Jimmy Carter

The latest wave of polling has been an almost uninterrupted parade of good news for Barack Obama – widening leads in national surveys, solid advantages in most swing states, and startling strength in numerous Republican bastions.

It could all mean nothing, of course. Michael Dukakis led George H. W. Bush by 13 points at this moment in 1988, a margin that would swell to 17 points after the July Democratic convention only to evaporate by Labor Day, never to reappear.

But Obama seems a far more durable candidate than Dukakis, while John McCain leads a Republican Party that is in a state of disrepair unimaginable 20 years ago.  read more »

Barack Obama the naïve sapling is out, replaced – for the time being at least – by a different caricature: the cunning opportunist, wrapping himself in the mantle of reform in ruthless and amoral pursuit of the White House.

The image began taking hold in the media last week, when Obama rationalized his way out of a previous commitment to make a good-faith effort at participating in the public financing system for the general election.

Given his earlier cutesiness on Nafta, his now infamous 130 “present” votes in the Illinois legislature and his penchant for blaming his staff for his own mistakes, the campaign funding flap could serve as a tipping point in the media’s portrayal of Obama.  read more »

“In many ways,” the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney wrote over the weekend, “Mr. Obama is wheezing across the finish line after making a strong start: He has won only 6 of the 13 Democratic contests held since March 4, drawing 6.1 million votes, compared with 6.6 million for Mrs. Clinton.”

Actually, it’s now worse than that: Mr. Obama’s late-in-the-campaign numbers took an additional hit on the final weekend of primary season, when Puerto Rico handed him his eighth loss since March. It is now indisputable that Mr.  read more »

On his New Yorker blog (which you should be reading if you don't already), Hendrik Hertzberg has a fun reminiscence of his old Carter administration colleague Chris Matthews. "When I first met him, thirty or so years ago, his hair was a different color, he was skinnier, and his neckties were more random, but he was otherwise pretty much the same political jabber machine he is today," writes Mr. Hertzberg.

After recounting some details of their White House period, Mr. Hertzberg tells what it was like editing Mr. Matthews when he was helming The New Republic:

He wrote almost as fast he talked, though he was a little weak on spelling and typing. After we got our butts kicked by Reagan, Chris wrote a few pieces for The New Republic, which I had become the editor of. Editing him was like tending a lush garden—you water, you do a lot of weeding, you get something worth admiring.  read more »

Jimmy Carter is still on his book tour, and still hinting at support for Barack Obama without saying it directly.

In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer taped for The Situation Room, Carter said that if superdelegates overturn what is nearly certain to be a majority of pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Denver (the only way Hillary Clinton can win at this point), it would be "uncomfortable." Carter, while admitting to having a favorite, still refuses to say who he voted for in the primary, or who he plans to support at the convention.

Carter is one of the Democratic Party elders, along with Al Gore, who could conceivably play a role in tipping the nominating process towards one candidate by weighing in at some point. In Carter's case, at least, that candidate would probably be Obama. (Carter previously told a Nigerian newspaper, "My children and their spouses are pro-Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama.")

Here's the transcript of the exchange, sent over by the CNN:  read more »

Responding to Jon Corzine's comments today indicating that he would consider switching his support to Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton if the Illinois Senator were to win the popular vote, Mark Penn said in today's Clinton conference call, "All superdelegates are going to look at this race, they are going to look at the popular vote including Michigan and Florida."

Penn's comment serves as an illustration of the increasingly selective metrics the Clinton campaign is trying to sell to superdelegates.  read more »

Hillary Clinton’s thematic inspiration may come from Walter Mondale and his “I am ready to be president now” campaign of 1984, but the uphill climb to the nomination she now faces actually mirrors the challenge confronted by a different Democratic candidate from days gone by: Ted Kennedy in 1980.

Kennedy, in challenging President Jimmy Carter, won enough giant industrial states to keep afloat during the months-long primary season, even as Carter commanded the edge in overall delegates and cumulative popular votes. Instead of surrendering after the last primary in early June, Kennedy soldiered on, intent on using the summer to sow doubts about Carter that might prompt delegates to turn on the president and hand Kennedy the nomination.

Likewise, despite her revival in Ohio and Texas (and Rhode Island), the only realistic scenario under which Clinton secures this year’s nomination will require her to engineer the kind of backdoor maneuver that Kennedy failed to pull off 28 years ago.  read more »

Late in the summer of 1976, President Gerald Ford and his inner circle huddled in Vail, Colorado, facing the grimmest general election outlook for a Republican since the L.B.J. landslide of ‘64.

An unelected president, Ford had barely secured the Republican nomination against a fierce challenge from Ronald Reagan, leaving the party’s conservative base dispirited and even more distrustful of Ford than they already had been. And the stench of Watergate—and Ford’s politically damaging pardon of Richard Nixon—stubbornly hung in the air. After eight years of Republican rule, an amorphous but potent yearning for change had taken hold.

At the Vail strategy session, the Ford team zeroed in on the chief vulnerabilities of their Democratic opponent, Jimmy Carter: His lack of experience, his lack of accomplishments and his lack of specificity on the issues. These had to be exploited mercilessly.  read more »

Steve Kornacki thinks there are parallels between Jimmy Carter's primary campaign and Mike Huckabee's, but by losing his "dark horse" status this early, Huckabee will run into trouble.

Also from the Observer, Howard Megdal finds it hard to believe that the Yankees would let Johan Santana go to another team.

It’s tempting to compare Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign to Jimmy Carter’s in 1976.

Both men, personable and devoutly Christian former governors from small southern states, began in total anonymity, only to navigate their way in dogged fashion to the head of crowded primary packs.

In Mr. Carter’s case, the momentum carried him all the way to the Democratic nomination and the presidency, a feat that made him the patron saint of all future White House long shots from both parties—Mr. Huckabee included.  read more »

The last two times Democrats enjoyed untrammeled dominance in Washington, the consequences for the party were catastrophic. But there's hope if the fates align in 2008.  read more »

Mitt Romney spoke to Yeshiva University’s business school in Manhattan last night, talking about the threat of radical jihad, terrorism and Jimmy Carter.

“Take former president Jimmy Carter," he said. "President Carter thinks Israel’s security threats is the thing that keeps peace from coming to the holy land. Having just been to Israel, I came to the opposite conclusion. The security threats keeps peace in Israel."

Thunderous applause.

“Threats is how you prevent bloodshed and terror and violence,” he continued.

Two spokespeople form the University said students had sought to have Romney as a guest because of his experience in the private sector and invited him before he announced his candidacy.

But as a Presidential candidate, Romney seemed to be a tough sell for some of the students.

“Who is that?” one female student standing next to me asked when Romney was working the crowd before his speech.

I explained that he’s a Republican presidential candidate.

“I have a soft spot for Giuliani,” she responded.

Why?

“Because I’m from New York and I was here when 9-11 happened.”  read more »

My dad's real smart, even if he doesn't agree with me on my Middle East politics, and a couple weeks ago he said something that stuck. He was saying that Jimmy Carter's book is a sign of rising anti-Semitism (something I disagree with), a sign we're entering a new phase for Jewish power in the U.S. That the result of Carter's book and Walt-Mearsheimer and other developments that I cheer and my dad fears is that Jews will have less power. I said, "So are you talking about pogroms?" My father made a little face. He's very poetical and ironical. "No. Without fireworks."

Not to belabor the obvious, but my father was saying that these big sociological questions are going to be brokered and renegotiated beneath the surface, quietly, and Jews and gentiles will adjust to a new reality. Smart guy, my dad.

I bring all this up because I just watched Obama in Springfield. You can prepare all you want for a big moment, but then the moment happens, and we're all changed. I'm excited. And I have to think one of the consequences of Obama's globally democratic dream is that, without it being explicit, without his having a fight with big Jewish backers—without fireworks—U.S. policy in the Middle East is going to shift.

I'm an optimist. But I think what's happening right now in the Jewish community is part of it. Jews are being forced to confront the contradictions in Zionism (as playwright David Zellnik says, describing his play, "Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl"). Despite the AJC's best efforts, all Jews are Wrestling With Zion (to quote the title of Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner's great anthology on the subject that the AJC attacked). This is the water we're all swimming in now, questions about Zionism; and I'm betting that without fireworks, the next generation of Jews is going to think differently about this, the ground is changing under them.

I'll cite one little fact that I think makes my point. In a Zionist history I was reading the other day, I read that the purchases of land in Palestine by Jewish agencies in the early part of the last century had covenants on them. The covenants said, This land can only be sold to Jews. (When I remember the citation, I'll stick it in.) Those covenants still exist, I'm sure. You can try and justify that type of discrimination in a million ways, but there it is. Real estate covenants barring sales to blacks and Jews are what my generation helped destroy in this country 30 years ago. Obama was borne up on that idealism, and his campaign is about bringing that idealism to America's actions in the world. He's half-everything, right? The ideology of Zionism is simply out of step with that spirit, and if Obama succeeds, Zionism will lose its hold on Jewish-American intellectual life. Without fireworks.

A reporter called me yesterday and said I was wrong in declaring there's a movement of progressive Jews who are criticizing Zionism. He asked for my evidence. I started with Jewish Voice for Peace, which runs muzzlewatch and rallied in the cold to support Jimmy Carter at Brandeis. He said, "But they're kind of a fringe organization."

Well, gee. That's actually what movement means, a rearrangement of the political hierarchy (of which that reporter is a part) to include a formerly marginalized group. The women's movement. The settlers' movement. The evangelical movement.

Now here are a few more straws in the wind, demonstrating that the formerly-marginalized progressives are movin' in.

—In Australia, the Age today does a piece on perestroika in the Jewish community (saying that author Antony Loewenstein is leading a breakaway to challenge the Israel lobby), and The Age's sidebar exposes as objectionable a regular practice in the Jewish community: Zionists use the word "self-hating" to describe Jews who dissent from the program;

—The Times piece on the American Jewish Committee's report on these matters of 1/31 devotes real space to a book that nettled the AJC: Wrestling With Zion, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. This wonderful book, which includes a great number of Jewish writers who are uncomfortable with Zionist ideology (and some who aren't so uncomfortable with it), came out nearly 4 years ago. It was never reviewed by the Times, mentioned only once in passing. Now it is mentioned prominently in the Times, and in a positive light. Change.

—In Washington last week, Theater J held a reading of the heterodox historical play I saw performed in N.Y. last spring, David Zellnik's amazing "Ariel Sharon Stands on the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl". The reading went well, before a good-sized crowd in the Jewish Community Center in Northwest D.C. No one jumped up and screamed antisemitism, they wanted to talk about Zionism.

—In yesterday's Washington Post, an aggrieved victim of the AJC (as opposed to one of the victims who's reveling in it), Richard Cohen, says "Shame" on the AJC for "promiscuously" throwing around the word anti-Semite.

—Australia again. Today's Australian features a sharp opinion piece by TAMU's Michael Desch, a Holocaust scholar, who hops on the self-hating thing again. Dismissing "Jews who deviate from the pro-Israel line" as "self-hating" is the kind of "dirty pool" regularly practiced by the lobby.  read more »

O.K. So it's a movement. We're gaining traction. What do we stand for?

A couple of times now, I've posted items imagining Jimmy Carter as being motivated by a spiritual debt to Anwar Sadat. Carter made Sadat stay at Camp David in 1978 when he wanted to leave; and Sadat gave his life for the accords he signed there. Now Carter is making up to his old friend.

Well I'm finally reading Carter's book, and I'm wrong. Carter is passionless (as James Fallows told us many years ago). He describes Sadat as the closest friend he formed in all his presidential meetings, but Sadat's 1981 assassination is dismissed in a couple of brief references. No tears are shed, no guilt expressed. Carter is utterly impersonal. His speech the other day at Brandeis was that way too—he dropped a few (Jewish) names, like Stu Eisenstadt and Stephen Breyer, but there wasn't really a friendly word about anyone. Compare him to Bill Clinton's tearful speech at Terry McAuliffe's book party at Four Seasons the other night—they're night and day.

It's worth remembering that Carter was a submarine commander who trained at Annapolis and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He's a technocrat, and a Christian. His motivation in writing his bombshell book is largely technocratic: there's a big problem here, I'm going to try and fix it. The prose in this book is dry. Carter saved his emotional moments for NBC News and Brandeis. The most emotional moment I've come to is when he's running in East Jerusalem with two Israeli soldiers accompanying him and one runs ahead and kicks the newspapers out of the hands of some Arabs who are sitting and reading the papers, to make sure they're not hiding guns. Carter goes over to apologize. He's still offended by that behavior, as he should be.

One of Jimmy Carter's most powerful points at Brandeis Tuesday was a challenge to Brandeis to organize its own trip to the Occupied Territories to find out whether he was exaggerating the horrible conditions that Palestinians face. "See for yourself." That's an important issue. Today's Christian Science Monitor has a strong piece by former S.D. Sen. James Abourezk talking about the Israel lobby's use of congressional trips to sway political opinion to the view that one side has the moral high ground in the unending cycle of violence there.

According to the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, congressional filings show Israel as the top foreign destination for privately sponsored trips. Nearly 10 percent of overseas congressional trips taken between 2000 and 2005 were to Israel. Most are paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, a sister organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major pro-Israel lobby group.

New rules require all trips to be pre-approved by the House Ethics Committee, but Rep. Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts says this setup will guarantee that tours of Israel continue. Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported consensus among Jewish groups that "the new legislation would be an inconvenience, but wouldn't seriously hamper the trips to Israel that are considered a critical component of congressional support for Israel."

These trips are defended as "educational." In reality, as I know from my many colleagues in the House and Senate who participated in them, they offer Israeli propagandists an opportunity to expose members of Congress to only their side of the story. The Israeli narrative of how the nation was created, and Israeli justifications for its brutal policies omit important truths about the Israeli takeover and occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Abourezk doesn't know about the journalists. The journos who have taken one-sided junkets to Israel don't have to declare them...

Brian Williams stood up for Jimmy Carter Monday by airing a wonderful scene from the Carter Center over the weekend. At some panel convened by Williams, Carter volunteered a scene at Camp David with Anwar Sadat that is apparently not in his book. Sadat was leaving. Carter changed into a suit and tie, knelt in his room and prayed to God for guidance, then went into Sadat's room and, surrounded by suitcases, asked Sadat's aides to leave him alone with Anwar. Carter addressed Sadat angrily, nose to nose. "You're betraying me and you're betraying your people," he said. If you leave, Carter went on, "I will sever our friendship." Sadat, of course, stayed, and the rest is history.

As Carter told this story, he started to cry. I wonder about his survival guilt. Sadat may have preserved his friendship with Carter, but three years later he was assassinated. The episode suggests to me (again) the spiritual motivation for Carter's valiant book. If he's sacrificing himself, well, he owes as much to his friend.

You think Jimmy Carter has problems. Yesterday on the progressive Jewish blog, Jewschool, Mobius noted that Urban Outfitters was selling kaffiyehs—the Arab scarf popularized by Yasir Arafat—as "antiwar scarves":

In hipster enclaves such as Berlin and Brooklyn, the kaffiyeh is so ubiquitous it's already passe [and] as a fashion item it is viewed by many in the Palestinian solidarity movement as a trivialization of the Palestinian struggle... Well, the kaffiyeh just got 10 TIMES MORE PASSE and 10 TIMES MORE TRIVIALIZED, thanks to Urban Outfitters

I went to the Urban Outfitters site today and now you can't even see the picture of the scarf; and the retailer announces:

Due to the sensitive nature of this item, we will no longer offer it for sale. We apologize if we offended anyone, this was by no means our intention.

Score another victory for Abe Foxman! This is actually fascinating as a symbol. Because truly, the antiwar movement in this country is now divided/stymied/unable-to-coalesce because of the unwillingness of many liberal Democrats to identify the Israeli Occupation as a source of problems in the Middle East.

Last night 100 progressive people, almost all Jewish (one wore Muslim head covering), crowded the Village Temple in New York to learn about conditions in the Occupied Territories. The speakers were a former Israeli soldier and a former Palestinian resistance fighter. They said the following:

—There are 530 checkpoints in the West Bank. Only 30 are on the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel. Yes; some of those have stopped suicide bombers. The purpose of the other 500 has nothing to do with security. "The strategy there is to destroy Palestinian society, to prevent any joint organized struggle [against the occupation]," said the Israeli.

—The Israeli P.M. recently promised the Palestinian President that the checkpoints would be relaxed. They have not been. "The army receives these instructions and... does not take the instructions," the Israeli said, citing Israel's leading newspaper. Thus the army acts on its own as a repressive force (Israeli generals have long defied civilian supervision).

—The Palestinian, his brother, and his father have spent 25 years in Israeli jails, much of that time without due process, for such offenses as graffiti and other statements opposing the occupation. The man's family has lost many acres of its land to Jewish settlers, in a village outside Bethlehem.

—Arbitrary laws prevent Israelis from carrying Palestinians in their cars in the Occupied Territories. The intention, says the Israeli, is to keep the two sides from talking.

The situation these men describe is worse than apartheid. "Three and a half million people live without any rights," said the Israeli, whose own sister was killed by a suicide bomber. "You want to stop these people [suicide bombers], you should give them a reason to live."

The campaign by the U.S. Jewish leadership to smear Jimmy Carter will one day be taught in history books, as an effort by a privileged elite to suppress the truth. Slavery and segregation also had powerful defenders who misrepresented those conditions. Despite all their well-connected efforts, these people will lose for two simple reasons: the facts are against them, and a movement has begun to discover those facts. The progressive Jews jamming the temple last night are the evidence.

The Brit Tzedek tour by these two former combatants in the Occupied Territories continues across our country over the next month. It is aimed at one thing: to open Jews' eyes and ears. Let us pray.

Patrick O'Connor of Palestine Media Watch has an interesting quantitative analysis on the latest exponent of anti-Carterism: Ethan Bronner, who reviewed Jimmy Carter's book in a predictable manner in yesterday's NYT.

Bronner has written 18 articles on Israel and Palestine for the Times since July 30, 2000. In them he quoted 1226 words from Israelis, and just 145 words from Palestinians. For example, in the Week in Review on July 30, 2000, after the failure of Camp David, and two months before the outbreak of the 2nd Palestinian intifada which has continued for the last six and half years, Bronner counseled that "no explosion... occurred, nor is chaos expected any time soon." The peace process' "positive direction in the long term is clear." [!] Bronner quoted 228 words from Israelis and 67 words from a Palestinian in that less than prescient analysis. It could be asserted that Bronner is unfairly penalized for reviewing four books by Israelis and one book by a Palestinian. However, eliminating those five reviews worsens his ratio, yielding 1045 words quoted from Israelis, and 97 words quoted from Palestinians.

The latest battle in the ideological war over Israel/Palestine took place the other day at a high school outside Boston. Andover High had invited a pro-Palestinian group called Wheels of Justice to talk at the school. Local Jewish groups rose in opposition; the event was cancelled. Then the ACLU stepped in and the event took place, 300 people jammed into a library, with loud protest.

A few comments:

1. As Jimmy Carter has shown, there is a new actor on the political stage: liberal Christians. (Per the Globe):

The Rev. Ralph Galen, minister of Andover's Unitarian Universalist Congregation and a member of Merrimack Valley People for Peace, said [Rabbi Robert] Goldstein's stance against Wheels of Justice has disappointed him. "The situation in the Middle East is so complex that it's already at a boiling point," said Galen, who helped bring The Wheels of Justice to neighboring North Andover two years ago with less resistance. "It just pushes us over and it's so hard to maintain our rationality, but we must."

Liberal Protestants used to be quiet about the Middle East, now they're demanding to be heard; the Presbyterian church, for instance, is debating divestment. This is part of the rage at Jimmy Carter: rightwing Jews want to keep the Middle East club exclusive. 2. Contrast the liberal churches' position with the strength that pro-Israel groups are drawing from the religious right. See Zev Chafets's new book, A Match Made in Heaven, about evangelicals' support for Israel, reviewed lately in Commentary Magazine. Chafets calls it the "wonderful Judeo-evangelical alliance." I wonder how wonderful it is. To preserve Israel from criticism, the American-Jewish community is being drawn further and further right.

3. The Globe article features a student at Andover High calling for a balanced panel discussion of the issues, rather than "just" Wheels for Justice. The pity to me here is that a Jewish kid is being mobilized in an argument about a country he probably has never been to, and whose apartheid-like practices he has no idea of. The pressure on Jewish kids these days is sure intense! I feel for them. When I was a little Jewish kid, I was protesting the Vietnam War with my parents and hearing about the Freedom Riders. What larks! True enough, I was being indoctrinated, too, but it was a hopeful set of values, one I still choose to embrace, liberal universalist ideas going back to abolitionism. These kids are being indoctrinated in a narrower set of religious-nationalist values: basically, Arabs Bad, Israelis Good.

Henry Siegman has again and again proved a leader on the Israel/Palestine issue. His review of Jimmy Carter's apartheid-in-Palestine book in the Nation offers breathtaking relief from the smear campaign against Carter. His piece concludes with an explanation of Carter's enormous contribution to Israel's security.

Accusations by Alan Dershowitz and others that Carter is indifferent to Israel's security only prove that no good deed goes unpunished. Arguably, the single most important contribution to Israel's security by far was the removal of Egypt--possessing the most powerful of the military forces in the Arab world--from the Arab axis that was intent on the destruction of the State of Israel in its early years. Egypt's peace agreement with Israel permanently removed the possibility of such a combined Arab assault against the Jewish State, something for which the late Syrian president Hafez Assad could not get himself to forgive Sadat, even after he was assassinated.... Carter's book provides an important reminder that the Camp David agreement not only created a durable peace between Egypt and Israel but served as a model for all of the major Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives that were to follow. Oslo's concepts of a self-governing Palestinian Authority, of a five-year process that concludes with agreements on permanent-status issues, of negotiations on such issues that begin no later than in the third year of the agreement and of an armed Palestinian police force to maintain order are all spelled out in the Camp David agreement. And the outline of what an Israeli-Palestinian settlement would have to look like if an agreement is to be reached is also adumbrated in the Camp David accords of 1978, which included Begin's acceptance of Egypt's insistence on the return of all Egyptian territory held by Israel. The magnitude of that accomplishment places the pettiness of the critics of President Carter and his latest book in proper perspective.

In a new Gallup poll asking people what male and female public figures they admire most, the top finishers were George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton.

Most admired men:

13 percent--George Bush 5 percent--Bill Clinton 4 percent--Jimmy Carter 3 percent--Barack Obama 3 percent--Billy Graham 2 percent--Colin Powell 2 percent--Pope Benedict XVI 1 percent--Nelson Mandela, George H.W. Bush and Bill Gates

A little lower on the list was John McCain, who edged out George Clooney, Mel Gibson, Al Gore, Tony Blair and Rudy Giuliani...in that order.

Most admired women:

13 percent--Hillary Clinton 9 percent--Oprah Winfrey 8 percent--Condoleezza Rice 4 percent--Laura Bush 2 percent--Margaret Thatcher 2 percent--Angelina Jolie 1 percent--Nancy Pelosi and Madeleine Albright, Barbara Bush and Maya Angelou

-- Azi Paybarah

I'm in L.A. One of the liberating things about being here is that while there's Jewishness all around me, it is not as confining a Jewishness as the one in New York. The definition is looser.

At a Christmas party of people in the movie business two nights ago, I talked to three Jews. 1 was a movie producer who said he welcomed Jimmy Carter's statements about the Middle East and couldn't believe the smearing he was getting, then went off to play with his child by a gentile woman. With 2 and 3 I had longer conversations about Jewishness.

2 was a producer married to a Jewish woman. He was the son of Holocaust survivors and in 1967 had been pressured by friends to move to Israel. He had refused and, feeling angry about the pressure, had come to the understanding he was American, and had moved west. He said he got along with his businessman father-in-law completely, agreed on all politics, till he'd had the worst argument ever with him over Carter's book. The father-in-law said Jimmy Carter was an anti-Semite. He didn't agree, he thought Jimmy Carter was saying important things.

3 was a beautiful woman who it seemed to me had traveled widely, using the powers of her beauty, and her mind. She had grown up here then gone to live in the middle of the country, where she had married and had kids with a gentile. Now she was going out with a non-Jew back here. She told me she felt really Jewish; it was her "core." I found that moving. And her father had said to her, "Israel is very important." But she was afraid to examine Israel. From what she had heard it was a place that prized violence and ethnic chauvinism. That wasn't her way. The soul of Jewishness, she said, was to participate in the modern world, and see the best in everyone, and reach out for greatness in other groups and add our greatness to the mix unselfishly. "High five," I said, mimicking Borat when the hotel clerk reads him the telegram saying his wife has been eaten by a bear. We high-fived. Her boyfriend came over, and our conversation petered out.

Comments. My focus group was self-selecting; of course this is a party an assimilationist like myself ends up at. In fairness to the body of American Jewry, it doesn't go to Christmas parties like this one, by and large, and has a stronger sense of Jewish chauvinism than anyone at the party. Still, we assimilationists have close connections to that more-conservative body. I bet that 3's father and 2's father-in-law both give money to Jewish organizations, maybe to arms of the Israel lobby. While notwithstanding their strong feelings, 3 and 2 are not having much effect on our foreign policy.

On the East Coast I feel a lot more pressure to be Jewish-identified in a chauvinist way. People who live in New York tend to be more particularist-Jewish than California Jews. (It's no wonder that Michael Lerner, one Jew to endorse Jimmy Carter, is in S.F.) And affluent Jews on the east coast form the heart of the Israel lobby. They have been given that role, by history, by the Jewish people, by Israel—someone—to stand with Israel and insist that America do so too, because they believe that America if left to its own devices would abandon Israel.

There is a Hebrew word for me and my Christmas-party Jews. We are galut. Galut means diaspora, homeless, exiled. To make aliyah in Israel (to emigrate) means to go up—because Israel is the highest spot. We are down. And galut is a judgmental word, it carries the hint, spiritually-alienated.

I'm still in that high-five moment with 3, a core Jew, not feeling alienated, offering a non-chauvinist way of identifying Jewishly to an America that, mimicking Israel, is mired in a bloody, racial clash with the Arab world. Happy holidays.

A friend went to Jimmy Carter's book-signing in Pasadena the other day. 3200 books, all snapped up weeks before, then signed by an aloof former president, who did not shake hands but was flanked by two phalanxes of security. Everyone who came in was X-rayed, or wanded.

My friend tells me Carter had a focused forward expression, he was on a mission. "Do you think someone is going to try and knock him off?"

The concern reflects a couple of realities. At 82, Carter would seem to have found a spiritual model in one of the heroes of his book, Anwar Sadat, who, at Carter's urging, took on the orthodoxies in his own culture to sign a historic peace agreement, and who gave his life to do so. Carter is taking on the orthodoxies in his own culture, with the same sense of all or nothing.

The venom he is encountering on the Jewish right is staggering. Even I'm surprised. Marty Peretz has called him a Jew-hater. Shmuel Rosner, the Haaretz correspondent who not long ago rated American presidential candidates on the degree to which they ignored the Palestinian issue, with obliviousness being a positive, has branded him a likely antisemite. And in doing so, subscribed to the most parochial formulations offered by neoconservative Iraq-warrior Eliot Cohen.

When will the Jewish universalists in American life come forward? That is the great threat Carter poses to the parochial: that others will start to care. And a policy that has been commandeered by a small set of interests will at last become the business of the American people. A bestseller with the word "apartheid" in the title—we're getting closer and closer to the Elian Gonzales moment, the moment when the American people wake up and realize that a fanatical lobby is not representing America's best interest.

Again the real journalistic responsibility here is not to repeat the smears of the Rosners and Peretzes, but to examine the simple question: Is what Carter is saying of the Occupied Territories true? Having been there, I say it is.

M.J. Rosenberg has a terrific piece on TPM about his alma mater Brandeis saying that Jimmy Carter can only speak there if he's balanced by Alan Dershowitz.

It is with real pain that I note that Brandeis is yielding to what amounts to an academic boycott of a former President for criticizing Israel.... We look like mini-Joe McCarthys and we are all being hurt by this...

Israelis themselves just laugh. How is it, they ask, that they can debate Israel-Palestine with absolute freedom but we Americans are afraid to...

Invite Carter to speak. Alone. Like any other speaker. Your students can handle it. Trust me. Trust them.

The Boston Herald reports that the Dershowitz act was dreamed up by Brandeis trustee Stuart Eizenstat, a former Carter adviser, along with Brandeis Prez Jehuda Reinharz. Just like when the New York Theatre Workshop decided it could only put on Rachel Corrie's show last spring if it was suitably "contextualized," with pro-Israel voices. These paroxysms speak to the same lesson: the Israel lobby isn't a control room in Washington, it's a general climate of fear about Israel's future that clouds the minds of goodthinking liberals who are empowered—with the ability to shut off debate. Even a former president lacks standing.

But watch out. The success of Carter's book, the contract to Walt/Mearsheimer, the Corrie run at the Minetta Lane, the Iraq Study Group's hail Mary to Syria—the world is changing.

The Times mentioned Jimmy Carter twice in yesterday's paper. On the sports age, he was described as "soft-spoken, cautious, reserved, conformist, reliable" (a piece on blood types). But the other article was in Arts, and labelled him a raving lunatic. This was part of the Times' continuing series to give space to (Jewish) defenders of Israel to denounce Carter as misinformed and dotty because he dared to write a book likening the Israeli occupation to apartheid. Two days before, WINEP's David Makovsky told the Times the book is filled with errors, and he's "saddened by it."

Back when Jimmy Carter was young, they used to have literacy tests to keep black people from voting. The black person would go to the polls and have to take a literacy test in order to vote. The pollworkers would ask the black person questions like, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" When the black person couldn't answer, they couldn't vote.

The Times is enforcing the literacy test on Israel/Palestine. Jimmy Carter failed. He made too many mistakes so he can't offer his opinion. Only experts can vote, usually centrist-right Jews who have no interest in or idea what's going on in the Occupied Territories. People who are blind to an outrage, people like Ken Pollack who can't even say the word occupation. A president who negotiated a lasting peace deal between Israel and Egypt and who has visited the area countless times: he's not well-informed enough to comment.

The literacy test has worked. It's sharply narrowed the mainstream discourse on Israel/Palestine. Democratic discourse is supposed to be contentious: You get a lot of views, and everyone makes some mistakes. Big deal; it's the ideas that count. But intimidated by the literacy test, a lot of liberals won't go near this issue, people who would be shocked to see what goes on in the Occupied Territories. Tony Kushner first explained this to me months ago. Even if you're sickened by what you see on TV, you're made to feel you're an idiot and not allowed to open your mouth till you know the difference between the Anglo-American commission and the Peel report and U.N. partition and Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration and Transjordan and a ton of other historical debris. How many bubbles in a bar of soap?

It's hurt us. For many years the left had a reasonable position, Palestinian state, that was outside the firewall the Israel lobby created that limited mainstream views. Now mainstream views have finally come around, mostly, to that opinion, Palestinian state, but some on the left are moving on, saying we missed our chance. They're talking about a binational state. At NYU last week Tony Judt said Yes he believes the idea of a Jewish state is "anachronistic," when you consider that as a Jew, he is allowed to move to Israel tomorrow, but a person born in that state and speaking the Hebrew language better than any of us can is not allowed to live there. Because they're Muslim or Christian. An interesting, important idea. The mainstream won't touch it. America's loss.

Jimmy Carter's use of the word "apartheid" in the title of his new book has generated a lot of controversy—the Washington Post reporting that a Middle East scholar has angrily resigned his affiliation with the Carter Center over Carter's book. The Democratic Party has of course banished Carter over the word, and, inevitably, Dershowitz has castigated the gentlemanly old prez.

The word is obviously loaded, as it echoes the South African regime that oppressed blacks, denying them many rights. Apartheid literally means separateness; and it's worth pointing out that the Israelis themselves call their forbidding wall, which goes well east of the Green Line, sometimes encircling Palestinian villages, a "separation fence." More importantly, if you've visited the Occupied Territories, apartheid seems a fair description of the isolation and abuse the Palestinians experience, and the denial of so many rights, including the freedom to move about, the freedom to seek employment. In this interview on Youtube, you can watch Avichai Sharon of Breaking the Silence describe how as an IDF soldier he used to confiscate Palestinians' cars for minor infractions and seize their keys and never return them, simply forget about them. There was a box of keys at his headquarters; no one had bothered to give them back. Jimmy Carter and a South African church leaderI met in Hebron both say that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is in some ways "worse" than apartheid.

Apartheid is now a general term (with of course a South African shadow). According to the U.N.'s description, it means denying a subject group of different ethnicity "basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."

The journalists who are now piping the Israel lobby's objections should visit the Occupied Territories and report for themselves on the real conditions of the Palestinians.

Jimmy Carter's interviewers have repeatedly challenged him about Hamas: Why should Israel talk to Hamas when Hamas doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist? Carter answers by describing the democratic elections that brought Hamas to power.

He ought to cite the insight of his former NSA Zbig Brzezinski, who said on public television that as the Carter Administration geared up the Camp David process in '78, Israel was led by an extremist party, Likud, that refused to accept the existence of "Palestinians," let alone their right to a state. And yet the U.S. and the Egyptians talked to those extremists.

The Palestinians are not the only unreasonable people in this mess.

Last night at Columbia's school of international affairs, Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector, and former Marine, opened a speech about Iran bracingly, by speaking not of Iran but about the "elephant in the room": Israel. He said that Israel is our close ally; and if Iran actually intends to develop nuclear weapons, not nuclear power (as the Iranian Ambassador had said, in the speech preceding Ritter's), and if Iran fails to repudiate Ahmedinejad's hateful rhetoric about Israel, well then, Israel's "legitimate national security concerns" are ours, and could even bring war. After all, Ritter said, one nuclear strike on an Israeli city and the small country would be deeply and permanently damaged.

The great thing about Ritter's speech, before an ambivalent UWS audience, was its bluntness. In that sense, his rhetoric reflected an important lesson of the Iraq war (which Ritter had opposed). We all know, or we ought to by now, that concern for Israel's security played a role in America's disastrous war plans. Yet as Philip Zelikow of the 9/11 commission has said, It was an agenda that dare not speak its name. It was generally cloaked in language about bringing democracy to the Middle East that reporters who knew better parroted. This lack of straightforwardness has damaged the country. It has corrupted our journalism and our thinktanks, it has caused enormous bitterness and mistrust—and justifiably. The feeling many Americans now have that they were lied to about the causes of one of the greatest mistakes in our history is going to echo through our lives for a long time...

I think the lack of straightforwardness reflected Jewish fears of antisemitism; that if a Christian nation was actually put to the test, and the alliance with Israel actually cost American lives, the American people would abandon Israel. And so the Middle East Forum likes to put up feel-good billboards saying, Israel's interest is also the American interest, and Israeli Ambassador Arens likes to say as he did in the Times yesterday that 9/11 put us and you in the same boat, got that? But attack Saddam in part because he has threatened Israel? Friends of Israel don't like to say that. They fear that the average American would do as Borat says they would do—and throw the Jews down the well. Thus: the Israel lobby, which acts to shield the issue from open public debate.

Last night, Ritter said, We're not going to abandon "my good friend, the state of Israel," and I'm going to put that agenda right on the table. Very post-Iraq. I wanted to hug him. Such transparency is essential, when we try to sort out what we're talking about when we talk about Iran.

Of course the sequel to all this is that in identifying this interest baldly, we get to scrutinize it, everyone gets to weigh in, even Americans who are appalled by Israel's racialism and militarism. Last night Ritter said that Israel is out of control, "drunk with hubris, arrogance and power." Jimmy Carter says in a book published tomorrow that Israel's policies in the West Bank are apartheid. And John Mearsheimer says that this small country's policies are hurting our standing throughout the Arab world, and America should therefore insist that Israel change its policies, and we should use our full powers to make that happen; and if Israel fails to heed us, change the relationship. There's a word for what Ritter, Carter and Mearsheimer are doing: discussing.

As I went downtown to see the play "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" last night, I read the Forward's coverage of Jimmy Carter's much-awaited book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Forthcoming from Simon & God bless them Schuster.. The article said that supporters of Israel are most upset by the characterization in the title, apartheid. That characterization used to upset me too, as being tendentious and emotional, till I went to Hebron last summer, the second largest city in the West Bank, where Arabs cannot set foot in large portions of the city center, and met a South African church worker who had lived through apartheid and who said that the conditions of the Israeli occupation were worse than apartheid. The people in the occupied territories have lived under Israeli administration for 40 years and had two elections in that time, yet we call Israel a democracy.

This is in the end the power of Rachel Corrie's words. I know people in the theater world, and so I have heard the rap against the play in the last few months. That it is a piece of polemics, not theater, and that as theater qua theater it is not that effective, too spare and one-note.  read more »

I like this Al Gore moment, I hope it lasts a long time. (Heck, I was for him becoming President back in '99, but my former party failed me on that). Al Gore is doing a truly great thing. Wired is crazy for him. So is New York Magazine, where John Heilemann writes that the party might just be turning against Hillary ahead of time.

Al Gore is committed on global warming. As he was committed to the Internet (all joking aside; ask Wired's Chris Anderson). He is using his power and brain to serve humanity.

Which raises the question for me: How serious is/was Bill Clinton? What has he done with all his great powers? How much political capital did he ever expend on something important? How much political capital did he piss away? I'm not much on policy, but how much does Bill "Policy-Wonk" Clinton have to say for himself? Welfare reform, NAFTA. Health care! Yes he created a gazillion jobs, but wasn't that Bob Rubin and the other meritocrats he had the wisdom to select? He was a fine president on racial issues, I think; yes, he had that, still does. He oversaw the arrival of Jews into the Establishment, to his credit.

Whenever I see Clinton I miss him. He is so charming and such a good speaker. His command of political history—spectacular. But what does it add up to? What's he doing now. O.K., he is helping Harlem, and doing good work on Africa and AIDs, and he was good on the tsunami. It feels a bit obligatory. Maybe it will make up for the Sudan pharmaceutical plant he bombed (I believe to turn attention from impeachment). A year ago he praised the invasion of Iraq and called for the toppling of Syrian President Assad. Was he doing that for Hillary? There is no gathering up of political capital and spending it, except on personal ambition. I wonder what Clinton could be serious about. Teaching political history, maybe.

But compare him to Gore or Jimmy Carter. Zilch.

Is USA Today emerging as an idealistic voice? It broke the big story on wiretapping citizens. Now Jimmy Carter, once again distinguishing himself as a moral voice, says that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's plans for fences deep inside the occupied territories of the West Bank, preserving settlements, are a landgrab.

It is inconceivable that any Palestinian, Arab leader, or any objective member of the international community could accept this illegal action as a permanent solution to the continuing altercation in the Middle East. This confiscation of land is to be carried out without resorting to peace talks with the Palestinians, and in direct contravention of the "road map for peace," which President Bush helped to initiate and has strongly supported.

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Freddy's back with Bill Clinton today on Charlotte Street, where the two men stood together in December of 1997 and made the case for active government. Of course, Jimmy Carter was the one who made Charlotte street cool in the first place; the picture is from his famous 1977 visit to the ruined neighborhood.  read more »

Another one of those limp-dick, hoity-toity, bipartisan blue-ribbon panels has come through with ano  read more »

Now that the war in Iraq is over, time to consider the battles being waged inside the Kerry campaign  read more »