Heretics' almanac

Carter, Foxman, and the rhetoric

Over what's turning into a massive article in Wikipedia about Carter's trashy book, there's a raging debate over what precisely Abe Foxman thinks of Carter's bigotry and/or contribution to antisemitism. This is tied in with a lengthy NYT article on Foxman himself, titled "Does Abe Foxman have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?" All this then gets tied in with an even more annoying debate about the existence, pervasiveness, and effectiveness of an Israel/Jewish lobby.

So here goes:

Window-dressing executions

Of all the horrible things that happen in Iraq, and indeed all over the world on a daily basis, the executions of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, have caused particular outrage.

The hanging of Saddam was undignified, what with the heckling and arguments and the cell phone camera; and the accidental decapitation of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was horrifying to our sensibilities.

I really don't know where and how Western public opinion, or the press, got this idea that war and armed conflict can be made into sanitary events in which horrible things don't happen. And I'm particularly disgusted and amazed by this insistence that executions be "civilized," as if a clinical setting somehow eliminates the moral problems with capital punishment.

Trashing Aftenposten's op ed pages

Arnt Folgerø is apparently a journalist in NTB who for reasons that remain unclear appears to hate Olaf Thommesen, a prominent politician within the tiny Liberal Party in Norway. So he wrote an article that pretty much is an ad hominem attack on Thommesen. Which prompted another journalist, Carl-Erik Grimstad, to call it for what it was. Folgerø responded, saying that Thommesen should have been "politically dead" given all his transgressions, implying somehow that it was his duty to point out that Thommesen appears to be immune from his own political demise because he's handsome and has a pretty wife.

I really don't have much of a view about Thommesen, except that I'm not too impressed by his blog, (especially because anyone who gives shmuck Thomas Hylland-Eriksen a media outlet has at least questionable judgment, and I'm not too impressed by the others, either. Even my former fencing buddy and distant relative Paal Frisvold seems a little lost in his writings).

Carter and words

Jimmy Carter's book Palestine:Peace not Apartheid gets support from the usual places, but a number of well-considered critics find serious shortcomings about it at best. Dershowitz and the ADL pretty much denounce it as an error-filled polemic.

Carter won't debate the book with Dershowitz, whom he apparently considers profoundly ignorant on the subject. He's also met with a number of Jewish leaders to assure them that never mind what he writes, he really has nothing against Jews or even Israel's existence, for that matter. One quote:

Well, he [Dershowitz] has to go to the first word in the title, which is "Palestine," not Israel. He should go to the second word in the title, which is "peace." And then the last two words [are] "not apartheid." I never have alleged in the book or otherwise that Israel, as a nation, was guilty of apartheid. But there is a clear distinction between the policies within the nation of Israel and within the occupied territories that Israel controls and the oppression of the Palestinians by Israeli forces in the occupied territories is horrendous. And it's not something that has been acknowledged or even discussed in this country.

Carter has gone to some great lengths, after the book was published, to make it clear that the term "apartheid" is used in a very limited sense, namely that Israel's policy amounts to stealing land that rightly belongs to Palestinians, or at least fall within the borders of a future Palestinian state.

But who in the world would ever choose a title that required so much parsing to understand? It's like a comedian having to explain why his joke is funny. It's pathetic.