Jimmy Carter an Anti-Semite? An Anti-Zionist? Hardly!
In recent weeks, ex-President Jimmy Carter (who spent much of his retirement building homes for Habitat for Humanity), has been vilified with such appelations as "anti-Semite" and "anti-Israel." All this because of a book he published which used the word "Apartheid" in the title. Here are three stories on this topic, one from the on-line Israeli newspaper Ynet, and two from the FORWARD, the national Jewish paper in the US.
Toward the end of the first story, note Carter's role in forcing Anwar Sadat to sign a peace treaty with Israel: does that sound like "anti-Semitism" or "anti-Zionism (anti-Israel)".
As one example of the anti-Carter propaganda, it's been noted in some news stories that 14 board members resigned from the Carter Center. The FORWARD story reveals that all 14 are Jewish, which shows two facts suppressed by the press: First, Jimmy Carter had a very large number of Jews on the board of the Carter Center, and Second, those who resigned were not exactly disinterested persons, given the strong Jewish attachment to Israel. Does a man who has a large number of Jews on his board sound like an "anti-Semite"? Should those members, because of their personal interest in Israel, perhaps have "recused" themselves from judging President Carter? Did they not have a conflict of interest in this matter?
20070112 FWD below Reform Rabbis Cancel Carter Center Visit
20070119 FWD below Carter To Speak at Brandeis
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3354810,00.html
Carter calls his Mideast book 'accurate'
Former US president says storm of criticism he has recently faced has not weakened his resolve for fair treatment of Israelis and Palestinians
Associated Press
Published: 01.21.07, 09:34
Former US President Jimmy Carter said Saturday that the storm of criticism he has faced for his recent book has not weakened his resolve for fair treatment of Israelis and Palestinians.
"I have been called a liar," Carter said at a town hall meeting on the second day of a three-day symposium on his presidency at the University of Georgia.
"I have been called an anti-Semite," he said. "I have been called a bigot. I have been called a plagiarist. I have been called a coward. Those kind of accusations, they concern me, but they don't detract from the fact the book is accurate and is needed."
Following the publication of the book: "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," 14 members of an advisory board to his Carter Center resigned in protest. Those former board members and other critics contend the book is unfairly critical of Israel .
"Not one of the critics of my book has contradicted any of the basic premises ... that is the horrible persecution and oppression of the Palestinian people and secondly that the formula for finding peace in the Middle East already exists," the 82-year-old Carter said.
Carter said he was pleased the book has stimulated discussion of an issue that has been "omitted from the public consciousness" for at least the last six years.
"Israel needs peace and the Palestinian people need peace and justice and I hope my limited influence will help to precipitate some steps," he said.
Saved 1978 Camp David peace talks
Also Saturday, Carter, at times emotional, told a town hall meeting of how he saved the 1978 Camp David peace talks when it appeared Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would leave.
Carter said in the first three days of the talks Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin often argued. After about a week, Carter said, Sadat reached a breaking point and packed his bags to return to Egypt - and Carter "knelt down and prayed and I asked God to help me."
Carter said he then walked to Sadat's cabin.
"Sadat and I stood with our noses almost touching and I told him that he had betrayed me and betrayed his own people and if he left our friendship was severed forever and the relationship between the United States and Egypt would suffer."
Sadat agreed to stay, and the Camp David Accords were signed after 12 days of negotiations.
The three-day conference was arranged to mark the 30th anniversary of Carter's 1977 inauguration.
===== 20070119 FWD below Carter To Speak at Brandeis =====
http://www.forward.com/articles/carter-to-speak-at-brandeis/
Carter To Speak at Brandeis
Jennifer Siegel | Fri. Jan 19, 2007
Pro-Israel activists are gearing up for a showdown with Jimmy Carter next week at Brandeis University, where the former president will field questions on his controversial new book on Israel.
The visit, scheduled for January 23, was recently announced after weeks of contention between Carter and university officials, who previously proposed that he appear in a debate with Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. Following the announcement, Dershowitz and his supporters are scrambling for a venue to present their views to the campus community. Earlier this week, an ad hoc student group invited the Harvard professor to speak following the Carter forum, which Dershowitz said he "absolutely" planned to attend, despite an announced university ban on all outsiders.
"I think the people who brought Carter to the campus are very anxious about having me speak," Dershowitz told the Forward. He added, "Brandeis will have to make the decision to exclude me [from the Carter forum], because I'm going to come. I'm not going to make it easy for them."
The stormy prelude to Carter's trip to Brandeis comes as the controversy over his book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," continues to escalate on several fronts across the country.
On January 11, the day after the Forward revealed that the 1,500-member rabbinical arm of Reform Judaism had canceled a planned visit to the Atlanta-based Carter Center, 14 Jewish members of the center's board of councilors resigned in protest over the new book and Carter's recent public statements suggesting that powerful American Jews had stifled an open public debate on Israel.
"Your book has confused opinion with fact, subjectivity with objectivity and force for change with partisan advocacy," the councilors wrote in public letter to Carter. They added, "We can no longer support your strident and uncompromising position. This is not the Carter Center or the Jimmy Carter we came to respect and support."
The departures followed the exit of Emory University professor Kenneth Stein, who resigned in December from his position as a Carter Center fellow. Several days after the councilors resigned, Emory professor Melvin Konner withdrew from a group advising the former president on managing his recent controversies.
According to press reports, the departures from the board of councilors were discussed for weeks, and the group unsuccessfully pressed for the resignations from some of the non-Jews on the 200-member board.
At the same time that Carter's critics are pressing their case against the former president, his defenders are stepping up their own efforts. In recent days, the Forward has learned, pro-Palestinian advocates have been circulating a boycott petition against Amazon.com. The online retailer has included a highly critical review, by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Washington Post, in the "editorial reviews" section under its listing for Carter's book.
"Because giving so much space in this location to such a negative review is so unusual - if not unprecedented - for Amazon, and because you have refused requests from many customers that you take a more balanced approach, we can only conclude that you are deliberately trying to discourage shoppers from ordering the former president's book," the petition says. It calls for a boycott of Amazon.com unless the retailer adds a positive review of similar length and substance to Goldberg's piece.
Nabil Mohamad, the organizing director for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination League, said he received the letter late last week, with several thousand signatures already attached, and forwarded it on to his group's members. He was unsure where it originated.
According to Mohamad, at some point since last week Amazon.com added a more positive, albeit brief, review from Publishers Weekly to the entry for Carter's book.
Amazon.com spokeswoman Patty Smith said the company was aware of the petition and routinely draws complaints about controversial books. Smith could not confirm whether the Publishers Weekly review was recently added.
At Brandeis, it is Carter's detractors who are concerned that the marketplace of ideas may be endangered. At the upcoming forum - which is not being run by the university's administration but by a committee comprised of four faculty members and one student - Carter will speak for 15 minutes and then spend 45 minutes answering 15 pre-chosen questions, culled from queries submitted by students in advance via the Internet.
"What disturbs me is that President Carter really declined to have a real debate and even with the current setup there will not be questions from the floor," said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis. "To my mind it is very unfortunate that there will not be an open forum for discussing some very serious allegations concerning the book and material that has now come out even beyond the book."
Dershowitz has said that he plans to bring up a new issue during his tentative speech at Brandeis: the funding of the Carter Center, which relies on a number of prominent Arab donors - including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates - for a portion of its $36 million operating budget. These financial ties, Dershowitz said, may explain why the Carter Center has never issued a report on Saudi human rights abuses.
Another new line of criticism opened in the past week is the charge that Carter's book goes so far as to accept terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. In their letter, the councilors who resigned from the Carter Center drew attention to a passage from page 213 of Carter's book which states that "it is imperative, that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel."
In recent days, a conservative newspaper, The New York Post, and a right-wing organization, the Zionist Organization of America, have also argued that the passage reads like an approval of suicide attacks.
In another passage, on page 15, Carter calls terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians "a course of action that is both morally reprehensible and politically counterproductive."
Fri. Jan 19, 2007
===== 20070112 FWD below Reform Rabbis Cancel Carter Center Visit =====
http://www.forward.com/articles/reform-rabbis-cancel-carter-center-visit/
Reform Rabbis Cancel Carter Center Visit
Jennifer Siegel | Fri. Jan 12, 2007
EDITOR'S NOTE: Shortly after this article was posted, 14 board members of the Carter Center announced their resignation from the institution.
The rabbis of America's largest synagogue movement have canceled a planned visit to the Atlanta-based Carter Center in response to the publication of former President Jimmy Carter's controversial new book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Last month, the Forward has learned, leaders of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, a 1,500-member group representing Reform rabbis, called off a scheduled tour of the Carter Center after the public reaction to Carter's book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," reached a fevered pitch, and an interdenominational group of rabbis expressed disappointment over a meeting with the former president. CCAR members were to have had the opportunity to visit the center as part of an optional day of activities preceding the group's annual conference, which will be held in Atlanta from March 11 to 14.
Carter's book "used language and images and terms that have the effect of escalating anti-Israel or even anti-Jewish feeling," said the CCAR's president, Rabbi Harry Danziger, in an interview with the Forward. "This is both a statement to President Carter that we hope he will enter into dialogue about what we think of as misrepresented facts about the Middle East, and, at the same time, our own statement that we feel that this was an unfair attack on Israel and we did not want to be part of a visit to the center because of it."
Since the publication of his book in mid-November 2006, Carter has endured a steady barrage of criticism from Jewish figures. Among them are vocal defenders of Israel, such as Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and the Anti-Defamation League's national director, Abraham Foxman, as well as former colleagues such as Emory University professor Kenneth Stein, who resigned from his post as a fellow at the Carter Center. Carter's critics have argued that his book is biased and unnecessarily inflammatory, and that it contains errors of both fact and interpretation.
In addition to placing the onus of the continuing conflict on Israeli settlement policies, Carter also asserted in his book that "powerful political, economic and religious forces in the United States" prevent the Palestinian side of the Middle East debate from being heard in Washington and the American media. During his book tour, Carter has been more outspoken in accusing the pro-Israel lobby and Jewish activists of stymieing debate.
With the rebuke from the CCAR, Carter, who brokered the Israeli-Egyptian peace deal and has been a leading proponent of a two-state solution, now finds himself being heavily criticized even by the leaders of the largest and most dovish of America's major synagogue movements.
"There's a real sense of sorrow, because many of us have said that he was in many ways our hero, and we've lost that sense of him," said Rabbi Andrew Strauss, president of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Phoenix. Strauss is one of the Jewish clergymen who met privately with Carter in early December, when the former president traveled to Arizona on his book tour.
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism - the umbrella organization for the country's 900-plus Reform congregations, with 1.5 million members - praised the CCAR's decision to cancel the Carter Center tour. The Reform leader said that over the years, on "numerous" occasions, his organization has invited Carter to speak, only to be rebuffed.
"Despite significant disagreements with him, we have invited him to speak on various occasions," said Yoffie, a senior dove in the American Jewish community, who, since becoming head of the URJ in 1996, has displayed a willingness to reach out to political opponents.
"He has shown no interest in appearing under our auspices, even before the [debate over the book]," Yoffie said. "So at this particular moment, we have no desire to chase after him for a dialogue."
Yoffie, despite sharing Carter's support for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, criticized Carter's approach to the conflict. "When was the last time we heard a strong voice from President Carter criticizing a terrorist attack against Jews in Israel?" Yoffie said in an interview with the Forward. "There's something fundamentally skewed in his moral outlook. He's done some good things in the world, and we're the first to acknowledge that, but he has serious problems when it comes to dealing with Jews."
In contast, Rabbi Michael Lerner, who recently informed followers that he is exploring the possibility of working with Carter on building a left-wing alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, described the former president as open to dialogue.
"I just had several conversations [with Carter] in the past few weeks that made me feel that he totally cared about the Jewish people and Israel," said Lerner, who is the founding editor of the liberal bimonthly journal Tikkun.
Carter has repeatedly insisted that one of his primary motivations is to achieve a peace settlement that would ensure Israel's security and survival.
The Carter Center did not respond to a request for comment. In several recent media interviews, Carter has strongly rejected any suggestion that he is anti-Jewish.
In a December 8 opinion article in the Los Angeles Times, the former president criticized what he called "severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to "the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee."
"My most troubling experience" on the book tour, Carter wrote, "has been the rejection of my offers to speak, for free, about the book on university campuses with high Jewish enrollment and to answer questions from students and professors."
The Carter Center did not respond to the Forward's request for additional details. But critics say that in the case of Brandeis University, it was the former president who decided against a visit to the campus. Last month, Carter rejected an invitation to speak at Brandeis after the school insisted that he appear in a debate against Dershowitz.
Fri. Jan 12, 2007
