In Your Face

As I wrote in my previous post, former President Jimmy Carter has refused Brandeis University's invitation to its campus to debate Alan Dershowitz. In an op-ed in today's Boston Globe, Dershowitz goes on the offensive. Dershowitz rebuts Carter's claims that Dershowitz is ignorant on the subject. Dershowitz also corrects Carter's feeble complaints that criticisms are coming only from Jews. More importantly, Dershowitz dismantles Carter's claims of objectivity:

Nor is Carter the unbiased observer of the Middle East that he claims to be. He has accepted money and an award from Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan , saying in 2001: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." This is the same Zayed, the long-time ruler of the United Arab Emirates, whose $2.5 million gift to the Harvard Divinity School was returned in 2004 due to Zayed's rampant Jew-hatred. Zayed's personal foundation, the Zayed Center, claims that it was Zionists, rather than Nazis, who "were the people who killed the Jews in Europe" during the Holocaust. It has held lectures on the blood libel and conspiracy theories about Jews and America perpetrating Sept. 11. Carter's acceptance of money from this biased group casts real doubt on his objectivity and creates an obvious conflict of interest.

Dershowitz ends the excellent piece, the whole of which I recommend reading, with this gem:

What most rankles is Carter's insistence that he is somehow brave for attacking Israel and highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people. No other conflict in the world -- not even the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan -- evokes more hand-wringing in the media, universities, and human rights organizations than the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Jimmy Carter isn't brave for beating up on Israel. He's a bully. And like all school-yard bullies, underneath the tough talk and bravado, there's a nagging insecurity and a fear that one day he'll have to answer for himself in a fair fight.

When Jimmy Carter's ready to speak at Brandeis, or anywhere else, I'll be there. If he refuses to debate, I will still be there -- ready and willing to answer falsity with truth in the court of public opinion.

Keep Digging That Hole, Jimmy

For someone who has been opining on the Israel-Palestinian conflict so much over the past few years, former President Jimmy Carter seems to have avoided his homework and not read much on the subject. In response to allegations that he plagiarized materials from a book by Dennis Ross, Carter responded recently that was impossible since he had never read Ross' book. Such a defense is flabbergasting. Ross was the United States' lead negotiator in the conflict during the Clinton administration. In other words, there is probably no non-Israeli or non-Palestinian who is more intimately familiar with the "peace process" than Ross. According to Carter though, it wasn't worth it to read Ross' accounts of the process.

Carter apparently has also not read Alan Dershowitz's The Case For Israel. That book is as comprehensive a take-down as there is of the Palestinians' claims against Israel. Yet, in refusing Brandeis University's recent invitation to Carter to debate Dershowitz, the former said, "There is no need ... to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine." (Quote and ellipses courtesy of the Boston Globe here.)

Defending The Indefensible

As most of you, especially faithful Zlog readers, are aware, former President Jimmy Carter has recently released a new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." The title alone should give an indication of what disgusting thesis Carter is propounding. The book's name, in and of itself, is absurd. South Africa's apartheid was meant to restrict the rights of a country's citizens. Israel's separation from "Palestine" is meant solely to preserve Israeli citizens' most basic right, that of life.

In the past few weeks, Carter and his book have come under attack from people defending Israel's right to exist. The attacks have not been coming just from Republicans and conservatives. Some of those who have taken Carter to task are Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Stein, the latter of whom is an Emory University professor who recently resigned as director of the Carter Center because, in Stein's own words, "[b]eing president doesn't give one the prerogative to bend the facts to reach a prescribed reality."

Well, Carter has decided to defend himself in today's Los Angeles Times. Carter argues that he is coming under attack because of the "the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices." I guess he has never heard of operations like CAIR. Carter uses words like "oppression" and "persecution" to describe the "Palestinian" lifestyle. He does manage to condemn terrorism but it of course comes in the mealy mouth moral equivalence that we hear from anti-Israel dignitaries right after condemning self-defense measures by the only democracy in the Middle East.

If you think you can stomach it, you can read Carter's pathetic defense here.