I trust Carter to write a book outlining his perspectives and biases. I know enough about the man not to trust his opinion, and do not believe everything he wrote in his book. I do not trust him. I do not need to read a book to be able to read and comment on critiques by like-minded folks who have read the book.
How is that any different the C.I.s response? Because disagreement requires something more?
A former U.S. Justice Department official disclosed to Arutz-7 that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's advocacy extended beyond the Palestinians, when he interceded on behalf of a Nazi SS man.
Neil Sher, a veteran of the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, described a letter he received from Carter in 1987 in an interview with Israel National Radio's Tovia Singer. The letter, written and signed by Carter, asked that Sher show "special consideration" for a man proven to have murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.
"In 1987, Carter had been out of office for seven years or so," Sher recalled. "It was a very active period for my office. We had just barred Kurt Waldheim - he was then president of Austria and former head of the United Nations - from entering the U.S. because of his Nazi past and his involvement in the persecution of civilians during the war. We had just deported an Estonian Nazi Commandant back to the Soviet Union after a bruising battle after which we were attacked by Reagan White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan.
"Also around that time, in the spring of 1987, we deported a series of SS guards from concentration camps, whose names nobody would know. One such character we sent back to Austria was a man named Martin Bartesch."
Bartesch, who had immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago, admitted to Sher's office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had served in the notorious SS Death's Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from U.S. immigration officials.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=119732
McGentrix wrote:I trust Carter to write a book outlining his perspectives and biases. I know enough about the man not to trust his opinion, and do not believe everything he wrote in his book. I do not trust him. I do not need to read a book to be able to read and comment on critiques by like-minded folks who have read the book.
How is that any different the C.I.s response? Because disagreement requires something more?
It's not, I've said it's equivalent, although I don't think that's exactly right. More accurately, it's a difference of degree. If ci were promoting the book without having read it, that would be equivalent to condemning it without reading it. But in general, either agreement or disagreement with a given thesis requires some understanding of what was actually written. Anything else is an expression of an uninformed opinion. We are all welcome to express those, but engaging in arguments defending them is foolhardy.
Free Duck, I do not believe my opinion is completely misinformed, because there have been discussions about his book that reveals why Jews and some others are against this book. I have read and seen enough about this subject to make an opinion based on my judgements about Carter and my exposure to the realities of Israel.
As humans, we all make mistakes in life. I'm sure Carter is not "perfect," but neither am I.
If my opinion is seen as based on ignorance, I want to hear why?
By HILLEL HALKIN
January 17, 2007
"Besides oppressing the Palestinians, turning the Arab world against the West, being responsible for Islamic terror, and getting America into Iraq, Israel and the Jewish lobby, according to veteran International Herald Tribune columnist William Pfaff, are now doing their best to instigate an American attack on
Iran..."
http://www.nysun.com/article/46845
cicerone imposter wrote:Free Duck, I do not believe my opinion is completely misinformed, because there have been discussions about his book that reveals why Jews and some others are against this book. I have read and seen enough about this subject to make an opinion based on my judgements about Carter and my exposure to the realities of Israel.
As humans, we all make mistakes in life. I'm sure Carter is not "perfect," but neither am I.
If my opinion is seen as based on ignorance, I want to hear why?
CI, I don't think of your opinion on the subject of Israel and apartheid in the territories as uninformed or misinformed, quite the contrary. However, if your opinion of Carter's book is "I trust him so he must be telling the truth", without having read it, that is uninformed opinion to me. It's a small distinction, I know. I wouldn't base my opinion about a book on someone else's opinion or on my trust of the author (though the latter might make me more inclined to believe him). My point was that saying "I condemn the book" without having read it is equal to saying "I trust Carter so I believe his book is good and true" without having read it.
I do think, though, that you're saying he deserves the benefit of the doubt because of who he is and that I agree with. It is this benefit of the doubt that has me looking for specific challenges of fact and not finding them. If someone has challenged a specific finding of fact in his book that directly affects his thesis, I'm more than willing to accept that. But nobody has done that. Instead, we get mostly regurgitated opinions that are based on prejudice and/or conflicting interests.
That's also part of my support for Carter's book; nobody has challenged anything in the book with facts to support their position. Until then, I feel confident that Carter has the ethics and honesty that I can support without doubt (he has the benefit of any doubt at this point, and I am open to any verifiable challenge).
You're saying the burden of proof is on the accuser and that's fair. If I hadn't read it, I would still be pushing for actual facts to show that he was wrong, but I wouldn't be able to say "he's right" without knowing exactly what it is he's saying.
Zippo wrote:Its great the way these threads get twisted.
Carter correctly states that Israel's occupation is the prime cause of trouble in the middle east
The majority of the replies seem to be devoted to Jimmy Carter himself rather than what he said
What ever happened to addressing the issue and not the person?
Anyway carry on the psychological examination of Carters motives I'm sure someone will sooner or later return to the points he was raising
You expect intellectual discourse from our fellow degenerate Re-pud-lickins? They mock those who watch CNN while they're tuned into the Fox cartoon channel. Ha...ha...ha...I love it when they try to impy Carter's failure as a president moreso than the current Monkey-in-chief residing in the White House. We should pity those suffering from oxygen deprivation via wilful asphyxiation.
Silent About Gaza
by John Pilger
A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. "Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run, and no space to hide," wrote the senior UN relief official, Jan Egeland, and Jan Eliasson, then Swedish foreign minister, in Le Figaro. They described people "living in a cage," cut off by land, sea, and air, with no reliable power and little water, tortured by hunger, disease, and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.
Egeland and Eliasson wrote this four months ago as an attempt to break the silence in Europe, whose obedient alliance with the United States and Israel has sought to reverse the democratic result that brought Hamas to power in last year's Palestinian elections. The horror in Gaza has since been compounded; a family of 18 has died beneath a 500-pound American/Israeli bomb; unarmed women have been mown down at point-blank range. Dr. David Halpin, one of the few Britons to break what he calls "this medieval siege," reported the killing of 57 children by artillery, rockets, and small arms and was shown evidence that civilians are Israel's true targets, as in Lebanon last summer. A friend in Gaza, Dr. Mona El-Farra, e-mailed: "I see the effects of the relentless sonic booms [a collective punishment by the Israeli air force] and artillery on my 13-year-old daughter. At night, she shivers with fear. Then both of us end up crouching on the floor. I try to make her feel safe, but when the bombs sound I flinch and scream
"
When I was last in Gaza, Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, showed me the results of a remarkable survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 percent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma you see why: 99.2 percent of their homes were bombarded; 97.5 percent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 percent witnessed shootings; 95.8 percent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed." Dr. Dahlan invited me to sit in on one of his clinics. There were 30 children, all of them traumatized. He gave each pencil and paper and asked them to draw. They drew pictures of grotesque acts of terror and of women streaming tears.
The excuse for the latest Israeli terror was the capture last June of an Israeli soldier, a member of an illegal occupation, by the Palestinian resistance. This was news. The kidnapping a few days earlier by Israel of two Palestinians - two of thousands taken over the years - was not news. A historian and two foreign journalists have reported the truth about Gaza. All three are Israelis. They are frequently called traitors. The historian Ilan Pappe has documented that "the genocidal policy [in Gaza] is not formulated in a vacuum" but part of Zionism's deliberate, historic ethnic cleansing. Gideon Levy and Amira Hass are reporters on the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. In November, Levy described how the people of Gaza were beginning to starve to death: "there are thousands of wounded, disabled, and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment
the shadows of human beings roam the ruins
they only know the [Israeli army] will return and what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions."
Amira Hass, who has lived in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle-train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer's day in 1944. "[She] saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking," she wrote. "This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side.'"
"Looking from the side" is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many Western Jews do, while those Jews who honor the humane traditions of Judaism and say, "Not in our name!" are abused as "self-despising." Looking from the side is what almost the entire U.S. Congress does, in thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist "lobby." Looking from the side is what "evenhanded" journalists do as they excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities and suppress the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out for better.
blueflame, The last two paragraphs from your post deserves to be repeated.
Amira Hass, who has lived in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle-train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer's day in 1944. "[She] saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking," she wrote. "This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side.'"
"Looking from the side" is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many Western Jews do, while those Jews who honor the humane traditions of Judaism and say, "Not in our name!" are abused as "self-despising." Looking from the side is what almost the entire U.S. Congress does, in thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist "lobby." Looking from the side is what "evenhanded" journalists do as they excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities and suppress the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out for better.
Those who would continue to use the epithet "anti-Semite" shows how desperate they are by the apartheid and genocide of the Palestinians by the Jews of Israel. The sufferers have become the perpetrators, and the only label they can assign those who chellenge them is a word.
When zionists demand that Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist, they never stipulate which 'Israel. - Israel has never defined its border with Palestine, because it does not acknowledge the right of Palestine to exist, and this explains why Palestinians have no hope of achieving justice. All attempts at 'negotiating' a settlement since the end of the 1967 War have been predicated on Israel retreating behind the armistice line (The Green Line) but now Israeli schoolbooks have erased it, just as Israel is actively
erasing Palestinians from history.
FreeDuck wrote:
Of all the bluster about inaccuracies and plagiarism I've yet to see any concrete evidence of either. Most of the complaint seems to be that he's not critical enough of the Palestinians or not considerate enough of Israel's need for security or (a Dershowitz) that he didn't also write a book about the human rights problems in Saudi Arabia.
All in all, I think the facts support his thesis though. And he's not the first person to forward it.
A former member of the Carter Center has some concrete evidence and finding it barely took even a minute. I'm sure if I made it a more thorough project, it could fill pages.
http://www.emorywheel.com/media/storage/paper919/news/2006/12/12/News/Professor.Describes.Carter.inaccuracies-2532452.shtml?norewrite200701212140&sourcedomain=www.emorywheel.com
Quote:In his book, Carter writes that the resolution says, "Israel must withdraw from occupied territories" it acquired by force during the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
But the word "must" never appears in the actual U.N. resolution text.
Stein argued that each word in the resolution was carefully chosen and by inserting the word "must," Carter changed the implications of this key resolution.
Stein said Carter makes a second "inexcusable" error in describing the impact of the 1978 Camp David Accords, which details how Egypt and Israel would normalize relations.
Carter writes that the accords called for "the dismantling of [Israeli] settlements on Egyptian land." But the accords never actually refer to the settlements. In fact, the Israeli leader at the time, Menachem Begin, was so opposed to discussing the issue that he wouldn't have signed any document mentioning them, Stein said.
Stein's third objection to Carter's book is that the former president de-emphasizes the importance of U.N. Resolution 242, he said.
This resolution called for the "territorial integrity, political sovereignty and independence of all states in the region." By emphasizing subsequent resolutions over 242, Stein said, Carter suggests that a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict could be imposed on the states by an outside party. That would change the central premise of all Arab-Israeli negotiations, Stein said.
<<SNIP>>
For example, Carter said he met with Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad in Switzerland in June 1977 when he actually met Assad in May. Additionally, Stein said Carter mistakenly wrote that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in June 1974 when, in fact, she resigned a month earlier.
Stein also took issue with Carter's account of the now-infamous Egyptian Cement Scandal. Carter wrote that "authorities" intercepted humanitarian aid in 2004 and sold it for profit, but he did not specify that it was the Palestinian authorities who intercepted the aid. This could lead readers to believe the Israeli authorities seized the aid, Stein said.
"If he intentionally didn't put 'Israelis' in there, then that's an error of commission, not omission," Stein said.
Finally, the professor contested Carter's description of the West Bank wall that the Israeli government constructed to prevent terrorist attacks.
In his book, Carter says the wall "separates Palestinians from other Palestinians."
But Stein said the wall separates Israelis from Palestinians in all but a few sections. Any comparison to apartheid - in which the South African government forced blacks to live in disparate "homelands" scattered throughout the country - is unfair, Stein said.
I found this these two statements from Carter's support staff to be the most telling (from the same link).
Quote:Carter has insisted in several interviews that his book contains no factual errors
Quote:As with all of President Carter's previous books, any detected errors will be corrected in later editions
cicerone imposter wrote:blueflame, The last two paragraphs from your post deserves to be repeated.
Amira Hass, who has lived in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle-train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer's day in 1944. "[She] saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking," she wrote. "This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side.'"
"Looking from the side" is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many Western Jews do, while those Jews who honor the humane traditions of Judaism and say, "Not in our name!" are abused as "self-despising." Looking from the side is what almost the entire U.S. Congress does, in thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist "lobby." Looking from the side is what "evenhanded" journalists do as they excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities and suppress the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out for better.
Those who would continue to use the epithet "anti-Semite" shows how desperate they are by the apartheid and genocide of the Palestinians by the Jews of Israel. The sufferers have become the perpetrators, and the only label they can assign those who chellenge them is a word.
Speaking of Amira Hass, I came across an interesting excerpt in Front Page Magazine, where report Steven Plaut is discussing the fallacy of articles that paint the CIA as a neofascist right-wing organization. This passage discusses Kathleen Christison, a CIA political analyst:
CIA Renegades
Quote:Kathleen ran a column devoted to serious discussion of a "report" (meaning a rumor) she heard from an Israeli far-leftist extremist reporter, one who has already been convicted in a court for fabrication (Amira Hass, who is also on record calling for Israel's elimination), about an Israeli supposedly defecating on a Palestinian photocopying machine. Forget 9-11, folks, the Christisons have discovered a REAL human rights atrocity! This alleged morning dump proves that Israel is an immoral society, opines the same columnist who has never denounced a single Palestinian atrocity against Jewish civilians.
Here are a few more details about Hass' extremist left wing pro-Palestinian escapades of the pen:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2432
Quote:It is against such a background that we read the latest anti-Semitic blood libel, this time in Haaretz, June 23, 2003. Haaretz has a long history of running lurid stories about the alleged abuses of Arabs by "settlers". Haaretz' Amira Hass got convicted in court for libel a few years back because of one such story that turned out to be a fabrication. In general, if one takes a Haaretz story about "settlers" and replaces the term "settler" with "Jew", one would have a ready-made feature that could fit comfortably onto any neonazi web site.
So if this is the subject of this thread's fan club for this woman, count me out of that please. She reminds me of the types of anti-war reporters that falsely wrote about American guards flushing copies of the Koran down the toilet at Gitmo.
That there are "extremist left wing" opponents of Israeli policies among the Jews of Israel or the United States is neither a surprise nor a defense of Israel's policies with respect to the Palestinians. That some of the things they allege may be false is no defense of the nearly 40 year occupation of the West Bank during which Israel has deprived the population of that land of all political anf most human rights.
Monte Cargo has been honest and candid in acknowledging that Israel has claimed the territory of the West Bank as a spoil of war (1967). However he is being dishonest in implying that the existence of intemperate anti Zionists among Jews (or gentiles) is somehow a defense of the systematic injustice Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people. These two things quite obviously have nothing to do with each other. There is no shortage of intemperate zealotry on either side of this issue.
The basic problem and issue here is that Israel has been dominated by political elements that deny the existence and rights of the Palestinian people whose land they have seized and taken. While the world has recognized the legitamacy if Israel in iits 1948 borders, Israel has not ever conceded the limit of its far greater territorial ambitions. Indeed it has attempted to paint itself as particularly virtuous for returning some of the territory it has seized by force from its neighbors, and, in the West Bank, has attempted to seize the land and drive out its inhabitants in an extended occupation that has grossly violated contemporary standards of acceptable behavior by modern nations.
Monte Cargo wrote:A former member of the Carter Center has some concrete evidence and finding it barely took even a minute. I'm sure if I made it a more thorough project, it could fill pages.
This same fellow has also accused him of plagiarism, did you find any evidence of that on google?
http://www.emorywheel.com/media/storage/paper919/news/2006/12/12/News/Professor.Describes.Carter.inaccuracies-2532452.shtml?norewrite200701212140&sourcedomain=www.emorywheel.com
Quote:In his book, Carter writes that the resolution says, "Israel must withdraw from occupied territories" it acquired by force during the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
But the word "must" never appears in the actual U.N. resolution text.
Is the word "must" central to Carter's thesis? Was Carter actually quoting the resolution when he wrote this?
Quote:Stein said Carter makes a second "inexcusable" error in describing the impact of the 1978 Camp David Accords, which details how Egypt and Israel would normalize relations.
Carter writes that the accords called for "the dismantling of [Israeli] settlements on Egyptian land." But the accords never actually refer to the settlements. In fact, the Israeli leader at the time, Menachem Begin, was so opposed to discussing the issue that he wouldn't have signed any document mentioning them, Stein said.
From wikipedia:
Quote:The second agreement outlined a basis for the peace treaty 6 months later, in particular deciding the future of the Sinai peninsula. Israel agreed to withdraw its armed forces from the Sinai, evacuate its 4,500 civilian inhabitants, and restore it to Egypt in return for normal diplomatic relations with Egypt, guarantees of freedom of passage through the Suez Canal and other nearby waterways (such as the Straits of Tiran), and a restriction on the forces Egypt could place on the Sinai peninsula, especially within 20-40 km from Israel. Israel also agreed to limit its forces a smaller distance (3 km) from the Egyptian border, and to guarantee free passage between Egypt and Jordan.
Quote:Stein's third objection to Carter's book is that the former president de-emphasizes the importance of U.N. Resolution 242, he said.
To the contrary, Carter emphasizes 242 quite a bit, in some places as if it were written by God himself.
Quote:For example, Carter said he met with Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad in Switzerland in June 1977 when he actually met Assad in May. Additionally, Stein said Carter mistakenly wrote that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned in June 1974 when, in fact, she resigned a month earlier.
Are either of these central to Carter's thesis?
Quote:Stein also took issue with Carter's account of the now-infamous Egyptian Cement Scandal. Carter wrote that "authorities" intercepted humanitarian aid in 2004 and sold it for profit, but he did not specify that it was the Palestinian authorities who intercepted the aid. This could lead readers to believe the Israeli authorities seized the aid, Stein said.
"If he intentionally didn't put 'Israelis' in there, then that's an error of commission, not omission," Stein said.
If this is true (and I don't recall this from the book, though I could have missed it) then it is misleading. But I don't see how it contradicts his central thesis.
Quote:Finally, the professor contested Carter's description of the West Bank wall that the Israeli government constructed to prevent terrorist attacks.
In his book, Carter says the wall "separates Palestinians from other Palestinians."
But Stein said the wall separates Israelis from Palestinians in all but a few sections. Any comparison to apartheid - in which the South African government forced blacks to live in disparate "homelands" scattered throughout the country - is unfair, Stein said.
But the facts back Carter here. There are towns that are entirely encircled by the barrier. I would expect Stein to know this.
Free Duck, Good research and challenges to Stein's claims. Those who would argue about the thesis forwarded by Carter can only attack his "words" rather than the content. Zealots comes to mind.
There are a lot of crazy anti-Israel statements here. We get a call for Israel to end of genocide of Arabs. Some genocide! The Pal population continues to soar.
Israelis, like the Germans did, watch as the Pals are led to their slaughter. Come on! Jews were slaughtered for their religion. Pals have not been slaughtered, although some have been arrested for killing Jews.
Advocate, You're missing the main thesis of this disuccision; mainly that Israel does not provide freeedoms and legal protections for the Palestinians. It's not about the criminal elements in any society that may kill innnocent people. The "real" issue is whether anyone living in similar conditions as the Palestinians would resort to violence out of frustration based on having no freedoms, no legal protections, and losing their property.
I assume you are talking about Pals outside of Israel. They are not citizens of Israel and, therefore, do not have concordant rights.
Pals have continued to attack Israel since the minute it was formed. Is this the basis of the frustration to which you refer?
