Carter Turned Down Debate Over Book

Jimmy Carter has promptly turned down an invitation from Brandeis University to debate Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz. Professor Dershowitz, who spends a considerable amount of time in Israel and has authored, among his many books, The Case For Israel, has severely criticized Carter's new tome, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter's refusal came in the in the form of a haughty comment: “I don’t want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz. There is no need for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine." I think Carter fears the articulate and well-informed Professor Dershowitz would make mince meat out of him.

Carter, who has long displayed a deeply-felt antipathy to the Jewish state, is meeting with a growing amount of criticism from experts on the Arab-Israeli conflict. There have been charges that his bias and shoddy research has resulted in a work that contains numerous factual errors and outright canards. And Dennis Ross, the U.S. diplomat who did so much shuttle negotiating between Arab and Israeli leaders, has even accused the former president of plagiarizing maps. The maps are, by no means, the only parts of the book that Carter plagiarized, according to a number of Middle East scholars.

That Carter would deliberately choose such an inflammatory title for his volume is not at all surprising, but it is still deplorable. Israel is the one nation in the Middle East that does NOT practice gender, religious, or racial apartheid. An Arab sits on Israel's High Court. Arabs are members of Israel's legislative body...the knesset. There are also quite a a few Arabs who serve in the IDF... some of whom have achieved high rank. And Israeli institutions of higher education have affirmative action programs which give Arabs preference in admissions (an absurd policy). The same is true for Israeli judgeships (and that is also absurd).

The feminist psychologist and writer, Dr. Phyllis Chesler, who has been publicizing the very real apartheid which is practiced in the Arab League nations, was 100% on target when she recently referrred to the reality of the situation as: "ISRAEL'S NON-EXISTENT APARTHEID."