By Kurt Nimmo
"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....."
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