Carter's anti-Israel Book: Act three

I was hoping to have heard the last of the whole fiasco whereby a former American President places his presidential infallible respectability at the services of one side in a complicated conflict. Moreover, delivering those services with a book full of distortions, false claims, omission of historical records, as well as punctuated with sanctimonious pontification.

Carter's response to the vehement criticism leveled against his book from authoritative sources whose opinions should matter to an author seeking to promote truth and peace, was to conjure up a Jewish cabal of silencing. While I could give him the benefit of a doubt with regards to his motivation in writing this book, I fear this knee jerk response, so typical of certain, very repulsive, segments of the American public, exposes him for what he is:

When Colmes began the interview asking “is Jimmy
Carter anti-Semitic,” Berman coolly responded:

No, I wouldn't go that far. But what he has done,
Alan, is he's abandoned his traditional position of honest broker and mediator
in favor he's embraced the position of an advocate, a singular advocate for one
side. We can't abide by that. In good conscience, we resigned, and actually,
it's 15 of us now that have resigned.

I believe Berman is being politically correct here, in the true sense of the word. He deflects the question from being about Carter the man to the book he wrote. (Thank you, NWO)

Well, I think that much as people are trying to avoid this conclusion, it's getting to be like the elephant in the room.

But never mind that now.

Asia Times columinist Spengler analyses and explains the book in terms of Carter's fatal flaw, which is lack of understanding:

What is happening to the Palestinians is horrifying, by
which I mean not simply unpleasant, but subversive of identity, in the sense of
Sigmund Freud's das Unheimliche. It is not nearly as horrifying as what will
happen next, however. Carter could not bring himself to confront Soviet
aggression during the 1970s for the same reason that he cannot abide the
predicament of the Palestinians. As he looked down the river to the end of the
journey, the former president muttered, "The horror! The horror!" By deluding
himself that the Palestinian predicament is something else than it really is,
Carter attempts to keep the horror away.

Where the Palestinians are concerned, Carter keens the same
trope. It is repulsive to think that a people of several millions, honeycombed
with representatives of international organizations, the virtual stepchild of
the United Nations, appears doomed to reduce its national fever by letting
blood. The 700,000 refugees of 1948, hothoused by the UN relief agencies,
prevented from emigrating by other Arab regimes, have turned into a people, but
a test-tube nation incapable of independent national life: four destitute
millions of third-generation refugees in the small and barren territories of
Gaza, Judea and Samaria, which cannot support a fraction of that number.

Comment:

I've written about the need to pity the Palestinians, because their entire being was warped by the most cruel mind games their leaders and prophets played upon their collective psyche. I think Spengler intuits the same type of pathology.

Here is a metaphor that Carter's religious heart would like: The Palestinians are like the unfortunate Isaac, whose father willingly tied him to the altar, in order to sacrifice him to (what he thought was) an implacable God who would make such ungodly demands upon him.

But this is where the usefulness of the metaphor ends. For where Abraham, the rich and strong chieftain, was prevented, forcibly, from executing his son, and thus ushered in an era of civility and rejection of gratuitous human sacrifice, Palestinians are being fed repeatedly to a hungry, unappeasable God by their own father, the Arab Ummah.

While Abraham accepted his son's redemption joyfully, Arab nations are hard at work nailing Palestinians unto the altar they had created for them.

Will the Palestinians ever come to realize the perversion of their national condition?