Tuesday was a bad day for Israel.
Tom DeLay explained to "The Hill" his reasons for starting his own Blog:
In making my decision it became very clear to me that what I should be doing is to advance the conservative cause and to support Israel,” he said.
Also on Tuesday President Jimmy Carter "made a hastily arranged visit: an hourlong gathering with a group of rabbis," according to today's New York Times. It's not bad that he met with the rabbis - it's bad that he had to in order to temper the "full-scale furor" and accusations of anti-semitism which his writing a book crtical of Israel caused.
Israel owes it's very existence to international and especially American support. It's illegal occupation of land, and it's inability to make peace with the Palestinians, has greatly undermined the backing it once had internationally.
Spending time in bed with corrupt fundamentalists like Tom DeLay, Ralph Reid and Jack Abramoff does not make Israel an attractive mate to most Americans. Neo-Cons like Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith, who are advisors to Likud as well as to the Bush administration, misleading us into war will not help Israel in the eyes of most Americans.
Although condemning critics of Israel as anti-Semites has worked for quite a while, it will not work forever. Just like those on the right who questioned the patriotism of those Americans who opposed the war eventually lost all credibility, so too will Israel lose when every critic of Israel has his basic decency called into question.
Abraham Foxman is quoted as saying that the title of Carter's book (Palestine Peace Not Apartheid) "is to deligitimize Israel, because if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn't really deserve to be a democratic state. He's provoking, he's outrageous, and he's bigoted." Carter actually said that the word apartheid could well be applied to the 'separate but equal' years of segregation in the U.S. At no point does Carter say that the U.S. or South Africa is not a legitimate democratic state - if Israel no longer wants the word apartheid applied to it, then it can do what the U.S. and South Africa did - change its practices.
Apparently Foxman is most outraged at "The reason he [Carter] gives for why he wrote this book is this shameless, shameless canard that the Jews control the debate in this country." What most upsets Foxman is that people are questioning the scope of Israel's influence, and he calls those questioners bigots.
Americans are used to questioning the amount of influence that groups like the National Rifle Association, the American Association of Retired People and the American Federation of Teachers, have on our government. We're entitled to also question the extent of The Ameican Israel Public Affairs Committee's influence on us, and we don't like being called a bigot when we do.
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