Jimmy won’t debate him, so Alan Dershowitz goes on the attack:
Listen carefully to what Carter says about the media: the plight of the Palestinians is “not something that has been acknowledged or even discussed in this country.” …
He then goes on to say that the only reason his book–which has been universally savaged by reviewers–is receiving such negative reviews is because they are all being written by “representatives of Jewish organizations” (demonstrably false!). So much for the media.
Now here is what he says about politicians:
“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.” …
Each of these claims is demonstrably false, as I have shown in detail elsewhere. …
[T]he big story that the media and political figures in America have missed is how grievously they, themselves have been insulted and disrespected by our self-righteous former president. Carter is lecturing The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and the major networks about how they are incapable of reporting the news objectively because they are beholden to some Jewish cabal. He is telling Pulitzer Prize winning writers such as Tom Friedman and Samatha Power that they did not deserve their prizes. He is telling George Will that his reporting is controlled by his Jewish bosses (sound a little bit like Judith Regan?). And he is denying that Anderson Cooper is capable of filing an honest report from the West Bank.
As far as our legislators are concerned, he is accusing Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Patrick Leahy of being bought and paid for by the Israeli lobby.
At the bottom, Carter is saying that no objective journalist or politician could actually believe that America’s support for Israel is based on moral and strategic considerations and not on their own financial self-interest. Such a charge is so insulting to every honest legislator and journalist in this country that I am amazed that Carter has been let off the hook so easily.
Dershowitz may be surprised. I certainly am not. It’s this same premise that’s at the foundation of Walt and Mearsheimer’s “Israel Lobby” paper too, as I have said before.
Back then, I quoted David Verbeeten’s detailed study of the power of AIPAC, which I urge anyone with an interest in this matter to read. He acknowledges the influence of AIPAC, but says that it’s the pro-Israel sympathies of the American people that drive politicians to allow that influence:
Groups such as AIPAC may not be able to determine executive policy, but they are at times able to constrain or modify it, especially through those institutions sensitive to the pulse of the American people—such as the U.S. Congress, which controls federal allocations. Knowing that for four decades, a plurality if not majority of Americans sympathized with Israel (Table 3), congressmen and senators are inclined to back the Jewish state.
Verbeeten elaborates on the American people’s natural sympathy for Israelis:
Support for Israel is the expression of an emotional and ideological attachment to the Jewish state on the part of diverse segments of the American people. It is a reflection of “a widespread fund of goodwill toward Israel that is not restricted to the Jewish community.”[30] In the words of scholar William Quandt:
The bond between the United States and Israel is unquestionably strengthened because of the congruence of values between the two nations. Americans can identify with Israel’s national style … in a way that has no parallel on the Arab side. Neither the ideal of the well-ordered Muslim community nor that of a modernizing autocracy evokes much sympathy among Americans. Consequently, a predisposition no doubt exists in American political culture that works to the advantage of the Israelis.[31]
This is what’s so pernicious about Jimmy Carter (and also the reason he will fail to gain converts to his cause). In a What’s the Matter with Kansas?-type attack, he is trying to persuade the American people that they’ve got the totally wrong idea about Israel.
Only, Carter is not only willing but eager to use the nastiest anti-Semitic canards to gain attention for his foul accusations, and he’s doing it with Saudi money, says Dershowitz:
It now turns out that the shoe is precisely on the other foot. Recent disclosures prove that it is Carter who has been bought and paid for by anti-Israel Arab and Islamic money.
Journalist Jacob Laksin has documented the tens of millions of dollars that the Carter Center has accepted from Saudi Arabian royalty and assorted other Middle Eastern sultans, who, in return, Carter dutifully praised as peaceful and tolerant (no matter how despotic the regime). And these are only the confirmed, public donations.
Judgment is coming for James Earl Carter, Jr., and I hope he gets his on earth.*** He will certainly have deserved it.
————–
*** I noted with the appropriate amount of Schadenfreude that Carter was totally marginalized during the Washington, D.C., part of the pomp and circumstance surrounding Gerald Ford’s death. Even Tom Brokaw got to speak at the National Cathedral, but not Jimmy Carter. He got to give a euolgy in Michigan, I hear. If there were cameras there, I’m not aware of it.
It must have floated up from the O’Donnell-Trump-Walters cesspool. Rachel Sklar sums up at Eat the Press:
from bestweekever.tv
Yesterday’s story in the New York Post [which is the backstory you need to fully appreciate how---and why---Walters ended up "siding" with Rosie---was delicious, though:
The fight started around 8:30 a.m. when Walters, back from a two-week vacation, walked into the hair and makeup room at ABC studios and tried to hug O'Donnell, whom she hired onto the popular show.
According to spies, O'Donnell recoiled from Walters' touch and yelled, "You kept me in the newspapers this whole time!"
Both "View" producer Bill Geddie and Walters tried to calm O'Donnell. Walters told her, "I did everything I could to squash the story" - prompting Rosie to scream, "You didn't call me for 10 goddamn days, and you didn't tell me what you were going to say on television!" ...
After O'Donnell's outburst at Walters yesterday, Geddie jumped in and told her, "You've crossed the line." O'Donnell retorted, "Cameras are now outside of my house where my wife and kids are." She turned to Walters and said, "You went all around this and never called [Trump] a liar. You never said, ‘Donald is lying.’ You never called him a liar.”
When Walters tried to defend herself, O’Donnell erupted, “Are you looking me in the face and denying you didn’t tell him you didn’t say this? You’re a [bleeping] liar.”
Cindi Berger, a rep for both Walters and O’Donnell said, “Whatever happened in the hair and makeup room was hardly a squabble. It’s business as usual, everyone has moved on.”
Bret Stephens in the WSJ (longer than usual exceprts below, because of $$)on the realities that will greet Condi Rice when she makes her trip to the Middle East next week:
In Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Ms. Rice confronts a leader who, as the Israeli political analyst Anshel Pfeffer puts it, has “all the practical authority of the Chicago chief of police circa 1925.” Never mind the internecine killing sprees, now approaching outright civil war, between Hamas and Mr. Abbas’s ostensible partisans in Fatah. The real problem is that Mr. Abbas no longer controls Fatah, where effective authority has devolved to local chieftains and power-brokers like the suave Gaza security chief Mohammed Dahlan.
On the Israeli side, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is probably the weakest in the country’s history. In a recent poll, Israelis disapproved of Mr. Olmert’s job performance by a three-to-one margin; 60% doubt his personal integrity because of questions surrounding a shady real-estate deal. The rest of his government is also marinating in scandal; it does not have the political capital to spare on bold diplomatic moves. …
The upshot is that even if America’s predicaments in Iraq really could be eased by the appearance of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front, such progress is exceedingly unlikely to happen. …
Ms. Rice surely has better things to do than to chase after this fool’s gold of international diplomacy. Contrary to the views of much of her bureaucracy, the U.S. cannot, as former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft advised in a recent op-ed, merely butt Israeli and Arab heads together and arrive, through an act of American leadership, at a negotiated compromise that has already eluded American diplomats going back to the Eisenhower administration.
When Ms. Rice arrives in Jerusalem, she will no doubt mouth the pieties that have now defined American policy in the Middle East for a generation — an Israeli and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security — along with some of the Bush administration’s coinage: democracy, respect for human rights, an absolute cessation to terrorism. These are the right pieties, and the Israelis will surely mouth them as well.
But perhaps her case, and Israel’s, would be better served by a bit of mutual frankness. As with the Palestinians, Israel’s problems today are largely of its own making, and no amount of U.S. diplomacy is going to save the respective sides from themselves. On the other hand, nothing Israel can give by way of concessions to the Palestinians is going to make much of a difference in terms of America’s credibility in Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Kabul or anywhere else on the proverbial Arab street. Maybe once that is mutually understood, r-e-s-p-e-c-t will actually spell respect for Ms. Rice.
That’s reality. However, the BBC has already written its 2007 Israel-vs.-Palestine script, and guess who’s to blame for the “disintegration” of Palestinian society? Certainly not the Palestinians! (via Stephen Pollard)
—–Original Message—–
From: Jeremy Bowen
To: Editorial Board; Newsg World-Bureaux-Eds; Newsg World Asseds; News Leadership Group; Mark Byford & PA; Simon Wilson-NEWS; Jerusalem Bureau;
Newsg World-Affairs-Unit
Sent: Fri Jan 05 15:16:16 2007
Subject: FW: Mini briefing on the Israeli and Palestinians
2007 has started as unpromisingly as 2006 ended. The outlook is bleak because of fundamental instabilities and weaknesses on both sides.
Israel’s major military incursion into Ramallah on Thursday, killing four Palestinians after a botched arrest operation, was a reminder of the non stop pressures of the Israeli occupation.
What is new in the last year, and will be one of the big stories in the coming twelve months, is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.
The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel’s military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile. [emphasis added]
The result is that internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah is getting worse. The death of a major figure on either side would spark something much more serious.
Do I have any volunteers to monitor the BBC and report back on how many times they use “the death of hope” angle to report their endless-loop fable?
For those of you who confuse the pursuit, consolidation, and maintenance of fame with humanitarianism, here’s how it goes:
At the moment, Angelina Jolie is courting controversy in order to keep herself in the spotlight
Despite her comments in a French magazine, Angelina Jolie wasn’t trying to criticize Madonna for adopting a child from Malawi, she says.
“The article included many falsehoods,” Jolie said in a statement on Monday. “I said many positive things that were omitted. I feel we must focus on the present and I encourage everyone to be supportive so that every child can adjust nicely to their new home.”
while the father of her biological child (and her two camera-ready Benetton-ad-style children), who is now a major power player in Hollywood,
works his ass off in order to—please, God—finally win an award:
