Maybe there is hope for Europe

A good piece by Mariano Aguirre is featured in the French paper, Le Monde diplomatique:

"The New York Post editorial on 5 January 2007 read: “How did this man ever become president of the United States?” Readers might have thought this was a crack about President George Bush in a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch. But the editorial went on: “He’s gone from failed president to friend of leftwing tyrants and global scold of anything that represents America’s legitimate interests”; he wanted to “demonise Israel” and had secretly given “PR and political advice to Yasser Arafat”. The Post was damning not Bush, but Jimmy Carter, and it said Democrats should “cut all their ties” to him for “when he flatly condones mass murder, he goes beyond the pale”...

Carter insists that he was talking about Palestine, not the situation in Israel, but there has been vociferous reaction in sections of the US Jewish community. Like the Anti-Defamation League, they take any criticism of Israel to be anti-semitic. The protests have succeeded: both the chairman of the Democrats, Howard Dean, and their leader in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, distanced themselves from Carter. In this early pre-election period the affair was unwelcome and pushed them to take a stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict...

In response to the attacks on his references to apartheid, Carter explained: “The alternative to peace is apartheid, not inside Israel… but in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, the Palestinian territory. And there, apartheid exists in its more despicable forms, Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights.” For Carter there are three essentials for peace in the region: guarantees on Israel’s security, an end to Palestinian violence, and recognition by Israel of the Palestinians’ right to a state in its pre-1967 borders...

Following [Chris] McGreal’s articles on [these] comparisons and the close military relations between the apartheid regime and Israel, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (Camera) accused him of falsehood and defamatory distortion of the facts (7)...

In 2006 there was a rise in tension around academics critical of Israel. There were strong reactions to an article published in London by two specialists in international relations, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (11), on the overriding influence of Jewish pressure groups in the US on its foreign policy in the Middle East; they claimed this had pushed the US into the war in Iraq. A few months later, Tony Judt, British and Jewish, and director of New York’s Remarque Institute for European studies, was attacked for “anti-semitic” views; he had maintained that the only solution to the conflict in the Middle East was a single, binational state (12). Judt held pro-Israeli views in his youth and is today regarded as a traitor. In October 2006, the Anti-Defamation League successfully pressed the Polish consulate in New York to cancel a conference Judt was to give on its premises. This caused shock, but Judt was later able to make his point – in Israel’s reputable Haaretz newspaper (26 July 2007) – that Israel’s future will remain in the balance as long as it continues repression and occupation in Palestine."