsters who live and thrive among the long-suffering, beaten-down Palestinian Arabs.
Which Palestinians do you support, Jimmy Carter?
A Palestinian mourner watches the funeral for the three sons of senior intelligence officer Baha Balousheh, killed in a drive-by shooting attack, in Gaza City, Monday, Dec. 11, 2006. Palestinian gunmen killed three young children of a senior Palestinian intelligence officer Monday, pumping dozens of bullets into their car as it passed through a street crowded with schoolchildren, an apparent botched assassination attempt that could ignite widespread factional fighting. (
AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)
“Overexposure” to the Holocaust was starting to annoy people at the close of the 20th century, as noted by Michael Blumenthal in an essay in Time magazine in February 2000.
Several weeks ago, at the home of some new acquaintances in Berlin, a kind and amiable family who had invited us over for Sunday dinner, there arose the subject of their adolescent son’s and his schoolmates’ “Holocaust fatigue”–their sense of having the Holocaust perpetually rammed down their throats by teachers and administrators at every turn. He was tired, the son said, of hearing so much about the Holocaust, a period in Germany’s history during which he was not even alive, and for which, by definition, he and his generation could shoulder no responsibility.
I commiserated with him, saying that I could understand his plight–one shared, in fact, by many Americans who feel they bear no blame for the historical fact of slavery or for the unforgivable mistreatment and displacement of Native Americans.
Blumenthal went on to note that this “fatigue” was unaccompanied by much knowledge about the Holocaust (in Germany, at least) fifty-five years after the event. But so it goes with history: human beings forget bad things—even things as bad as the Holocaust. They choose to forget, in order to be able to move forward, to go on with their lives. Life goes on. It must, and it should.
The sacralizing of the Holocaust (”Never forget,” the warning passed on from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who couldn’t forget—and shouldn’t, of course, have been expected to) was directed at American Jews: perpetual naifs lucky enough to have been born into the many bounties of American-style freedom.
I am not one of them: not naive, and was not born into the many bounties of American-style freedom (which makes me treasure it all the more, I daresay). I am all too familiar with the persecution of Jews that continued apace in Europe immediately after the Holocaust, persecution about which neither the perpetrators nor the victims were sentimental: by the time the second round was over, both parties understood that it was the eternal fate of the Jews to suffer persecution, whether of the extermination kind under Nazism or of the show-trial kind under Stalinism.
So I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t get all worked up over Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust “conference.” I’ll let my naive American friends writhe in pain over it. Let them learn: the Holocaust did not end the historical persecution of the Jews. It was just one milestone.
Am I cold-blooded and cold-hearted enough for you? Blame anti-Semitism (not the name-calling kind—the rounding-up and exterminating kind). It made me, a non-believer from a long line of non-believers, into a realist, and an unashamed, unembarrassed, forthright defender of the Jews. And this cold-hearted, cold-blooded bitch is telling you that it is the Palestinians, not the Israelis or the Jews, who will suffer most from Ahmadinejad’s insanity.
The Times (London) agrees with me.
For it is not simply that the denial or playing down of the Holocaust will, as Amos Oz, the liberal Israeli writer, said, “be received with revulsion and disgust everywhere in the world”; it makes the terrible mistake of justifying criticism of Israel by denying the historical fact so crucial to the state’s founding. The more thoughtful Palestinians have already understood that the refusal to acknowledge the wartime persecution of the Jews gives credibility to the assertion that critics of Israel are motivated by anti-Semitism. Iran’s President simply proves the point. He has labelled Israel a “tumour” that should be “wiped from the face of the Earth”.
Mr Mottaki has revealed the real intention. “If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt”. With such crass statements from their supporters, the Palestinians must worry that their case will never be understood. In fact, the truth or otherwise of the Holocaust is of no concern to Iranian hardliners. They are using the issue because of its emotive value — in Israel, Europe and especially in the US. Nor is the timing coincidental. The hardliners are determined to rally domestic support for their defiance on the nuclear issue and to sabotage any dialogue with America on Iraq. What better way to achieve isolation than to deny one of the most shameful events in Western history?
While Andrew Sullivan laments “the scandal of the American torture regime” under George Bush and Friends, the Daily Mail reports that Bill Clinton was apparently the head of an American eavesdropping regime in 1997.
American intelligence agencies were bugging Princess Diana’s telephone over her relationship with a US billionaire, the Mail’s sister paper has learned.
Evening Standard reports that she was even forced to abandon a planned holiday with her sons in the US with tycoon Teddy Forstmann on advice from secret services, who passed on their concerns to their British counterparts.
No doubt Diana, Princess of Wales, was just one of the many victims of this nefarious policy.
(updated with a new link, and a quote, and an important clarification)
In light of the Gaza murder, via drive-by shooting of a Fatah-linked intelligence officer,
In the attack, the gunmen pumped dozens of bullets into a car carrying the children of intelligence officer Baha Balousheh, a loyalist of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. …
The children were aged six, seven, and eight. ***
I hope our uber-Christian former president is very proud of his unqualified support for “the Palestinians.”
I would remind Jimmy “Keep Turning That Other Cheek Until Your Head is Severed from Your Body” Carter that, as Nick Cohen memorably said, political serious consists of saying which Palestinians you support [emphasis mine]:
Please don’t tell me that it helps the Palestinians to give the far right the time of day, or pretend that Palestinian liberals, socialists, women, gays, freethinkers and Christians (let alone Israeli Jews) would prosper in a Palestine ruled by Hamas. It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.
While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco,…
Read the whole thing.
——
***Abbas condemned this in the strongest terms:
“This was an ugly and inhuman crime, carried out by a gang of miscreants,” Abbas said. “We strongly condemn it.”
