Gstaad

A London friend has sent me a book whose subject caused a few faint complaints in the beginning but has now escalated to a full-scale furore, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Racist and anti-Semitic have been the operative words used by outraged pundits to describe it, while people such as the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and the director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman have gone overboard in calling the 39th President of the good old USA not only an anti-Semite but a Christian madman and a pawn of the Arabs.

Let’s take it from the top. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian causes and is as anti-Semitic as David Ben-Gurion. He was a weak president but always a man of integrity. His book clearly states that the blame for obstacles to a just peace is shared by Israelis, Palestinian and American leaders. He also states that the Israelis are attempting to gain land illegally in the occupied territories, just as some leaders advocate violence and are refusing to accept Israel’s right to exist. So far so good.

What has caused this furious backlash is that Carter also points out that the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington has stifled debate, and that the Israelis are guilty of human rights abuses in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Talk about shooting the messenger. Is there anyone except the usual suspects who can deny that the editorial pages of American newspapers rarely present anything but pro-Israeli viewpoints? Carter could have used another title, as he himself acknowledges, but he stuck to the ‘apartheid’ word in order to make a point. The apartheid followed by Israel at present, in which Israelis are dominant and Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights, is a milder version of the one used by white South Africans who oppressed blacks.

Most Europeans will welcome Carter’s view of what has been going on in the occupied territories since 1967. But not Americans. The Anti-Defamation League has been running ads in major newspapers defaming Carter, and pundits like Michael Kinsley have gone ballistic over the ‘loaded word’, as he called apartheid. But a forced separation of two people in the same territory with one group dominating the other is apartheid in my book, and to hell with those who will call the poor little Greek boy a racist and an anti-Semite. I’ve been called these names before, and they have yet to break any of my bones. But Jimmy has been getting worse flak than I ever did. ‘Holocaust denier’, a ‘patron of former concentration-camp killers’, a ‘Christian madman’, a ‘man who condones mass murder of Israeli Jews’ are some of the grenades lobbed Jimmy’s way by the likes of those who would rather shut one up than debate the issues in DC. Namely, the Israeli lobby.

The trouble with Foxman, Dershowitz and their ilk is that they’ve cried wolf once too often. They doth protest too much over the slightest criticism of a country which has a hell of a lot to be criticised about, and whose most respected newspaper, Haaretz, has long pointed out the brutalities perpetrated on the Palestinians by Zionists of the old school of Begin, Shamir and Netanyahu. Let’s face it, a vocal Palestinian viewpoint is nonexistent in America, but Foxman is outraged by any suggestion that this might be the case. ‘The reason he [Carter] gives for why he wrote the book is this shameless canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media.’ Well, yes, Foxman old boy, that was the point of the book, and that’s why you’ve gone bananas over it. The Jewish lobby in America has stifled debate, and if one refuses to admit it there is no point me banging on about it.

Read the book and make up your own mind, says the Greek sage. Which brings me to the European apartheid practised by our Muslim cousins (distant cousins, I might add), aided and abetted by our own politicians and media. Channel 4’s courageous exposure of what extremists preach within the walls of Britain’s leading mosques had as much coverage as Taki’s win of the Sudan Open in 1959 did. Channel 4 managed to film mad mullahs preaching against Kuffars (that’s us) and calling for a holy war against us, yet none of the busybodies who pounce on anything they deem offensive to Muslims have raised a finger. No politician has stood up and demanded the arrest of these hate-mongers, and none of the police seems perturbed in the least. Where are all these watchdogs now that we need them? Don’t European Christians have any rights left? Can you imagine the reaction if a Christian church allowed a priest to say such things in, say, Saudi Arabia? Well, not really as there are no churches allowed in Saudi Arabia.

Not to worry. We have David Cameron who will save us once these Scots go back up north. Well, the poor little Greek boy is not going to wait for his rescue. I am Ukip all the way, and hope all the rest of you Kuffars back the only party which might save a little bit of Britain the way we knew her to be.

Spectator, February 3, 2007