Kurt
Nimmo
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Novelist Jack Engelhard, minus a firm grip on reality, absurdly
lambastes former president Jimmy Carter as the author of a modern
day version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Engelhard
is whirled into a tizzy by Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not
Apartheid published recently by Simon & Schuster, not exactly
the publishing wing of Hamas.
“Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian
land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace
agreement in the Holy Land,” writes Carter.
For Englehard, however, telling this simple and undeniable truth
is akin to “Holocaust Part 2,” and is downright biblical,
as in the Old Testament part of the Bible. “Historians tell
us that Pharaoh was the first to stir up the multitudes against
the Jews, and we have it from Scripture that a new Pharaoh will
arise to torment us from generation to generation.” Carter,
according to Englehard, is this “new Pharaoh,” arrived
to persecute the Jews, never mind the colonization Carter writes
about is an established and verifiable fact, one systematically
ignored by Englehard.
Instead of reading Carter’s book “chapter and verse,”
Mr. Engelhard relies on the pro-torture advocate, Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz. “Dershowitz, to find point-by-point
where Carter turns history on its head, truth inside out. That’s
where we find exactly how Carter casts five and half million Israelis
as villains against 300 million peace-loving Arabs,” the
novelist writes.
But then, of course, novelists specialize in fiction.
Carter has not cast five million Israelis against “300
million peace-loving Arabs,” a sarcastic enough portrayal—in
fact, racist, as it appears Engelhard believes most of these Arabs
are anything but “peace-loving” and are instead stubbornly
determined to kill the Jews, or at least push them into the sea,
a common enough Zionist myth, for some reason usually accepted
with little challenge, at least here in America. No, in his book,
and on C-Span and elsewhere, Carter asserts a rudimentary and
irrefutable fact: Israel is an apartheid state (although the term
apartheid is less than sufficient) and so long as it remains so
there will not be peace in the “Holy Land,” or for
that matter anywhere else in the Middle East.
“Carter embraces Hamas, which openly calls for the destruction
of Israel, and Carter reminds us that the Israelis never want
peace, never make concessions,” the fictionist continues.
“The fact that Israel gave up the Sinai and more recently
gave up Gaza—well, all that makes no difference once you’ve
got your mind made up and your heart is brimming with hostility,
hatred and bigotry.”
Not exactly. Carter simply pointed out yet another fact: Israel
(and the United States) refuse to talk to Hamas and its leaders,
despite the fact that Hamas won the January, 2006, elections.
Instead, Israel abducted the leaders of this duly elected government
and attacked the office of the Palestinian prime minister, Ismael
Haniyeh. But then, I suppose, this is better than killing them
outright, as Israel did to the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi
in Gaza a couple years ago.
Talk about hearts “brimming with hostility, hatred and
bigotry.” In Engelhard’s beloved Israel Palestinian
children are “shot to death sitting in school classrooms
… families murdered while tilling their land there; agricultural
land stripped and burned here, farmers cut off from their land
there; little girls riddled with bullets here, infants beheaded
by shell fire there; a little massacre here, a little starvation
there; expulsion here, denial of entry and families torn apart
there; dispossession is the name of the game,” as Bill and
Kathleen Christison characterize the consistent and sadly all
too predictable behavior of the “only democracy in the Middle
East,” yet another racist abstraction that nauseatingly
assumes all Arabs are incapable of equality of rights and privileges
and instead favor dictators and the boot heel.
Ask Uri Avnery, Israeli peace activist and Knesset member, about
the so-called Gaza “Disengagement Plan” cooked up
by the Likudites.
“From the start, the ‘Disengagement Plan’ was
an exercise in deceit…. The main aim of the exercise is
to satisfy George Bush…. Bush demanded that Sharon come
up with a plan. No problem. Hocus pocus, here is a plan, with
a fine promising name: ‘Disengagement.’ Speeches,
meetings, a visit to the White House, exchanges of documents,
state visits, emissaries, Mubarrak, Abdallah, disputes, compromises,
and finally even a full-blown cabinet crisis. All this for a balloon
full of hot air…. It has no basis in reality. All in all,
it is a recipe for the continuation of the war in another form.”
Some disengagement, write Shamai K. Leibowitz and Katerina Heller.
The “Unilateral Disengagement Plan” is nothing more
or less than “than a tactical military redeployment of Israel’s
Occupation Forces. This is evident from Israel’s decision
to retain military control over the would-be evacuated areas in
the West Bank and control over airspace, coastline and border
crossings of the Gaza Strip, as well as Israel’s decision
to continue with the building of the West Bank Wall deep inside
the West Bank…. Effectively, the Disengagement Plan will
turn Gaza into the world’s largest open-air prison with
1.3 million Palestinian inmates. The result will be a continuation,
if not an increase, of the bloodshed and violence.”
Jack Engelhard should stick to writing novels, as he has a tough
time with the facts.
“Along the TV and speaking circuits, Carter seldom misses
a chance to inventory his grievances against the Jewish State
and to promote his Mein Kampf, his struggle to enlist the rest
of us in joining his campaign to blow down the single house the
Jews built to spare themselves further pogroms and genocides,”
he writes.
Carter’s book, of course, is not Mein Kampf, as he does
not elevate the Arabs to Übermensch status or declare the
need for Lebensraum.
However, there are more than a few Israelis, especially of the
rabid settler type, who believe in Lebensraum, German for “habitat”
or “living space,” and will not be satisfied until
every last bit of Arab land is stolen, every last olive grove
flattened, every last well poisoned, and every last Palestinian
becomes a victim of the Diaspora, or Nakba, the Cataclysm.
It should be noted that the Nazis gleaned the idea of Lebensraum
from the British and French, who used Darwin’s natural selection
as a way to cull unwanted people in far-flung colonies. Israel’s
Lebensraum is not implemented in Nazi blitzkrieg fashion, but
rather slowly, over decades, with the hope most of us will not
notice, although there are currently 6 million Palestinian refugees
scattered around the world.
Of course, no excoriation, no disingenuous flaying is complete
without hitching Carter’s wagon to that of the late “terrorist”
Yasser Arafat. “For some time, word circulated about a certain
ex-president who actually helped Yasser Arafat write his speeches
in order to polish that mass murderer into a more presentable
figure for the American people,” the story teller writes.
“Americans couldn’t stomach Arafat’s own kampf
to ‘drive the Jews into the sea,’ so Jimmy Carter,
it was said, changed that—only the words, not the intent—to,
‘We want peace.’”
Naturally, Arafat never said he wanted to drive the Jews into
the sea, but never mind. In fact, Arafat was the best fall guy
Zionists such as Engelhard ever had to kick around, as his corruption
and the mismanagement of the PLO and Fatah led directly to the
election of Hamas, the only other viable alternative. For the
land-grabbing and Arab-hating Jabotinsky Zionists, this was a
situation made in heaven, as they will never negotiate with a
militant Islamic organization, democratically elected or otherwise.
Israel nurtured Hamas precisely to break Palestinian nationalism
and paint the Palestinian people as intractable Islamic fanatics,
never to be trusted or negotiated with. It is a strategy that
has worked swimmingly.
“Many of us found that hard to believe about an ex-president
‘who builds homes,’ and it is still difficult to prove,
but now, with this book, we can believe anything. The unintended
subliminal message from the pages of this updated Mein Kampf is
that, with people like Jimmy Carter on the prowl, the need for
a strong Israel, supported by righteous Jews and true Christians,
is more urgent than ever.”
And this is of course worse than Israelis who do the exact opposite
of building homes, flattening them—and peace activists—with
huge American-made, armored bulldozers.
Engelhard is apparently incapable of understanding the obvious—continued
intransigence, racism, fanaticism on the part of the Israeli state,
with the help of self-righteous and selfish “Christians”
(read: evangelical, dispensational zealots) will eventually deliver
Israel to the same fate suffered by all colonialist states: ever
increasing rates of violence, social upheaval and mass emigration,
as few want to live in a police state perpetually and increasingly
at war with not only its numerically superior neighbors but its
own people.
Predictably, Mr. Engelhard rounds out his article by calling
Jimmy Carter an antisemite. Fortunately, this malicious misrepresentation
no longer works, although no shortage of Israel Firsters try as
they may to make it stick. Instead, when a Jewish novelist, or
a over-inflated torture apologist masquerading as a law professor,
throws the term around, there is a good chance the person on the
other end of the abuse is on to something.
Finally, although Jimmy Carter is right about Israel and the
Palestinians, this in no way excuses his past actions. Carter
not only had the CIA hire Argentinian death squads to train thugs
in Honduras—the guys who eventually went by the name Contras—and
go after the Sandinistas (net result: 30,000 dead Nicaraguans)
, he is also responsible for kicking off the destabilization of
Afghanistan through funding and training the Mujahideen prior
to the Soviet invasion in late 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s
national security advisor, was instrumental in this effort, eventually
resulting in the transmogrification today known as al-Qaeda or
more accurately al-CIA-duh.
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