Well, it’s fine to see someone honestly ask the question.
It’s standard SDMB boilerplate partisanship to see the glib bullshit fly so quickly after an honest question. Ah well.
As, I’d hope, might be obvious, Israel has, long ago, said that the Palestinians may have a “genuine grievance” (here I thought it was more than 40 years of negotiation that showed that Israel accepted that fact. Jayjay obviously has inside info). Likewise, the idea that settling land whose ownership is, at best, disputed and at ‘worst’ shown to be state-land, as codified under Ottoman law is “colonialist” is just a bit of newspeak designed to obfuscate. Nor, it’s worth noting, was Carter’s smear limited to or predicated on Israel recognizing that the PA had a negotiating position or that they should stop building settlements. I’m not sure if spoke actually knows what the book was about other than ‘Israel bad’, but apparantly it meets with his approval.
~sigh~
No… see, the problem with Carter isn’t that Israel is just a big bad meany (or overfull of Ultra Chuztpah). The problem (and, funny, Carter’s supporters here haven’t mentioned his pattern of habitually lying in order to advance his partisan politics). The problem with Carter, in a nutshell, is that he’s a vile liar. I mean, when he starts lying, he evidently finds it hard to stop.
Now, most folks who’ll enter threads like this on the SDMB probably don’t care about all that. You’re lucky if some of 'em can remember if Iran is a brutal and repressive theocracy or a thriving civil society. In short, with one single book, Carter uttered dozens of lies, half-truths and/or “mistakes”. His agenda is one that has, as its goal, the stripping of any significant or substantial Israeli ability to interdict or strike at its enemies.
More to the point, and in a broader context as I pointed out above, visiting Hamas and then wanting to talk to Jews/Israelis is a bit like hanging out with the Grand Wizard of the KKK and then wanting to chill with the cast of Roots. People who aren’t wilfully ignorant understand that point, that being friendly with violent racists probably doesn’t seem warm and fluffy to the perennial targets of those racists. But hey, again, you asked your question on the Dope, a place where “I just support Hamas, an organization explicitly racist and dedicated to genocide against the Jews… how could anybody think I’m an anti-semite?”
Ahem.
So put just the recent history together: Carter is a liar, with an agenda, that is hostile to and dangerous for a specific nation. He also often props up via rhetoric and actually went to meet with, on friendly terms, a group of genocidal racists who are, also, hostile to and dangerous for a specific nation.
Put all that together, and any specific nation would be well within its rights to prohibit the scumfuck from even entering their sovereign territory, period. That Israel is just refusing to provide resources for his security detail is, frankly and in proportion, peanuts.
And as Moto points out, Carter is certainly not a newbie to being a total asshole (or fervently-ideological-anti-Israel-leftist, take your pick) where Israel is concerned. Remember, this is the same guy who while visiting Golda Meir, took time and specifically belittled Israel’s secular society and essentially predicted ruin if she didn’t follow a more ‘biblical’ route of government.
Carter’s smug superiority is interesting, in that it betrays his pattern of cluelessness and his great ability to be a total asshole at a moment’s notice: here he was, a Christian, telling a Jew whose family was terrorized by pogroms, who was the leader of a nation of Jews which had, just over two decades previously been established as a safe haven for all the Jews of the world… that her religious devotion was lacking and that Carter could predict that ruin would come if she didn’t be a Jew in the right way, the way her arrogant asshole Christian guest was telling her to be.
Or in his own words:
If you want more info Marc, I’d be happy to dredge some up. Reading over just a bit of the information I’ve given you should at least convince you that Israel has some very real reasons that it might consider to be legitimate reasons to classify Carter ‘persona non grata’. Which I think was your question. Yes?
