IT IS TIME FOR THOSE WHO SLANDERED JIMMMY CARTER AS AN
“ANTISEMITE” TO APOLOGIZE
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As
we prepare for the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, it would
be appropriate for those who slandered him as an “antisemite” to
apologize.
Despite the
fact that Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Camp David Accords,
which brought peace between Israel and Egypt, when in 2006 he wrote the
book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” which became a New York Times
best-seller, he was assaulted as an “antisemite” by Israeli supporters.
Abe Foxman, then director of the Anti-Defamation League, called Carter “a bigot.”
Pro-Israel
pressure groups placed ads in the New York Times accusing Carter of
“facilitating Israel’s annihilation.” Martin Peretz, editor of The New
Republic, declared that, “Carter will go down in history as a
Jew-hater.” Deborah Lipstadt, then a professor at Emory University and
now the Biden administration’s diplomat in charge of monitoring and
fighting antisemitism, compared Carter to Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke
in a Washington Post book review.
Several
months after the book’s publication, in response to such personal
attacks, Carter told The Observer, “The word (apartheid) is the most
accurate available to describe Palestine. Apartheid is when two
different people live on the same land, and they are forcibly segregated
and one dominates or persecutes the other. That’s what’s happening in
Palestine. So the word is very, very accurate. It’s used widely and
every day in Israel.”
Since
then, Israel has been accused of practicing apartheid in the occupied
West Bank by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli
human rights group B’Tselem.
Peter
Beinart, a professor at the City University of New York and an editor
of Jewish Currents, declares that, “I think that what Carter was saying
in 2006 was really ahead of its time and that Carter was not just right
but was showing a very unusual form of political courage.”
In Beinart’s view, “those who attacked and slandered Jimmy Carter” should apologize.
Sadly,
many in the organized pro-Israel community frequently use the charge of
“antisemitism” to silence critics, even Jewish critics, whose number is
growing dramatically.
Allan C. Brownfeld,
Editor of ISSUES,
The quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism