Carter dodges foul ball, hits home run
The man is amazing - a heavyweight champion.
Instead of running for cover from their ruthless assaults on his character, he's thrown the weight of an entire lifetime of good deeds against the most powerful and horrific political machine the world has ever known.
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter says the decision by Canada and other nations to withhold money from the Hamas-led Palestinian government is "a crime."
Of course, this makes the entire US Congress, which just passed a similar bill Thursday, a pack of criminals!
"It's a crime against the people of Palestine," Carter told CBC News in an exclusive interview from New York.
"For Canada and others to punish the Palestinian people because they voted for their candidates of choice, I think is literally a crime."
"There is in many ways a much more serious deprivation of human rights among the Palestinians because of this ill-advised policy than even there was in South Africa," he told CBC News.
"I deplore the Palestinian suicide bombings as much or more than anything than I do what Israel has done against the Palestinian people. It's horrible on both sides and should be eliminated. But you have to look at the facts."
He said that by the time Hamas was elected in January, the Palestinian authority had already been brought to bankruptcy and couldn't pay police officers, firefighters and government employees.
Carter also said the Israeli response to the capturing of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah last summer was "excessive beyond what was needed."
Carter, who has led efforts to monitor several elections in the Palestinian Authority since leaving office, said bringing peace to the Middle East is the most important commitment in his public life.
His top-selling book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has been criticized by pro-Israel groups and led to the resignation, announced this week, of Kenneth Stein, a Carter Center fellow and a longtime Carter adviser.
Carter's latest book has drawn stern rebukes from current Democratic leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean.
"With all due respect to former president Carter, he does not speak for the Democratic party on Israel," PELOSI said in a statement.
Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, said he intended the book to provoke debate on Israeli policy that has been stifled by the news media and others, who have been "almost unanimously silent," and lamented the lack of debate over Israeli policy in the U.S.
"It's almost a universal silence concerning anything that might be critical of current policies of the Israeli government," he said.
WHERE ARE ALL THE PATRIOTS???
Will this 82 yr old grandfather and former president stand ALONE on the world stage and struggle against a political and economic behemoth of our own making without a word of support from US???
Americans, UNITE! Stand up and fight for freedom and justice!
A REAL American President is leading the way!
Carter is living proof of the legitimacy of the Harvard/University of Chicago study decrying the power of the Israeli lobby. This patriot doesn't deserve the indignity people far lesser than he have heaped upon him.
Jimmy Carter is what a president should be: courageous and compassionate, standing up to the Jewish Supremacists, bringing world attention to the plight of the Palestinians.
George Bush is everything a leader should NOT be: cowardly and weak, complying with every whim of the Zionists, regardless of how much suffering and death he causes.
Carter is a peacemaker and tries to bring an end to suffering; Bush is a warmonger who causes more death and destruction.