Jimmy Carter’s Libel

Today is the publication date of Jimmy Carter’s libel of Israel — a book simultaneously sanctimonious and mean-spirited, uninformed and misinforming, an embarrassment not only to him and his party, but to all Americans.

Unfortunately, anti-Israel groups do not care what is between the covers of this atrocious book.  They care only that a former president has associated Israel with “apartheid” — a moral capital crime. 

The “U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation” — a group that describes itself as “a national coalition of more than 200 organizations” — issued an “Action Alert” yesterday, noting it “has not reviewed an advance copy of the book,” but nevertheless urged members to call the media, and the party that will control Congress, to emphasize the one thing about the book that matters to the group:  its title.

Call your local talk radio programs and write a letter-to-the-editor to your local paper affirming that Israel’s policies toward Palestinians are apartheid . . . .  Send a message to your Members of Congress and the Democratic Party stating that you support President Carter’s use of the term "apartheid" to describe Israel’s policies.

It will be important to watch how the media handles this.  In the meantime, my attempt to help Truth get its boots on is here.

UPDATE:  Thank you to Scott Johnson at Power Line (here), Martin Peretz at The New Republic (here), and the great Anne Lieberman at Boker tov, Boulder! (here) for picking up on this issue.  Scott linked to an excellent editorial at the Stanford Daily on “What Apartheid is and is Not” by Stanford Law School Fellow and Lecturer in Law Amichai Magen, which included this:

“The analogy between apartheid and Israel is absurd. The revival of national sovereignty in the Jewish homeland is not a manifestation of European colonialism, in contrast to the white settlers (Afrikaans, English and others) who created Johannesburg and Pretoria. Jews are indigenous to the Middle East as is the Jewish national language, Hebrew. Anyone who has ever visited Israel knows that it is one of the most diverse multi-ethnic democracies in the world.

“While South African apartheid was based on denial of sovereignty for the black population, Israelis accepted the two-state solution from the beginning, including the 1947 UN partition plan. . . .  It is not surprising, therefore, that Columbia University president Lee Bollinger called the comparison of Israel to apartheid “grotesque and offensive.”

“Apartheid? Israel is the sole liberal democracy in the Middle East.”

SECOND UPDATE:  Continue reading here.