Thursday, January 11, 2007

No Comment Needed

AccessNorthGa.com - North Georgia's Newsroom: "Fourteen members of an advisory board to Jimmy Carter's human rights organization resigned on Thursday to protest his new book, which criticizes Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories.

The resignations from The Carter Center board are the latest backlash against the former president's book 'Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,' which has drawn fire from Jewish groups, been attacked by fellow Democrats and led to the resignation last month of Kenneth Stein, a center fellow and a longtime Carter adviser.

'You have clearly abandoned your historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side,' the departing members of the Center's Board of Councilors told Carter in their letter of resignation.

The 200-member board is responsible for building public support for the Carter Center. It is not the organization's governing board."

5 comments:

truepeers said...

I think some comment should be made: how can a "human rights" organization presume to act as a "broker" between two sides, as if they were moral equals? Wouldn't anyone who seriously believed in human rights spend an awful lot of time criticizing Arab society and its means of detracting attention from its own internal evils: i.e. scapegoating the Jews? There are the Carters and then there are the Carter lights. It's not obvious to me why one should prefer the latter - Carter at least comes to the end of a sad career by showing us what he really is. The Carter lights will more insidiously pile up the White Guilt on Israel - fettering the possibility of real and honest engagement between Jewish and Arab existential and moral realities - all the while pretending to be the voice of reason.

chuck said...

Where are the other 184 resignations? I think there is a ways to go here.

Unknown said...

chuck, this is true, but Jimmy Carter has gotten more back talk in the past year than he has in over 30 years. Maybe he should go back into retirement while he still has some friends.

MeaninglessHotAir said...

It's all good.

Charlie Martin said...

"I think some comment should be made: how can a "human rights" organization presume to act as a "broker" between two sides, as if they were moral equals?"

Exactly: they have to treat them as moral equals. This requires very flexible ideas of morals --- which Carter seems to have, for all his prissy pickle-faced Sunday-school teacher pronouncements.