Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: jimmy carter

Showing posts with label jimmy carter. Show all posts

Sunday, February 26, 2023

There is no inoculation for the virus of Jew-hatred

My post about Jimmy Carter's antisemitism last week prompts a question: but what about all the wonderful things he has done?

One cannot argue that Carter has not been sincere when he works with Habitat for Humanity, for example. His Middle East work may be influenced by his antisemitism, but he has worked on many other worthy causes. How can those things fit together?

But one can ask the same thing about lots of other antisemites. Alice Walker is a gifted poet and storyteller, but that doesn't make her immune from antisemitic attitudes. Roger Waters was a good songwriter in the 1970s, but that doesn't mean he doesn't harbor antisemitic attitudes. Roald Dahl wrote fantastic children's books, but also hated Jews.

Then again, we can go back in history and ask the same questions. Voltaire was a groundbreaking philosopher, but he was also a racist and antisemite. Martin Luther was a brilliant theologian and an obsessed Jew-hater.

If theology can coexist with hate, perhaps that invalidates the theology. But pioneers in theology and philosophy and humanitarianism and progressivism and socialism and science and even medical ethics have been found to be antisemites - and these are all fields that, in theory, if you believe their self-definitions, should be immune to antisemitic thought.

Obviously, theory is very different from practice.

Some people say that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory. Or that it relegated to the Right. Or that is is a form of bigotry that is part of a larger group of discriminations against race or sexual preference or age.

Yet it fits in no clear category. It morphs into new forms every few decades.

It is a virus with new strains coming out all the time.

Viruses have only one imperative - survive by adaptation. Right now the most virulent strain of antisemitism spreads by pretending to be outraged at how Jews act in Israel - and it cloaks itself by insisting that this current hate of Jews in Israel has nothing in common with the previous instances, despite the obvious parallels.

This is hardly the first time antisemitism pretended to be the opposite. In 1873, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution on antisemitism that pretends to be philosemitic - but ends up wishing that all Jews should convert to Christianity.

Is this any different than modern antisemites who wish just as fervently that the Jewish state be destroyed, that Jews should live as second class citizens in a Muslim majority state and most of them should be ethnically cleansed? Is the Southern Baptist desire that all Jews see the light different from those who want all Jews to be "good Jews" who shed all nationalism and all attachment to the land of their ancestors?

And both of them claim to be doing it because they care so much about Jews.

The other strains of the antisemitic virus didn't die out. The Middle Ages strain is still there, the Christian strain still thrives in many places, the Nazi strain stays stubbornly alive and spreading. Social media has been a huge boon to the virus, allowing it to spread at the speed of light. People can work very hard for years to come up with a way to minimize the threat of one strain but another one can emerge and propagate in days.

Today, we hear people arguing against accusations of antisemitism. How can Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch be antisemitic when their entire organizations are based on human rights? How can Jeremy Corbyn be antisemitic when he is an avowed anti-racist?

The virus doesn't care what philosophy you have. Whatever you hate most in life can be linked to Jews, and usually is.

Instead of reflecting on the history of antisemitism that shows that anyone can catch the virus of antisemitism, many pretend that they are immune. Worse, they pretend that their progressivism or humanitarianism or anti-racism inoculates them from antisemitism - that they aren't and cannot be antisemitic because their worldview does not allow it.

On the contrary, the virus can grow in any medium. The anti-racists become antisemites by accusing Jews/Israelis of racism. The humanitarians become antisemites by accusing Jews of inhumanity. The very ideas that people believe make them immune to infection are the ones that spread it.

Just like before, they justify their hate as being based on facts, unlike all of their predecessors. even though those predecessors said the exact same thing. They write their articles and posts and tweets that show the exact same kind of irrational, obsessive hate that previous centuries of antisemites had.

As we know from recent experience, viruses are hard to eradicate. We still need to try. But we need to understand that the virus does not avoid anyone because of their belief system. On the contrary, it often uses that very belief system as a means of spreading further.

Beware of anyone who says they cannot be antisemitic because of their worldview. Instead, teach them about the history of antisemitism, and show that they have very prominent Jew-hating forebears, who were the world's leaders in theology, the arts, philosophy, science and the Enlightenment.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Jimmy Carter, antisemite.

The announcement that Jimmy Carter is entering hospice care at his home is prompting a wave of fawning pre-obituaries about what a wonderful humanitarian he is.

No one is talking about his antisemitism.

Carter's animus towards Israel is legendary, but the source of that hate is not his progressivism or humanitarianism, but old fashioned Christian antisemitism.

For decades, Jimmy Carter gave a weekly Sunday sermon at his Georgia church. Some of his lessons promoted classic Christian antisemitism, way beyond what the Christian scripture says.

He says that modern Israeli Jews are persecuting Palestinian Christians in line with alleged Jewish persecution of Christians in the New Testament because of Jewish supremacism:

“…this morning I’m gonna be trying to relate the assigned Bible lesson to us in the Uniformed Series with how that affected Israel and how it affects us through Christ personally… It’s hard for us to even visualize the prejudice against gentiles when Christ came on earth. If a Jew married a gentile, that person was considered to be dead. … How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised? Non believer? And what? Unclean, what? They called them DOGS! That’s true. … What was Paul’s feeling toward gentiles in his early life as a Jewish leader? [Paul was not a Jewish leader. Ed.] Anybody? Absolute commitment to persecution! To the imprisonment and even the execution of non-Jews who now professed faith in Jesus Christ. … We know the differences in the Middle East. But the differences there are between Jews on the one hand who comprise the dominating force both militarily and also politically and the Palestinians who are both Muslim and Christians. …”

Carter bizarrely claims that sacrifices in the Jewish Temples were a means for rich Jews to avoid taking care of their elderly parents:

“Corban [sacrifices] was a prayer that could be performed by usually a man in an endorsed ceremony by the Pharisees that you could say in effect, ‘God, everything that I own all these sheep all these goats this nice house and the money that I have, I dedicate to you, to God.’ And from then on according to the Pharisees law those riches didn’t belong to that person anymore. They were whose? God’s! So as long as those riches were belonged to the person, that person was supposed to share them with needy parents right? But once it was God’s it wasn’t theirs and they didn’t have anything to share with their parents. So with impunity, and approved by the Pharisaic law, they could avoid taking care of their needy parents by a trick that had been evolved by the incorrect and improper interpretation of the law primarily designed by religious leaders to benefit whom? The rich folks! The powerful people! Because the poor man wouldn’t have all of this stuff to give to God. He would probably, in fact he might very well have his parents in the house with him or still be living with his own parents.”

This is a completely fictional reading of Jewish law.

Carter repeatedly said that Jewish leaders wanted to kill Jesus for various reasons, spreading the very source of Christian antisemitism as truth:

The subject of his first class was the tale of Jesus driving the moneylenders from the temple. The press soon reported that the president had informed his students that this story was “a turning point” in Christ’s life. “He had directly challenged in a fatal way the existing church, and there was no possible way for the Jewish leaders to avoid the challenge. So they decided to kill Jesus.”

So the Jews wanted to kill Jesus because he opposed the moneylenders! And in another lesson, Carter doubled down on Jewish hate of Christians:

He soon spoke at a Sunday-school class again; and, with an AP reporter in attendance, told those assembled that Jesus, in proclaiming himself the Messiah, was aware that he was risking death “as quickly as [it] could be arranged by the Jewish leaders, who were very powerful.”

There is a theme of rich, powerful Jews who want to oppress the gentiles - that informed Carter's view of the modern Middle East.

And his opinion of American Jews reflected that same animosity he has towards the Jews of Jesus' time. he blamed Jews for his loss in the 1980 election, more than once.

Kenneth Stein, who worked with him and interviewed him for his own book, quotes Carter as railing against the "Jewish money" that opposed him:

"[Vice president] Fritz Mondale was much more deeply immersed in the Jewish organization leadership than I was. That was an alien world to me. They [American Jews] didn't support me during the presidential campaign [that] had been predicated greatly upon Jewish money."

Carter's aide Stuart Eizenstat also says that Carter blames Jews for his 1980 loss: “From the New York primary [in March 1980] onward, I believe Carter was left with the view that New York Jews had not only defeated him in the primary but were also a factor in his loss in November.” However, while New York Jews did vote overwhelmingly for Ted Kennedy in the primary, more voted for Carter than Reagan in the presidential election.

Reagan took over 90% of the electoral college in 1980. It was a landslide. For Carter to blame New York Jews for his huge loss is nothing less than pure antisemitism.

Carter's antisemitism doesn't end there. He noted how Palestinian Christians were fleeing, but he blamed not the Muslim supremacists who are persecuting them, but Israel, continuing his theme of powerful Jews persecuting Palestinian Christians - even though Israel's Christian community has stayed steady.

His hate of Jews naturally spread to his supporting antisemites. When Helen Thomas lost her job for calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel, saying Jews must "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to Germany or Poland where they were massacred, one of the very few people who supported her was....Jimmy Carter. She told Playboy that he was very sympathetic but didn't want to go into details because it would get him into trouble.

Carter also condoned terror attacks against Jews in Israel. Really.

In his "Peace, Not Apartheid" book, Carter wrote, "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel."

This "humanitarian" didn't call for suicide bombings against Jews to end unconditionally. He advised Palestinians to use them as a bargaining chip to force Israel to give in to their demands. That is literally the definition of terrorism, and Carter is saying that he supports the goals of Palestinian terror.

Carter made many hateful statements about Israel which clearly cross the line into antisemitism. For example, he once downplayed the Iranian nuclear threat because they would only have a couple of bombs while Israel has hundreds, as if dropping a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv is no big deal. Carter's support and even compliments for Hamas, for Palestinian "democracy" and other outrageous anti-Israel statements could fill a book. But even without mentioning Israel, his antisemitism is clear and unambiguous.

The single most damning example of Carter's antisemitism comes from an incident in 1987.

Neal Sher was the head of the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi prosecution unit. They had iron-clad evidence that a Chicago resident, Martin Bartesch, a member of the SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp, was a war criminal and a murderer.

Bartesch's family started a huge campaign against the OSI, writing letters to members of Congress and other prominent people asking for help. Most politicians contacted the OSI to find out the details, OSI provided them with evidence of his guilt, and they would drop the matter.

But, Sher says, not Jimmy Carter.

In September 1987, after all of the gruesome details of the case had been made public and widely reported in the media, I received a letter sent by Bartesch’s daughter to the former president. Citing groups that had been exposed for their anti-Semitism, it was an all-out assault against OSI as unfair, “un-American” and interested only in “vengeance” against innocent family members.

...Not even the staunchest and most sincere devotee to humanitarian causes could legitimately claim that an SS murderer who deceived authorities to obtain a visa and citizenship was somehow deserving of exceptional treatment.

That’s why I was so taken aback by the personal, handwritten note Jimmy Carter sent to me seeking “special consideration” for this Nazi SS murderer. There on the upper-right corner of Bartesch’s daughter’s letter was a note to me in the former president’s handwriting, and with his signature, urging that “in cases such as this, special consideration can be given to the families for humanitarian reasons.”

Unlike members of Congress who inquired about the facts, Carter blindly accepted at face value the daughter’s self-serving (and disingenuous) assertions.

Here is Carter's note supporting the case of a known Nazi war criminal.

Carter took the side of a family of a Nazi against his own government. And he couched it in "humanitarian" terms.

Maybe, maybe one could excuse one or two of these examples in isolation. But in the aggregate, there is no denying it: Jimmy Carter is an antisemite, and anyone who doesn't think that this detracts from his humanitarian work is condoning world's oldest hate.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

David Friedman's "Sledgehammer" -- Should All US Ambassadors to Israel Have Law Degrees? (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

From the time that Donald Trump won the election in 2016 -- and even before then -- there was nothing he did or said that was not open to criticism. After all, he had never held public office before and had no experience in government.

A similar criticism was applied to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

An online post on The National Review in 2020 called Kushner "a national disaster":

Perhaps the most stubbornly stuck-on piece of chewed gum on the White House walls has been Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who, it is always necessary to point out, had no experience in anything like government before being catapulted to one of the most important roles in the administration. [emphasis added]

This was in May. By September, Politico featured a post describing How Jared Kushner Proved His Critics Wrong:

It was assumed to be ridiculous that Trump had tapped the 39-year-old Kushner, not a diplomat or an expert in the region, for this role and assumed that everything he did afterward was ridiculous, if not nefarious.

Rarely has so much mockery been directed at an approach that, in the event, was methodical, creative, and ultimately achieved a breakthrough.

Kushner did not make peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, but no one else has, either. What he did was find a path for historic deals to normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with perhaps other Arab countries to follow. [emphasis added]

In his book Sledgehammer: How Breaking With The Past Brought Peace To The Middle East, David Friedman turns around the issue of experience back at the critics:

The US-Israel policy that existed when we took office was simply beyond repair. It was dominated by self-proclaimed experts with no real-world negotiating experience. [p. 8; emphasis added]

This problem of "experts" lacking the key skill of knowing how to negotiate has been an issue in the Iran deal as well.

Actually, the criticism about lacking expertise leveled at Kushner could easily be applied to Friedman as well. He himself readily points out that he was the first US ambassador to Israel with no previous diplomatic or government experience. [p. 49]

But while Kushner brought skills as a negotiator, Friedman was skilled as a lawyer and litigator. Many of the accomplishments of the Trump administration in the Middle East were a result of Friedman's knowledge of the law in general and his legal skills and ability to analyze a problem.

Friedman became the US ambassador to Israel on March 29, 2017 -- and hit the ground running.

He had a meeting in the State Department with the Office of the Legal Adviser -- and asked outright why the US did not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, as required by the Jerusalem Act of 1995. In response, he got a lecture on how that law was subject to a presidential waiver and was an option exercised by both Democratic and Republican presidents ever since the law was first enacted.

Friedman's response was to point out that they were wrong, that they failed to see a key distinction:

The Jerusalem Embassy Act permits the move of the embassy to be delayed by presidential waiver. But the recognition of Jerusalem is not waivable--it simply is declared in the statute. [p. 65; emphasis in original]

The State Department lawyers refused to agree, but it is unlikely they had ever had their legal arguments parried by an ambassador before.

And it was only the beginning.

In September 2017, Friedman "began to push the envelope on political issues." In a press interview, he referred to Israel's control of Judea and Samaria as an "alleged occupation." He followed this up with another interview where he said that the West Bank settlements were part of Israel -- based on the fact that the residents serve in the IDF, have Israeli citizenship and are considered Israeli by the government. [p. 90-91]

That month Friedman also visited the UN with Trump. Trump spoke to the General Assembly, and so did Abbas, threatening to prosecute Israelis at the International Criminal Court. When the issue came up the following month, Friedman pointed out that by encouraging the ICC to prosecute Israelis, Abbas went against the diplomacy that the Palestinian mission was supposed to be engaged in -- which was legal grounds for closing the mission.

Rather than push the point and jeopardize the political capital needed down the line to make recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital a reality, he sent a note to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson laying out the issue and saying he would abide by his decision. Tillerson started the process of setting the PLO mission on the path to closure. [p. 93-94]

By November 2017, the issue of official recognition of Jerusalem was on the front burner. Besides having to provide all the 'pro-recognition arguments' for a memo drawn up by the head of national security (the memo only contained the risks), Friedman also had to argue for recognition against Secretary of State Tillerson and National Security Advisor HR MacMaster in front of Trump. [p. 98-103]

He won the argument and the US officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on December 6, 2017. In February, the State Department claimed, however, that actually moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would take 10 years and cost a billion dollars. Friedman found a way to open the new embassy in 3 months at a cost of $150 thousand. Trump authorized $500,000 and the US embassy in Jerusalem opened on May 14, 2018 -- the 70th anniversary of Israel's independence. [p. 112]

Before May 14, 2018, the US Embassy was in Tel Aviv and the consulate (established in 1844) was in Jerusalem -- as a mission to the city rather than to the country as a whole. This made no sense once the state of Israel was established, and created conflicts since technically the US ambassador from Tel Aviv was out of his area of jurisdiction in Jerusalem, where he met with Israeli officials. On the other hand, the consulate administered to Jerusalem but did not have any responsibility for the US-Israel relations.

During the summer of 2018, with Mike Pompeo replacing Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, Friedman pursued these finer points of having the US embassy located in Jerusalem. As a result, Pompeo announced on October 18, 2018:

I am pleased to announce that following the May 14 opening of the US Embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, we plan to achieve significant efficiencies and increase our effectiveness in merging US Embassy Jerusalem and US Consulate General Jerusalem into a single diplomatic mission. I have asked our Ambassador to Israel David Friedman to guide the merger. [p. 140-146]

The issue of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights came up a couple of months earlier, in March 2018. It was an issue that Netanyahu was pushing. On the US side, national security advisor John Bolton raised the issue with Friedman, who saw it as an application of UN Security Council Resolution 242 entitling Israel to "secure and recognized borders," a framework which could then be extended to the Vision for Peace being worked on for Israel and the Palestinians. Friedman then raised the issue with Trump, who agreed with the idea. [p. 156-157]

By September 2019, with another round of deadlocked elections in Israel, Friedman addressed the State Department's use of the term "occupied territory." He writes that:

I was willing to go along with "disputed territory" or even "West Bank," but I wanted the nomenclature changed to eliminate the term "occupied." I argued that territory is "occupied" only when the party in control has no rights to the land except by reason of military conquest--and that was not the case here. [p.161]

According to Friedman, following the Six Day War, the captured territory was considered disputed. It was Carter, who saw settlements as an obstacle to peace, who had Herbert Hansell, the legal advisor to the State Department, issue a 4-page memo claiming that they were illegal.

In his book, Friedman lists "basic errors" in the Hansell Memo.

o It fails to acknowledge that Israel's legal right to the "West Bank" was confirmed by both The Balfour Declaration and San Remo Resolution and incorporated into the League of Nations resolutions that were the legal basis for restructuring the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

o Hansell claims Israel is a belligerent occupant in relation to Jordan, but fails to show how that is relevant when Jordan itself had no legal claim to the territory.

o He claims the settlements are the result of illegal "forced transfer" when in fact Israel did not force anyone to move.

o The memo also does not account for the fact that the Six Day War was a defensive war.

o Hansell does acknowledge that belligerent occupancy would no longer apply if the state of war would end between Israel and Jordan -- and it did, making the Hansell memo irrelevant.

For his part, Friedman asked a group of lawyers to provide support for the Trump administration's view that the West Bank was not occupied:

I'm asking the question because in the circumstances you have outlined, where legitimate arguments can be made on either side of an issue, I would think you would want to act at the direction of your client...

Guys, when Jimmy Carter wanted an opinion from his State Department legal adviser that settlements were illegal, he got it from Hansell. Not a dissertation on the various positions or an acknowledgement that things could go either way. He got a full-throated finding of illegality. Why isn't Mike Pompeo entitled to the same courtesy, assuming what he's asking for is intellectually honest?

Friedman is not making an obscure point.

Carter did not ask Hansell for a legal decision evaluating the different sides to the issue. What he asked for was legal justification for a position that had already been made by the Carter administration and given to Hansell to support.

Here is the beginning of the Hansell Memo:

Dear Chairmen Fraser and Hamilton:
Secretary Vance has asked me to reply to your request for a statement of legal considerations underlying the United States view that the establishment of the Israeli civilian settlements in the territories occupied by Israel is inconsistent with international law. Accordingly, I am approving the following in response to that request. [emphasis added]

Friedman was asking for the same courtesy from the lawyers, that given the different sides to the issue, they should support the position of the administration.

And that is what he got. On November 19, 2019, Pompeo announced:

After carefully studying all sides of the legal debate, this administration agrees with President Reagan. The establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.

By saying the settlements were not per se illegal, the door was left open that individual settlements may be open to "local competing claims," but as a whole, the settlements were disputed, not occupied. [p. 161-165]

Earlier, in August 2019, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib announced their plan to visit "Palestine" -- a plan that the Israeli government resisted facilitating, because of their plans to exploit the trip against Israel. Israel had passed a law a year earlier, prohibiting tourists from advocating boycotts or sanctions against the country.

Friedman explains the nature of Israel's law:

Nothing prevented Israelis or Palestinians from engaging in this activity--the law simply prohibited foreigners from advocating boycotts of Israel on Israeli soil.
Many liberal Americans were opposed to this law. They argued that principles of free speech were paramount in balancing the issues. This argument missed the point. Israelis and Palestinians had free speech. But Israel had the right to control its borders and had no moral obligation to facilitate visits for those who sought Israeli's destruction. [p. 168; emphasis added]

When Friedman got a copy of the planned itinerary of Omar and Tlaib's trip, he saw that the visit was entitled "US Congressional Delegation to Palestine" and that the visit was focused exclusively on the West Bank with no meetings with Jews.

He considered this as crossing a line regarding US law and policy:

Not because it's my business who Israel lets into its borders, but because here were two isolated members of Congress seeking to establish a new foreign policy of the United States. The United States did not recognize a state or even a place called Palestine, and this end run around our policies and our values should not be tolerated.

The decision of what to do was Israel's to make, and Israel decided the visit violated Israeli law. When the decision was announced and there was an uproar in response, Friedman released a statement, which read in part:

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is not free speech. Rather, it is no less than economic warfare designed to delegitimize and ultimately destroy the Jewish State. Israel properly has enacted laws to bar entry of BDS activists under the circumstances present here, and it has every right to protect its borders against those activists in the same manner as it would bar entrants with more conventional weapons.

...the Tlaib/Omar Delegation has limited its exposure to tours organized by the most strident of BDS activists. This trip, pure and simple, is nothing more than an effort to fuel the BDS engine that Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar so vigorously support.

Like the United States, Israel is a nation of laws. We support Israel’s application of its laws in this case.

By October 2020, one of the last things that Friedman wanted to accomplish was recognition by the State Department that US citizens born in Jerusalem would be recognized as having been born in Israel, and have that fact reflected in their passports. While it seemed a natural outgrowth of US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the State Department -- then still under the direction of Rex Tillerson -- blocked such a move.

But Mike Pompeo, on the other hand, was supportive -- but asked Friedman to work with the Legal Advisor to the State Department, the same office that had supported Tillerson in blocking the passport change. Friedman wrote a lengthy legal analysis showing that recognition had created a legal certainty that Jerusalem was in Israel. But the State Department lawyers responded that Jerusalem remained a final status issue. He offered a compromise, where US citizens born in Jerusalem had the choice to list Israel as their place of birth while retaining the option to list Jerusalem instead. With Pompeo's help, this was found acceptable. [p. 223-224]

As Trump's term started to draw to a close, Friedman addressed 3 bilateral agreements between the US and Israel -- and the "dirty little secret in the State Department." These agreements, The Binational Science Foundation, the Binational Industrial Research & Development Foundation, and the Binational Agricultural Research & Development Fund all contained the same limitation:

Projects financed by the Fund may not be conducted in geographic areas which came under the Administration of the Government of Israel after June 5, 1967, and may not relate to subjects primarily pertinent to such areas. [emphasis added]

In other words, the US government was officially boycotting research and development projects it was conducting with Israel in the West Bank. Fixing the problem required dealing again with lawyers was well as several government agencies and their insistence that no amendment could be made to the agreements without renegotiating them -- despite the fact that all that was at stake was deleting the one sentence.

Friedman arranged a special signing ceremony with Netanyahu at Ariel University for October 27, where the amending of the agreements would be formalized --

And I informed everyone involved that the necessary, and only the necessary, approvals must be obtained prior to October 27 or I would inform the secretary of state of all those who stood in the way of the ceremony and contributed to a diplomatic embarrassment. [p.225-226]

Problem solved.

One last problem addressed in November 2020 centered on how products made in the West Bank were labeled. Before the Oslo Accords, under US law such products could be labeled "MADE IN ISRAEL" -- but afterward, the labeling had to specify "WEST BANK," including products made in Area C, which were under Israeli control.

Friedman discussed the issue with the head of US Customs and Border Protection, whose main focus is avoiding confusion, rather than getting into geopolitics:

I explained to them that the term "West Bank" was itself misleading, as a product emanating from that area could be made under the authority of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, or the State of Israel. You can't get more confusing than that!

They came to an agreement where the labels would specify "Gaza" for the Gaza Strip, "West Bank" for the territory in Judea and Samaria controlled by the PA and "Israel" for the areas under Israeli control. [p.227-228].

Reading about the various issues that Ambassador Friedman focused on and was able to resolve, it is hard to believe that someone without legal training could have pinpointed the key points and pushed the legal arguments necessary. It would not have been enough to be pro-Israel. The proof is the fact that these issues were not resolved by the experienced US diplomats who preceded David Friedman. It also helped that he was not content with the status quo and was determined -- with Trump's backing -- to make necessary changes.

Friedman's knowledge and abilities as a lawyer helped, just as Jared Kushner's background and negotiating skills helped bring about the Abraham Accords.

But that is a different book.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Jimmy Carter twists words of UNSC 242 in NYT op-ed

Jimmy Carter wrote yet another tendentious op-ed for, who else, the New York Times.

The first paragraphs show yet again that he is simply a liar.

We do not yet know the policy of the next administration toward Israel and Palestine, but we do know the policy of this administration. It has been President Obama’s aim to support a negotiated end to the conflict based on two states, living side by side in peace.

That prospect is now in grave doubt. I am convinced that the United States can still shape the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before a change in presidents, but time is very short. The simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.

Back in 1978, during my administration, Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, and Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, signed the Camp David Accords. That agreement was based on the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which was passed in the aftermath of the 1967 war. The key words of that resolution were “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every state in the area can live in security,” and the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

The agreement was ratified overwhelmingly by the Parliaments of Egypt and Israel. And those two foundational concepts have been the basis for the policy of the United States government and the international community ever since.

The words "key words" links to a UN publication that also says that there were two main points to the resolution - but not the ones Carter says.

The resolution stipulated that the establishment of a just and lasting peace should include the application of two principles:
✹ Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; and
✹ Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.

The part that Carter quotes about "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" was not from the operative part of the resolution, but from the preamble - which has no legal standing. And the part that he ignores is the part that was meant to say that the final borders would be the result of negotiations, not the 1949 armistice lines.

So Carter spins a double lie: one is that he elevates a meaningless preamble phrase to importance it doesn't have, and he ignores the phrase that insists that Israel's neighbors (which do not include the Palestinians, who are not mentioned at all in the resolution) allow Israel to have secure borders, which it most certainly didn't have before 1967. That is why the language doesn't call for Israel to withdraw from all territories - but to create a border that would allow it to be secure from attack, borders that would be negotiated with its neighbors.

Also, the text he links to mentions this fact that he ignores: the PLO strongly rejected UN 242 at the time.

This is what 242 says. The drafters of the resolution from the US and UK are unanimous in this interpretation. Carter, however, pretends that UNSC 242 says that all Israeli communities beyond the artificial 1949 armistice lines - that were never secure nor recognized - are illegal. And he is including the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem! (Carter counts all Jerusalem residents across the Green Line to be living there illegally.)

242 also says that, even if you do recognize a new entity called "Palestine" in part of the territories, that state must acknowledge Israel's right to live in peace. Given that Fatah, which dominates the PLO which controls the Palestinian Authority, explicitly says that violence is an acceptable form of "resistance," clearly Israel's Arab neighbors do not accept that clause that is indeed one of the main parts of 242 that Carter ignores.

There's plenty more that Carter twists in the op-ed, but really, when he lies as far as what the two main points of 242 are, he's already proven to be a liar.

After January 20, we will have another ex-president who will have free rein to make up anti-Israel lies in op-ed pages.

The New York Times yet again shows that it allows anti-Israel op-ed writers to not be subject to basic fact checks.

(h/t David B)

It's Giving Tuesday! Please help support EoZ!

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

No one showed up to protest Carter at Cardozo. No one.

Not one single protester showed up to Cardozo to express outrage that Jimmy Carter was receiving an award.

A few disappointed counter-protesters were there, however, with nothing to counter-protest:

There was a small crowd of reporters and curious students there as well.

Meanwhile, other Jewish organizations expressed their outrage. Too bad they couldn't actually send anyone there and get guaranteed publicity to focus on Carter's terrible record. Even YU's own Zionist clubs couldn't muster a contingent.

The alumni who promised to physically block Carter? Nowhere to be found.

This was most disappointing.

I haven't yet heard anything about the speech, or questions asked in the ceremony itself. But from everything I can see, Cardozo's dean arranged things to minimize the chances for anything embarrassing to happen from the very start, so I'm certain the questions asked were pre-screened to put a sunny face on the debacle.

YU/Cardozo update - Carter gave anti-semitic Bible lessons, NYT coverage, more

The story made The New York Times:

When editors of The Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution, a scholarly publication from the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, decided to bestow this year’s International Advocate for Peace award on former President Jimmy Carter, they sought to honor his decades as a mediator and humanitarian. But in the process, they ignited a sizable conflict of their own.

That is because Cardozo is a part of Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish institution where support for the state of Israel runs high. And among supporters of Israel, there are few figures more controversial than Mr. Carter, who has repeatedly criticized Israeli policy toward Palestinians and described their circumstances as apartheid.

...“Part of being a law school is being an open and diverse community with a cacophony of ideas which people are free to express,” Dr. Diller said Tuesday. But, he added, “we are part of a Jewish institution and we stand for Jewish values and commitments, and part of that is support for Israel.”

Brian Farkas, the editor in chief of The Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution, said that the decision to honor Mr. Carter had been mischaracterized.

He said he had spent the morning engaged in “respectful” discussion with members of the Jewish Law Students Association, and that plans were in the works for a future event that would offer differing perspectives on Mr. Carter’s work.

He added that Mr. Carter, who was not available for comment, had agreed to take questions from students after his address on Wednesday afternoon.

Perhaps one of the students can ask Carter about his Sunday school lessons that were first revealed by Phyllis Chesler):

As decades-old tapes from his Church Sunday school lessons reveal, former President Jimmy Carter’s bias against the Jewish state may come more from an old fashioned Christian animus toward Judaism than from concerns over the situation of Palestinians. Carter taught Christian students in Plains Georgia that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are tricks to enhance wealth, and that current Israeli policy toward Palestinians is based on these “Jewish” values and practices.

In a series of sermons Carter recorded between 1999 and 2003 that were published as a CD set by Simon and Schuster called “Sunday Mornings in Plains,” Carter attacks modern Israel by retreading ancient anti-Semitic tropes that go back to the early church fathers and the Judaism/Christianity schism that gave birth to a millennia of Christian persecution of Jews.

1. Jews hate and feel superior to non-Jews: In the tapes, one hears -- in Southern drawl -- his ancient animus: Jews hate non-Jews:

“…this morning I’m gonna be trying to relate the assigned Bible lesson to us in the Uniformed Series with how that affected Israel and how it affects us through Christ personally… It’s hard for us to even visualize the prejudice against gentiles when Christ came on earth. If a Jew married a gentile, that person was considered to be dead. … How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised? Non believer? And what? Unclean, what? They called them DOGS! That’s true. … What was Paul’s feeling toward gentiles in his early life as a Jewish leader? [Paul was not a Jewish leader. Ed.] Anybody? Absolute commitment to persecution! To the imprisonment and even the execution of non-Jews who now professed faith in Jesus Christ. … We know the differences in the Middle East. But the differences there are between Jews on the one hand who comprise the dominating force both militarily and also politically and the Palestinians who are both Muslim and Christians. …”

2. Jewish ritual sacrifice is a dodge that relieves one from taking care of one’s parents, while preserving one’s wealth:

“Corban was a uh prayer that could be performed by usually a man in an endorsed ceremony by the Pharisees that you could say in effect, ‘God, everything that I own all these sheep all these goats this nice house and the money that I have, I dedicate to you, to God.’ And from then on according to the Pharisees law those riches didn’t belong to that person anymore. They were whose? God’s! So as long as those riches were belonged to the person, that person was supposed to share them with needy parents right? But once it was God’s it wasn’t theirs and they didn’t have anything to share with their parents. So with impunity, and approved by the Pharisaic law, they could avoid taking care of their needy parents by a trick that had been evolved by the incorrect and improper interpretation of the law primarily designed by religious leaders to benefit whom? The rich folks! The powerful people! Because the poor man wouldn’t have all of this stuff to give to God. He would probably, in fact he might very well have his parents in the house with him or still be living with his own parents.”

3. Carter ties this Jewish feelings of superiority and religious malevolence to current Israeli policy:

“One reason is that the Israeli government headed now by Netanyahu has to depend on the ultra-right or fundamentalist Jews to give them a majority in the parliament which they call the Knesset, and the recent resignation of foreign minister Levy has left Netanyahu with only one vote margin in the parliament. So the ultra-conservative Jewish leaders demand always that they have total control over anything that relates to religion inside Israel, in particular in Jerusalem. Well, I’m not here to condemn anyone but to point out that even within ourselves, there is an inclination for, I’d say, a feeling of superiority. Wouldn’t you think so? Would you agree? I know I have it.”

Carter’s beef with the Jews is not simply a disagreement over how Israel should treat the Palestinians. His is a deep theological hatred of the type that most Christians (including the Vatican in the 1960s Nostra Aetate) have long disavowed. This is not the “new anti-Semitism: it’s the old. All the more indefensible for an orthodox Jewish religious institution to give this man an award.

As I've said in the past, I am reluctant to call people anti-semitic without serious proof. This is damning. (In the partial transcript, which I unfortunately can no longer find online but which was emailed to me, Carter at one point criticizes biblical Judah - but calls it "Israel.")

Carter's admitting his own feeling of superiority and self-righteousness is accurate, at least. After all, he calls his group of crotchety yentas "The Elders" (without the irony that some others might employ in using that title.)

Here is his wonderful group being used as a prop by Hamas underneath a huge poster showing a map where Israel doesn't exist.

That same group happily attended an anti-Israel protest a couple of years back that effectively meant that Carter and his fellow "conflict resolution" peers agreed that Israel's legal system is illegitimate.

Is part of "conflict resolution" to allow yourself to be used by extremists on one side - or to openly embrace one side?

I am told that my protest posters will be distributed by at least one group at Cardozo today. If anyone takes photos or video, I'd appreciate it!