[Salon] IT IS TIME FOR THOSE WHO SLANDERED JIMMMY CARTER AS AN “ANTISEMITE” TO APOLOGIZE - Guest Post by Allan Brownfeld

IT IS TIME FOR THOSE WHO SLANDERED JIMMMY CARTER AS AN “ANTISEMITE” TO APOLOGIZE —————————————————————————————————————— As we prepare for the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, it would be appropriate for those who slandered him as an “antisemite” to apologize. Despite the fact that Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Camp David Accords, which brought peace between Israel and Egypt, when in 2006 he wrote the book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” which became a New York Times best-seller, he was assaulted as an “antisemite” by Israeli supporters. Abe Foxman, then director of the Anti-Defamation League, called Carter “a bigot.” Pro-Israel pressure groups placed ads in the New York Times accusing Carter of “facilitating Israel’s annihilation.” Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, declared that, “Carter will go down in history as a Jew-hater.” Deborah Lipstadt, then a professor at Emory University and now the Biden administration’s diplomat in charge of monitoring and fighting antisemitism, compared Carter to Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in a Washington Post book review. Several months after the book’s publication, in response to such personal attacks, Carter told The Observer, “The word (apartheid) is the most accurate available to describe Palestine. Apartheid is when two different people live on the same land, and they are forcibly segregated and one dominates or persecutes the other. That’s what’s happening in Palestine. So the word is very, very accurate. It’s used widely and every day in Israel.” Since then, Israel has been accused of practicing apartheid in the occupied West Bank by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Peter Beinart, a professor at the City University of New York and an editor of Jewish Currents, declares that, “I think that what Carter was saying in 2006 was really ahead of its time and that Carter was not just right but was showing a very unusual form of political courage.” In Beinart’s view, “those who attacked and slandered Jimmy Carter” should apologize. Sadly, many in the organized pro-Israel community frequently use the charge of “antisemitism” to silence critics, even Jewish critics, whose number is growing dramatically. Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor of ISSUES, The quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism (www.acjna.org)