Attempts at Marginalizing Carter Intensify

Fourteen members of the Carter Center have resigned in protest over former president Jimmy Carter's book,"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." AP hints that they were mostly themselves Jewish Americans. The Jerusalem Post says all were. This is only 7% of his board, which has 200 members.

The lobby is drawing wagons around this one, even though Carter's book is actually very biased toward Israel and makes historical errors in Israel's favor. AP reports:

' "You have clearly abandoned your historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side," the departing members of the center's Board of Councilors told Carter in their letter of resignation. '

What is really being demanded by the Zionist expansionists is that Carter ignore the creeping Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, ignore the way in which Israel makes Palestinians' lives miserable, ignore the datum that under Israeli occupation 15 percent of Palestinian children are malnourished. If he ignored all that, then he'd be being even-handed.

The invocation of even-handedness is ironic. We all know what happened to Howard Dean when he even so much as suggested that the US play the role of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The conditions under which Palestinians beyond the green line under Israeli occupation live are actually much worse than what most black South Africans suffered under Apartheid. Within Israel proper, Arabs with Israeli citizenship suffer discrimination. A frankly racist law prevents family unification for Israeli Arabs married to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, singling them out on racial grounds for discriminatory treatment not visited on Jewish Israelis.

Amazon.com isn't being fair to Carter's book, either.