[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: The Jimmy Carter Row They should have thrown it in the river Instead, the Israel lobby has made a mess of its war on Carter, says alexander cockburn Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby in the US - Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew - had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter's Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book and all its aspersions on Israel's treatment of Palestinians would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up some interns, and simply sallied forth from the Harvard Law School to buy up every copy of Carter's book and hurl each one into the Charles river. Would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the attempted blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt? Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. The Anti-Defamation League has taken out ads. The lobby's allies in the press have hurled their rotten tomatoes. The http://Amazon.com book site features venomous assaults at unprecedented length. Carter has been stigmatised as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs, an advocate of terror. But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter's book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, now at number three on Amazon itself. This doesn't prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Once a book by a former President with weighty humanitarian credentials has actually made it into the bookstores, it's a hard job to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse. The trouble with the Israel lobby, and those American Jews who follow its lead, is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel's equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations to the Palestinians and other bloodthirsty subhumans. Use the word 'apartheid' and they howl with shock and indignation. The shock is about 30 years out of date. Israeli writers regularly use the word 'apartheid' to describe arrangements in the 'Occupied Territories' and have done so for years. South African Jews have said that in some ways the Israeli version of apartheid in the Occupied Territories is worse than their own before its abolition in 1990. But if the lobby is fighting rearguard and increasingly futile actions to suppress all discussion here about what Israel is doing to Palestinians, it is far more successful in exerting pressure in the area where it continues to exercise very serious clout - namely the US Congress. The lobby's prime foreign policy task has been to rally support for an onslaught on Iran, an objective it has not been slow to impart to members of the party now controlling Congress: the Democrats. What an irony! Desperate for an end to the war, the voters hand Congress to the Democrats. Barely more than two months later, Bush is kidnapping Iranian diplomats from their consulate in Irbil, in northern Iraq - a carefully calculated provocation arousing scant tumult at home. Bush is also deploying larger naval forces to the Persian Gulf, as Israel plants story after story about its possible recourse to nuclear weapons if it is to stop the Iranians developing a nuclear bomb. Some Tonkin Gulf-type provocation, maybe a seizure of an Iranian tanker, is easy to imagine some time in February. In Congress, however, there's barely a whimper out of the Democrats amid these terrifying prospects. It may have made a mess of its war against Carter's book, but as a ferryman across the Styx toward Armageddon, the lobby is doing a competent job.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: angle (#0)
Curious as to why Jews haven't re-visited this topic yet...
|
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
|
||