Carter Refuses to Debate Dershowitz
After going on and on about the alleged lack of debate in the United States regarding the Mideast conflict, former President Jimmy Carter is now refusing put his own ideas to the test.
According to the Associated Press:
Former President Carter has decided not to visit Brandeis University to talk about his new book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" because he does not want to debate Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz as the university had requested.That's interesting that Carter would accuse Dershowitz of knowing "nothing about the situation in Palestine" when he himself seems to know nothing of the true history of the region. Instead, he simply repeats the same false talking points that have been promulgated through years of anti-Israel propaganda.
"I don't want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz," Carter told The Boston Globe. "There is no need ... for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine."
David Horowitz sets Carter and the real history of the Mideast straight in his latest column at Frontpagemag.com:
It is a lie that Palestinians “had their own land, first of all, occupied.” This is like saying that Texans had their own land occupied by Hispanics, ignoring the fact that Hispanics were there first. The very word Palestine is a Roman appellation for the people called Philistines, who were not Arabs but red-haired sailors from the Aegean. The Jews were there as well.Read the entire article. And pass it on to the legions of Israel's critics who know not of what they speak.
In short, first of all the Jews were in the land before the Arabs.
Second of all, the Arabs who inhabited the Palestine Mandate in 1948, at the time of the creation the state of Israel, considered themselves Syrians.
Third, the Palestine Mandate was not created on land taken from the Syrians or the Arabs. It was taken from the Turks.
It was not taken from the Turks by the Jews, but by the British and the French. They took it because Turkey sided with Germany in the First World War and, of course, lost. The Turkish empire had ruled the entire region including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan for four hundred years before Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan were artificially created by the English and the French. Jordan – a state whose majority is Palestinian – occupies 80% of the Palestine Mandate. So it is a preposterous lie to say that the Palestinians had their own land and that it was occupied by the Jews.
Fourth, the individual plots of land that Jews now own were in the first instance bought from the Arabs who regarded themselves as Syrians and who lived in the area of Israel. The only property that was confiscated was confiscated as a spoil of the aggressive war that five Arab states waged against Israel from the day of its birth. Five Arab armies invaded Israel, a sovereign state, with the declared intent of “pushing the Jews into the sea.” The cry today of the Muslim majority in the Middle East is to “liberate Palestine from the river to the sea.” In other words push the Jews into the sea.
By the standards of occupation and legitimacy Jimmy Carter invokes, Israel has more legitimacy as a Jewish state than Texas does as an American state, rather than a Mexican province.
Cross-posted at Kesher Talk.