Volume 98, December 30, 2009
The Committee for Truth and Justice
Seeking Justice Through Truth

   Jimmy Carter #2.

CTJ   

 Carter "Apology": Reaction I

Tevet 8, 5770, 25 December 09 01:53
by Andrea Levin

(Israelnationalnews.com) Dear President Carter:
     We at CAMERA have been outspoken in our criticism of the many factual errors and distortions about Israel in your book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, as well as in various Op-Eds and media appearances. We've been greatly concerned that false allegations you've made damage Israel, promoting misunderstanding, enmity and prejudice against that nation and its people.
     It is against this backdrop that we sincerely welcome your recent letter to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in which you ask forgiveness from the Jewish community for statements that may have stigmatized Israel.
As you may know, in Judaism the process of repentance also entails action to reverse any harm caused.
    In this spirit, we urge you to join your promising words with concrete actions to redress troubling false statements you have made only recently about the Jewish state. In a Nov. 6, 2009 Op-Ed in the International Herald Tribune entitled "Goldstone and Gaza" you made false and exaggerated charges concerning the UN's Goldstone report on the Gaza conflict. You referred erroneously to the "destruction" of 40,000 homes in Gaza and claimed "several hundred thousand homeless people suffered through last winter."          

    You refer to the "destruction of hospitals" and claim the Gaza Strip is "surrounded by an impenetrable wall." You claim "the Goldstone committee examined closely the cause of deaths of 1,387 Palestinians who perished. . . "
All these statements are factually false and contribute to inflaming negative perceptions of Israel. Efforts to redress the errors via communication with IHT editors failed with their saying you have refused to correct the false statements.
    We do hope you'll set the record straight and affirm your commitment to undo any wrongful stigmatizing of Israel. Below is the factual detail corroborating our concerns about the errors made:

• Israel did not destroy 40,000 Palestinian homes.
Al Mazen Center for Human Rights, a pro-Palestinian NGO, recently issued a report called "Cast Lead Offensive in Numbers" in which it found that 2,632 houses were destroyed beyond repair and 8,522 were assessed as repairable.  The Goldstone Report provides additional sources including the Palestinian NGO, Al-Dameer-Gaza, that cites 2,011 civilian and cultural premises as destroyed, of which 1,404 were houses that were completely demolished and 453 partially destroyed or damaged." There is no credible report that comes near your charges.

 •There was no "destruction of hospitals."
Along with the World Health Organization and the Arab League, other international and Palestinian sources confirm that while there were hospitals damaged in the Gaza Strip, none were destroyed. The January 22-23 report by the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that four days after the cease-fire, hospitals were running at full capacity to treat the wounded.

• "Several hundred thousand" people were not made homeless, spending the winter in tents and caves and under plastic sheets.
A January 21-27, 2009 report by the United Nations, issued just days after the end of the Gaza fighting found that "Tens of thousands of Gazans remain homeless, with most staying with relatives or other host families."  OCHA’s January 2009 report stated: "As of late January, 18,035 people remained in 30 shelters.” The U.N.'s figure for those displaced last winter is one-tenth or less of the number you posit. Of those displaced, most stayed with relatives and not in tents, caves or plastic sheets.

• Gaza is not "surrounded by an impenetrable wall."
While a concrete and steel wall does separate Gaza from Egypt, a fence made of metal wire, posts and sensors separates Israel from the Gaza Strip. The fence has been penetrated many times, including when Palestinian gunmen crossed into Israel and kidnapped Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit and killed two of his comrades.

• The Goldstone Report did not examine "closely the cause of deaths of 1,387 Palestinians."
The report identified by name only a small fraction of the1,387 reported fatalities, and certainly did not "closely" examine the "cause of deaths" of that total.
Again, we hope your conciliatory words are indicative of a true change of heart in which Israel is no longer subjected to unwarranted and false criticism. We urge you to take the concrete step of correcting the wrong and distorted statements about Israel in your recent column in the IHT.
Thank you for considering this request and, perhaps, setting the stage for a new beginning.

Andrea Levine, Executive Director, CAMERA

 Carter "Apology": Reaction II

Tevet 8, 5770, 25 December 09 02:41
by Gerald A. Honigman

(Israelnationalnews.com)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

    Ex-President Jimmy Carter has recently asked Jews for forgiveness.
Carter claims that the fact that his grandson is now running for office in their home state of Georgia has nothing to do with his apology. He states that Jews only make up 2% of the county where his grandson lives--about the same percent that Jews make up in the nation at large--and so uses this as further evidence of the integrity of his intentions.
Hogwash!
I voted for Carter in the '70s.
    I liked his approach to environmental concerns.  I  came to regret my decision.
I'll never forget watching the Democrat National Convention on television and seeing Carter chasing after his producer comrade, Michael "Israel is one of the three top evils in the world" Moore.
      Like other Gentile politicos, Carter has received millions of  dollars from Arabs for his help in demonizing Israel and Jews.
Well, I have a way Jimmy can put this all to rest...sort of.
    Since he is a man of the world whose books do indeed reach millions and influence world opinion, I have a new assignment for him.
After all, for decades now, if Israel took one too many breaths, he was there to investigate, criticize, and dissect it under the high power lens of moral scrutiny. Most often, his critiques were given little or no context whatsoever. Jewish victims were constantly blamed themselves when issues such as blown buses, checkpoints, the security barrier, and such were discussed. Arabs were given a virtual free pass.
    While indulging in such hypocrisy, Carter acted deaf, dumb, and blind regarding what was happening in the region surrounding the nation of the Jews.
    Jimmy, your first task is to travel to re-visit your friend, Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Damascus and author of the "Hama Solution's" son, in Syria.
Since you worry so much about Arab rights and conditions--you must now, at long last, demand that "Arab" Syria stop murdering and subjugating its millions of Kurds. The latter are not even allowed to speak their own language, have been forcibly Arabized for decades--yet I don't recall a peep about their plight ever being uttered from your lips. Only America's toppling of Saddam changed things for the better for "Arab" Iraq's millions of Kurds. No concern from you over their brethren in the Turkish and Iranian portions of Kurdistan either...some thirty five million perpetually used and abused stateless people. Why hasn't their plight caught your attention?
    The second part of your assignment will take you to "Arab" North Africa.
Since you are allegedly so concerned about human rights, you will finally have to break your troubling silence about the plight of another truly stateless people (Arabs have almost two dozen states; "Palestinians"--no matter how you define them--are Arabs), the thirty million or so Imazhigen/Berbers, who predate their Arab conquerors by millennia and who, like the Kurds, have had their own language and culture outlawed by Arabs and who have been murdered if they have resisted.
    Your next assignment has you moving just a bit south and east into the Sudan.
    While Darfur in the west has been making the news of late, the forced Arabization of the south by the north has been going on for centuries and exploded once again in the '60s.
    Where have you been while this Arab enslavement, genocide, and such against black Africans (not only in the Sudan) has been going on? And, unlike the most of the south, the blacks in Darfur are also Muslims...so, this goes beyond a religious jihad and truly involves Arab racism, pure and simple. Many quotes from black victims have testified to this.
All of these things are happening in the here and now. Why the silence? Where’s your book?   
So, here's the deal, Mr. Carter...
    Write your book and articles, give your speeches and take Arabs to task for the crimes they have committed against everyone else in the region --real crimes, not measures Israel has been forced to take to survive Arab slaughter—and maybe we will take you seriously.

  Jimmy Carter and the Politics of Apology – by Jacob Laksin

Posted By Jacob Laksin On December 29, 2009 @ 12:11 am In FrontPage | 11 Comments

jimmycarter

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jimmy Carter [1] is no stranger to apologies. The former president has spent years making excuses for Hamas, championing the Palestinian jihadists as the embattled victims of Israeli aggression – the group’s exterminationist founding charter and record of terrorism notwithstanding. Now it’s Israel’s turn to profit from Carter’s dubious public relations tactics.

After years of demonizing the Jewish state on the world stage, Carter at last has seen the error of his ways. Or so he says: Last week, Carter issued a statement to the Jewish community in which he apologized [2] for his role in tarnishing Israel’s image and, invoking a traditional Jewish prayer, asked for forgiveness.

“I never intended or wanted to stigmatize the nation of Israel, even though I have disagreed with the settlement policy all the way back to the White House,” Carter reportedly said. He also urged that “[w]e must recognize Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances,” and that “we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel.”

In completely unrelated news, Carter’s grandson, 34-year old Atlanta attorney Jason Carter, is running for a state senate seat [2] in a suburban Georgia community that just happens to be home to a proportionally small but politically significant Jewish population.

If Carter’s conversion to nuance on the issue he has long viewed through a thoroughly anti-Israel lens seems more than a trifle expedient, it is. This after all is the man whose 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid [3], notoriously equated democratic Israel with South Africa’s regime of racist discrimination. The author now suggests that he overstated his case, and that he regrets the book’s inflammatory title. Carter remains critical of Israeli settlements, but he now allows that Palestinians aren’t actually suffering under the yoke of racist apartheid. His mistake

For Israel’s supporters, that concession, however self-evident, could still be welcome. Yet it’s difficult to see Carter’s mea culpa as a genuinely good-faith effort to undo the damage his campaigning has done to Israel’s reputation. Most conspicuously, there is the convenient timing of his contrition, which comes as his grandson aims to fill a post vacated by Jewish politician – David Adelman, now the Obama administration’s nominee for ambassador to Singapore – in a district with an influential Jewish community [4]. In such circumstances, having one of the world’s preeminent detractors of the Jewish state as a direct relative is not exactly a selling point.

Even if opportunism doesn’t fully explain Carter’s apology, his second thoughts remain deeply suspect. Just days before airing his regrets, Carter published an op-ed [5] in London’s Guardian that rehearsed many of the anti-Israel tropes for which he now purports to be sorry.

In making a case for a renewed Middle Eastern peace process, Carter excused Arab intransigence (“no Arab or Islamic nation will accept any comprehensive agreement while Israel retains control of East Jerusalem”); whitewashed Palestinian terrorism (Carter made only an oblique reference “Palestinian recalcitrance”); and blamed Israel and Israeli leaders for the failure of past negotiations even as he exempted Palestinians from comparable scrutiny.

Equally deplorable, if typical, was Carter’s one-sided and selective account of the background of the conflict. Though lamenting the “intense personal suffering” of Palestinians living “under siege in Gaza” in the aftermath of last year’s war, Carter never mentioned the relentless eight-year rocket bombardment of Israeli cities and villages that forced the Israeli offensive. Similarly, Carter denounced Israel’s reluctance to allow the shipment of construction materials like cement into Gaza, but failed to note both that Israel has indeed allowed some limited shipment of materials [6] and the reason why it has to screen such shipments in the first place: Construction materials are routinely used by Palestinian terrorists to build rockets and fortifications. In yet another revisionist flourish, Carter accused Israel of destroying Palestinian schools [7] and hospitals [8] with “precision bombs missiles” during the Gaza war, while omitting the critical fact that they often served as havens for Hamas gunmen [9] who tried to exploit the Israeli military’s restraint and its reluctance to strike civilian targets.

But nothing betrayed Carter’s biases as plainly as the one concrete proposal he offered to begin the peace process: urging the United Nations Security Council to pass even more resolutions condemning Israel. It was precisely the kind of stigmatization of Israel for which Carter would reject within days. Apologizing for such attacks apparently did not mean abandoning them.

Unfairly singling out Israel for criticism is not the worst of Carter’s sins. After all, the United Nations, whose Goldstone report [10] is only the most recent example of the agency’s anti-Israel animus, has long made a habit of doing just that. Far more harmful to the interests of enduring peace in the Middle East is the ex-president’s longtime courtship of Hamas terrorists.

Carter has made no secret of that sinister partnership. On his travels to the Palestinian territories, Carter routinely sings the terrorist group’s praises, assuring all who will listen that, were it not for Israel’s belligerence, Hamas long ago would have accepted a ceasefire and laid down its arms. At times, Carter’s apologetics have gone from the merely credulous to the pernicious, as when he claimed that the tunnel networks that Hamas used to attack and kidnap Israeli soldiers were really “defensive” structures.

That the United States and Europe consider Hamas a terrorist group has not dampened Carter’s enthusiasm for the jihadists. In January 2006, he called on the international community to defy laws on terrorism financing and launder money to Hamas in the form of relief aid. Not even Hamas leaders themselves can convince Carter that peace is the furthest thing from their intentions. Hamas leader-in-exile Khaled Meshal has never hidden his support for suicide terrorism and has called destroying Israel the “destiny” of the Palestinian people. That didn’t keep Carter from seeking out Meshal [11] for a friendly chat about peace negotiations in the spring of 2008.

If Carter truly feels that an apology is in order, he might consider atoning for his role in promoting a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of Israelis, brutalized its fellow Palestinians [12], poisoned the political climate in the region, and destroyed any hope for a present-day peace settlement. But that sorry contribution to the peacemaking that Carter still claims as his life’s work would require something more substantial than a bankrupt and cynically proffered apology.