POSTCARD USA: The holy cow called Israel

[Neo]

Sunday, December 24, 2006

POSTCARD USA: The holy cow called Israel
By Khalid Hasan

Every American administration has gone out of its way to defend every Israeli policy and action, be it massacres of Palestinians, wanton bombing of civilians, or military raids into Palestinian settlements. But there has been no administration more pro-Israel than that of George Bush

The nightmare of every American public figure is to be seen as anti-Semitic. It is a charge lethal enough to snuff out a political career and earn the man who has been so accused public opprobrium. No one will come to his aid in the press and the rightwing talk radio, with which the airwaves in this country are thick, will heap so much abuse and scorn on the man as to make his name mud and render him unfit to seek public office ever again.

The hypocrisy of it all is that privately many agree that the anti-Semitism charge has been used to denounce anyone who has dared speak critically of Israel. In one-to-one conversations, people who wouldn’t dream of being quoted in public, will admit that the pro-Israeli lobby exercises undeserved power and much influence. They would also concede that such blind support of all Israeli causes, right or wrong, does not serve the American national interest. However, there are few who would even dream of taking a public position on any issue where they have to criticise Israeli policy or Israeli actions. Ironically, there is far more criticism of Israeli statecraft and Israeli treatment of Palestinians and Israeli occupation of Arab land in Israel itself than there is in America.

Every American administration has gone out of its way to defend every Israeli policy and action, be it massacres of Palestinians, wanton bombing of civilians, or military raids into Palestinian settlements. There has been no administration more pro-Israel than that of George Bush. Under him and his cabal of pro-Israeli advisers and members of the cabinet, such as the Warrior Princess Condoleezza Rice, Israel has never had it better. Perhaps that is only natural because the state of Israel was brought to birth by President Harry Truman. If anyone should have guilt about how the European Jewry was treated, it should be the Germans. Why should America carry this burden when it has played no part in the persecution of the Jews?

Given this backdrop, President Jimmy Carter is to be commended for having written a book that upholds the trampled rights of the Palestinians. Since the publication of the book, which uses the word ‘apartheid’ in its title, thus likening the treatment of Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis to that of black South Africans by the racist white state that today lies in the dustbin of history, Carter has been subjected to great abuse. But the man has to be saluted. Because of what he has accomplished since he left the White House, he has become the world’s most respected and its most trusted statesman.

One of the attacks mounted on Carter said, “Even as Islamic Hitlerites gather in Iran to deny the first Holocaust of the Jews and to plot the second, former president Jimmy Carter tours America with a new book that describes Jews as racists and oppressors, and suggests they are also a conspiratorial mafia that intimidates ‘critics,’ controls America’s media and war policy, and are therefore also the source of Islamic terrorism and the Arabs’ genocidal campaign to eliminate them from the map of the Middle East. In other words, Americans beware of the Jew in your midst.”

Now, where did Carter say that Americans should be beware of the Jews who live in America? Nowhere. But you have to call a man a dog before you hang him.

Carter wrote, “The Palestinians have had their own land, first of all, occupied and then confiscated and then colonised. They’ve been excluded from their own gardens and fields, and pastures and churches. They have been severely restrained in their movements. They have to have different kinds of passes to go through different checkpoints inside their own lands on their own roads. The Israelis have built more than 200 settlements inside Palestine. They connect these settlements with very nice roads for the Israeli settlers, and then superhighways and so forth going into Jerusalem. Quite often the Palestinians are prevented from even riding on those roads that have been built in their own territory. So this has been in many ways worse than it was in South Africa.” Carter’s critic calls what the former President wrote “more than a lie”, in fact, “a blood libel.” It is another matter that not a word of what Carter wrote is untrue.

One of the great supporters of the Israeli causes is Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, whom Carter was due to debate at the Brandeis University. Carter declined to go and when asked why, replied, “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.” Carter told Boston Globe, “There is no debate in America about anything that would be critical of Israel.”

If Gen. Musharraf wants the world to believe that the 2007 elections in Pakistan are going to be free and fair, as he and his people claim, then it is Jimmy Carter whose stamp of approval he should obtain to validate his claim. Such is the man’s credibility that if he pronounces the elections free and fair, everybody would believe him, including the people of Pakistan.

But would Musharraf do that? The jury is out on that one.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\12\24\story_24-12-2006_pg3_3

 

[sparten]

Dailly Whines again.

 

[Adux]

have to agree there with sparten.

 

[solid snake]

I agree with sparten too.

 

[Owais]

I am afraid that USA may see a big disaster due to Israeli lobby.