The Cap’n informed me today that former President Jimmy Carter is planning to visit the nearby settlement of Neveh Daniel. Why? “To get the settlers’ side of the story.”
I don’t normally post on Fridays. And I don’t normally get into too big a lather over what a doddery old has-been does in his spare time. But something about this planned visit from one of Israel’s most outspoken critics (that’s putting it mildly, of course) got to me. I was thinking today, as the Cap’n, Bill and I returned from doing our Shabbat shopping in Jerusalem, about what the world has come to for the Jews. Efratniks used to shop regularly in Bethlehem, in Arab stores. I kid you not. The road to Efrat used to go right through downtown Jesusville. Then it got unsafe to do that, and the Jews stopped shopping there. Then they had to stop driving through. Then the bypass road (the “tunnel road”) was built so Jews could get from their homes to the city without having rocks thrown at them. Then the concrete baffles, stone wall, and watch towers were built to protect Jewish motorists from being shot like clay pigeons while traveling to and from Jerusalem.
Israel was once the darling of the media. It was the Little Engine That Could, then it was the David fighting the Goliath of the Arab League. But then it was a little too successful. It could afford state-of-the-art weapons. It had a citizens’ army that beat its neighbors’ regulars every time. It (gulp!) conquered land in a defensive war and was suddenly left with some glorious national treasures, and a large population of now-stateless Arabs whom no other Arab state wanted besides. The world has never liked the Jews, and while in some times and places Jews have enjoyed lives blessed with tolerance at least and downright popularity at best, the pendulum seems always to swing from one extreme to another. Some Jews have decided that the best way to win the war for our right to exist as a people is to assimilate, and have done so pretty successfully. (Over 50% of American Jews under the age of 35 say that the annihilation of Israel—not its quiet withering on the vine—would not be a personal tragedy. Think on that for a while.) Others don’t see a problem, and think anti-Semitism is a thing of the past. And others, like me, are sick to death of fighting one ridiculous fight after another for our right to breathe and be Jews, but don’t see any alternative.
So when the Cap’n told me that Israel’s (American) Public Enemy #1 was planning to visit the very people he recently vilified in print as racist, empirialist murderers, land-grabbers, and road-hogs, I reacted. More specifically, I began by hyperventilating. Then I asked when he planned to arrive so I could lie in wait and be the FIRST to kick his sorry ol’ cracker ass when he arrived. Then, and only then, I went to my computer to get the facts. Here they are, provided by Nadia Matar, co-chair of Women in Green and a neighbor of ours in Efrat. Whatever inflammatory stuff people say about her, or that she has said in the past, this is a clear, rational, well-deserved denunciation of Carter. While I’m sorrier than I can say at telling a Nobel Peace Prize winner (2002) where to go, Carter is not the Nobel Committee’s first ill-advised choice of peacemaker. (Remember 1994?) At least I have the cold comfort of living in a part of the world where Jews can act in their own best interests and say what they think.
“Dear Neighbors,
“Former President Jimmy Carter will be visiting Neve Daniel this Sunday, June 14th. He is coming for the ostensible purpose of ‘hearing our point of view,’ but of course his real agenda is to kick us out of our homes.
“Because of Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid as well as his past record of hostility towards Israel, he has a hard time presenting himself as an honest broker. Here’s where we come in: by coming here and talking with us, we will enable him to present himself as willing and eager to listen to both sides, and thus regain some credibility.
“We don’t think we should accord him good publicity and the opportunity to rehabilitate himself so cheaply. He doesn’t need to visit us to learn our perspective: he’s a brilliant and wily man who knows plenty. Seeing as the likes of Menachem Begin, Bibi Netanyahu, and the rest of Israel’s elder statesmen and most articulate advocates never succeeded in impressing him with any sympathy for Israel’s plight over the past 30 years, it’s pretty ridiculous to assume that a visit here will change anything.
“Anti-Semitism is becoming more and more acceptable in America as well as everywhere else in the world, and American Jews are reacting with timidity and silence. We here in Israel must call Jimmy Carter what he really is: no honest broker but a powerful advocate of those who are trying to destroy us.
“Please sign a petition telling Carter that he isn’t welcome here by clicking on this link.
“Help spread the word: we have only two days.
“The text of the petition is attached below. …
“Sincerely,
“The Neve Daniel, Efrat, and Gush Etzion Action Committees”
Petition
Thursday, June 10, 2009
JIMMY CARTER GO HOME
ANTI-SEMITES CAN’T BE HONEST BROKERS
We, the residents of Neve Daniel and Gush Etzion, have just learned that former president Jimmy Carter will be paying a visit to our community and to our area on Sunday, June 14th.
We wish to inform Mr. Carter that he is not welcome here and we request that he cancel his visit.
Mr. Carter would like to present himself as an honest broker pursuing peace, but he has exposed himself as an anti-Semite who has slandered and harmed Israel and the Jewish People at every turn. His book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is full of lies and libels, and the Carter Center and Mr. Carter’s endeavors are funded generously by Arab money.
While we are always ready to talk with those who disagree with us, Mr. Carter doesn’t fall into that category. Mr. Carter is an advocate for those seeking to destroy Israel, and the fact that he contributes to that agenda under the guise of a man of good will seeking peace only makes him more dangerous and his efforts more dishonest.
Mr. Carter will no doubt continue to smear and slander us, calling us usurpers and occupiers on our own land. But we wish to inform him and those that think like him that the Bible records our history here as well as certain promises: the promise that the land would lie desolate during our exile and that we would return here and once again make it flower. God is our witness and so is history to those promises’ fulfillment. And now that we’re here, we’re not leaving. We won’t allow Mr. Carter or anyone else to throw us out of our homes and exile us from our land.
At a time when anti-Semitism is becoming increasingly acceptable in America, we appeal to all Americans of good will: don’t legitimize the genteel anti-Semitism of men like Jimmy Carter.
Sincerely,
the undersigned
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The following is an excerpt from an article entitled, “Jimmy Carter: Jew-Hater, Genocide-Enabler, Liar” by David Horowitz, published on FrontPageMagazine.com (Thursday, December 14, 2006).
“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.
“Here is Carter’s description of the Middle East conflict in his own words, delivered during an interview he gave on National Public Radio during the second day of the Holocaust deniers’ conference in Teheran:
“‘I have spent a lot of time in Palestine in recent years. … The Palestinians have had their own land, first of all, occupied and then confiscated and then colonized. 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.’
“When hundreds of millions of Muslims are calling for the extermination of the Jews of Israel this is more than a lie; it is a blood libel. …”
For more on Carter and his cozy relations with Arabs, see “Carter and Arab money, Carter and Israel” by Alan Dershowitz.
Shimshonit 
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