Right-wing hysteria over Carter, Israel

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 2:08 PM on December 6, 2006.

You read that right, Carter scares the s**t out of right wingers.

Time's 2004 Botch Blog of the Year, Powerline, has suggested more than once that Jimmy Carter is a traitor. Conservatives from Michelle Malkin on down applauded a nasty C-SPAN caller who slung insults at the president on-air recently, and cries of AHA! have arisen over an email from a former Carter colleague who's breaking with him over the president's latest book on Palestine.

The hysteria behind the name-calling is quite simple: He scares the bejeezus out of rightwingers. He's a Navy Vet, an evangelical minister, an American President, a Nobel Prize winner, a best-selling author, and a world-renowned philanthropist.

The email came from Dr. Kenneth W. Stein, professor of Israel Studies at Emory University, partner of the Carter Center. It will be promoted as proof, PROOF!, that Carter's latest book is some anti-Israel screed, to be ignored and the president castigated.

Leaving aside the fact that Stein's departure is admittedly a hollow gesture (Many still believe that I have an active association with the Center and, act as an adviser to President Carter, neither is the case... Since I left the Center physically thirteen years ago, the Middle East program of the Center has waned as has my status as a Carter Center Fellow.) this email may more appropriately be seen as the book's seal of approval.

Stein claims in his email that the book "is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments," though he declines to cite them. I don't doubt that he's found his differences, but those remain to be seen.

On the other hand, although Stein and Carter did coauthor a book some years ago, their approaches to the Israel/Palestine conflict have diverged markedly since then. Stein now sits on the board of editors for the Middle East Quarterly, a journal published by the fanatical fantasy-plagued neocon, Daniel Pipes, who also heads up a McCarthyite site called CampusWatch. The Middle East Forum, another associated project, boasts among its experts, neocon William Kristol and Joseph Farah, editor of rightwing yes-mag WorldNetDaily.

Juan Cole does not hold the MEQ in high esteem: "It publishes scurrilous attacks on people. There's no scholarship. It's a put-up job. As for Pipes himself, let's just say that he's not a full professor at a major university."

Pipes is a middle-brow bigot toward Arabs and Muslims, so having an associate of his break with you is, to my thinking, not too bad a thing. It's also interesting and fun to compare the language of CampusWatch to the language of Stein's Carter crit.

Here's an excerpt from Carter's book, whose "title [is] too inflammatory to even print":

There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East...

1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and

2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories.

In turn, Israel responds with retribution and oppression, and militant Palestinians refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel and vow to destroy the nation. The cycle of distrust and violence is sustained, and efforts for peace are frustrated. Casualties have been high as the occupying forces impose ever tighter controls. From September 2000 until March 2006, 3,982 Palestinians and 1,084 Israelis were killed in the second intifada, and these numbers include many children: 708 Palestinians and 123 Israelis. As indicated earlier, there was an ever-rising toll of dead and wounded from the latest outbreak of violence in Gaza and Lebanon.

The only rational response to this continuing tragedy is to revitalize the peace process through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, but the United States has, in effect, abandoned this effort. It may be that one of the periodic escalations in violence will lead to strong influence being exerted from the International Quartet to implement its Roadmap for Peace. These are the key requirements:

a. The security of Israel must be guaranteed. The Arabs must acknowledge openly and specifically that Israel is a reality and has a right to exist in peace, behind secure and recognized borders, and with a firm Arab pledge to terminate any further acts of violence against the legally constituted nation of Israel.

b. The internal debate within Israel must be resolved in order to define Israel's permanent legal boundary...

Tagged as: neocons, israel, jimmy carter

Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.