The assassination of Jimmy Carter continues …

In Saturday's Washington Post, Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, took aim at Jimmy Carter and his recent book, Palestine: Peace Not Aparthied.

The column was a perfect example of how to baselessly smear an ideological opponent without engaging -- in any way -- that opponent's argument; it was a case study.

Its title -- drawing a not-terribly-subtle parallel between the former president who put human rights squarely in the middle of U.S. foreign policy and Adolph Hitler, a genocidal maniac -- was: "Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem."

Lipstadt accuses Carter of giving "inadvertent comfort" to Holocaust deniers -- the subject of much of Lipstadt's scholarship and two of the three books she's authored. Carter, she wrote, has responded to "criticism" -- "witch-hunt" would be a more appropriate description -- by "reflexively" offering up "innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government." She adds, "When David Duke spouts it, I yawn. When Jimmy Carter does, I shudder."

Carter has repeatedly fallen back -- possibly unconsciously -- on traditional anti-Semitic canards. In the Los Angeles Times last month, he declared it "politically suicide" [sic] for a politician to advocate a "balanced position" on the crisis.

Of course, saying that the political climate in the U.S. is such that just about any vocal criticism of Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories -- that's the subject at hand, although one would be hard-pressed to discern it from Lipstadt's Op-Ed -- guarantees a firestorm of indignant howls is certainly not a "traditional anti-Semitic canard"; it's a fairly accurate description of the pitfalls inherent in modern America's polluted discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One need look no further for confirmation of that than Lipstadt's own toxic response to Carter's book.

What's striking about her column is not only it's stunning intellectual dishonesty -- Jimmy Carter has never suggested that Jews control the media or the government in any way, shape or form -- and it's not only that such a transparent attempt to tar a former president with innuendo and half-baked guilt-by-association would appear in a major newspaper of record; what's really amazing about Lipstadt's effort -- and the efforts of a host of Israel hawks like her -- is the degree to which it does exactly what she accuses her opponent of doing: conforming to some of the ugliest stereotypes that have long undersored hardcore anti-Semitism.

Lipstadt herself gives inadvertent comfort to the likes of David Duke.

While that statement is jarring, it is exactly as fair and accurate -- or, I'd argue, as unfair and outrageous -- as Lipstadt's charge. That's the problem with associating a substantive argument like Carter's with an illogical and hateful ideology like Duke's: it's not hard to cherry-pick almost any text and find in it some small thing that a racist might embrace as confirmation of his or her odious beliefs.

Specifically, while David Duke is certainly, unlike Jimmy Carter, a Holocaust denier and has argued --again, unlike Carter -- that there's some shadowy Jewish conspiracy exerting control over the American media, people like Duke also expound on their belief that Jews are paranoid, see themselves as perennial victims, have fetishized the Holocaust and now invoke its history to stifle any criticism of Israeli policies in the current era. Like many stereotypes, there's a kernel of truth in that and advocates like Lipstadt have chosen a rhetorical strategy that, sadly, supports those stereotypes to a T. If Jimmy Carter's arguments are illegitimate because they play into the tropes of people like David Duke, then so are Lipstadt's own.

Lipstadt makes no attempt to actually refute Carter's thesis, or even to engage it; she says, simply, "Others can enumerate the many factual errors in this book" and lists several who have (including people like Alan Dershowitz). Indeed, her criticism has nothing to do with Carter's subject; rather, she argues that Carter's book didn't devote sufficient weight to the supposed impact the Holocaust has had on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

His book, which dwells on the Palestinian refugee experience, makes two fleeting references to the Holocaust. The book contains a detailed chronology of major developments necessary for the reader to understand the current situation in the Middle East. Remarkably, there is nothing listed between 1939 and 1947.

In those years, the world's attention was squarely on Europe, and no events that were crucial to the chronology of the Middle East conflict occured. In fact, I checked the timelines for the creation of the State of Israel offered by a few different organizations and none of them listed any significant developments betwen 1939 ("The British government issues the White Paper of 1939 setting an absolute limit of 75,000 on future Jewish immigration to Palestine") and 1947 ("The United Nations approves partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. It is accepted by the Jews, but rejected by the Arab leaders" (from Wikipedia's timeline)).

Compare Carter's approach with that of Rashid Khalidi, head of Columbia University's Middle East Institute and a professor of Arab studies there. His recent book "The Iron Cage" contains more than a dozen references to the seminal place the Holocaust and anti-Semitism hold in the Israeli worldview.

Of course, Lipstadt's own 850-word column -- supposedly related to the situation in Israel and Palestine -- only refers to "Palestinians" twice, and nowhere is there a mention of Israel's refusal to resume direct talks with Palestinian leaders six years after withdrawing from the negotiating table, nor do the words "occupation," "settlement" or the phrase "human rights violations" appear anywhere in the text.