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Friday, January 12, 2007
Carter aside, Israel deserves total support
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At some point, the names matter. And so, too, do their words.
Whenever another person long invested in the passions of Jimmy Carter feels so betrayed by the assertions in his latest book that they divorce themselves from his legacy work, the rest of us should surely take notice.
When they, loyalists such as former Ambassador William B. Schwartz Jr., scholars such as Kenneth Stein and Melvin Konner, public people never given to impetuousness, such as former state Rep. Cathey Steinberg and former DeKalb CEO Liane Levetan, when they — and others whose contributions to the betterment of this state and nation are renown — walk away from the most important figure most of them will ever know, the world should take notice. And ask why.
In their farewell, the language is of a pained, bewildered soul forced to consider that they had misread, misjudged or been betrayed by a beloved and trusted friend. “I love Jimmy Carter and I’ve always loved Jimmy Carter,” said Barbara Babbit Kaufman, one of the 14 who resigned last week as members of the Carter Center’s board of councilors, along with Schwartz, Steinberg, Levetan and others. “But this is not the Jimmy Carter that I’ve always known and loved.” she said.
Konner, the Samuel Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory and the author of “Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews,” wrote as much in a powerful AJC op-ed just before Christmas. “Carter has changed,” wrote Konner. “Something has happened to his judgment. I don’t understand what it is, but I know it is very dangerous.” He wrote too:
“[Carter] has become a spokesman for the enemies of my people. He has become an apologist for terrorists.”
Stein, a Middle East expert and the first executive director of the Carter Center, parted company expressing similar views and distress.
In each case, their actions are minimized or discounted: The 14 are among a 200-member advisory board; the 21-member board of trustees is the important one. But the names and the language chosen by careful and precise scholars and people whose lives reflect soundness, judgment and balance reflect a concern the rest of us should share that Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid” chooses sides with harmful and lasting consequence.
It’s a legitimate worry. This is not a tempest-in-a-teapot, a spat or a quarrel among friends.
The matter of Israel’s survival and this country’s relationship with it is much too consequential to discuss in the normal language of political debate. But I do sense a growing willingness, on the left especially, to regard Israel as the villain and America as the enabler.
As the war in Iraq has grown more unpopular in this country, there’s an eagerness to make peace, or at least the illusion of peace, so that we can get out. If we leave in defeat, the entire world knows we won’t go back, even in defense of Israel, for at least the time it took to recover from Vietnam.
For me this is not a time to be equivocal, either about Iraq, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas or our commitments to friends who believe in our word.
Israel’s right to exist has never been affirmed by its enemies. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vows to see it destroyed. Palestinians chose a terrorist organization, Hamas, in parliamentary elections a year ago. Syria arms Hezbollah, which seeks to destroy Israel, as Syria would directly if it could.
For my part, there can be no “balance” in U.S. policy in the region. Retreating from Gaza in the summer of 2005, Israel did something this country would never have done, sending 25,000 soldiers to haul 8,500 of its citizens from their abodes, sacrificing their homes and land to the prospect of peace. What did they get in return? A rain of missiles.
With that example, with Hezbollah and Hamas, and a frighteningly dangerous leader in Iran who is no more than five years away from nuclear weaponry — sworn enemies all — you’ll not find a word here that undermines support in this country for Israel. That was surely not Carter’s intentions, but I fear it will be a consequence.
We have one permanent friend in the region and that is Israel.
When longtime Carter supporters speak out, as Stein and Konner and board members who resigned last week did, the rest of us should listen.
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Ethanol cost, call girl case, airline bid
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• If you can eat it, you can’t afford to put it in a gas tank — starting with corn, the price of which is beginning to affect pork, beef, chicken — and soft drinks, among other food items. Soft drink prices are expected to rise 4 percent, in part because of corn sugar prices. So with ethanol, we pay at the grocery store — and with our tax dollars.
• “Pay-go,” one of U.S. House Democrats’ first 100-hour agenda items, is another of the cynicism-breeding games that politicians play. It gives them cover not to extend President Bush’s tax cuts, but that’s about it. “The big money, as we know, is in entitlements,” noted U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). “Pay-go completely ignores this.”
• Before global warming, you never heard of bullets that were fired into the sky falling and hitting people, as happened in Mableton, or of an Atlanta woman saved by her bra from harm caused by a .45 fired into the air on New Year’s Eve. You never heard, either, of meteorites crashing through roofs, as one did in Freehold Township, N.J. Coincidence? Hardly. Before mankind came along, we didn’t have these environmental occurrences.
• Fulton County commissioners find themselves with excess collections of $90 million. What to do? “We are going to do a little bit of everything,” said Commissioner Bill Edwards. “I’m happy, man. The money’s there. It’s just a matter of what we spend it on.” And we wonder why Milton County beckons.
• The report that a Gwinnett County call girl operation that charged $10,000 kept good records certainly doesn’t alarm any of the johns I might know. And don’t put me on a jury where I’m asked to convict one whose indictment is based on a name somebody wrote in a book. I think we arrest them because we want to see pictures of men allegedly who would /could pay $10,000.
• A telling and ominous sentence in a tally of Pelosi Democrats’ first 100 hours: “The Democrats advanced the bill without even a bare-bones accounting of the estimated cost, which is likely to be in the billions.” The funding, we’re told, will be addressed later. The bill commits to inspecting all cargo on all U.S.-bound ships and all passenger planes. This country could go broke buying a false sense of security.
• The jaywalking British historian, who sounds perfectly obnoxious, invites attention to the rent-a-cop business. Private security couldn’t have compelled the professor to produce ID, cross the street elsewhere or escalate his apparent obnoxiousness into a crime — without summoning a disinterested party, a police officer. Is the cop here a city agent or a hotel agent? I say hotel. And, by the way, no private security company can compete for jobs with a public official with arrest powers.
• Code Red, high alert: Next the poets descend on Atlanta.
• Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle is a smart guy to hire former state Sen. Terrell Starr of Jonesboro, a Democrat, as senior adviser. Starr, who stepped down last year after 38 years in the Senate, was trusted and respected by colleagues on both sides of the aisle, no matter the rancor of partisan debate.
• Bush message to Syria and Iran: A day of reckoning will come if they continue to feed terrorism in Iraq. They might be tempted to change — if they believed that Bush, and somebody like him, would occupy the White House for the next decade.
• Uh, oh. This latest US Airways bid — up 20 percent — should be of serious concern to the hometown company. Money will talk.
• Allowing an advocacy group to determine how many people it represents — in this case, the National Alliance to End Homelessness — is about like asking the secondhand smoke crowd how many people it’s killed. It’s pick a number. In the first case, the alliance puts the number at 744,000. The advocacy group’s spokesman blamed lack of affordable housing. That, yes, and drugs, mental illness, alcoholism, laziness, poor life choices and a host of other reasons.
• Go Fish Georgia, the governor’s new $19 million initiative to lure fishing enthusiasts and their tournaments, will likely not resonate in parts of metro Atlanta. But then neither did NASCAR, until we heard about the crowds and decided a museum was worth $100 million or so in mostly public money. And then lost to a fatter cat.
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