Dear Journalist,

Many of you may have seen former President Carter's media interviews of late. While I admire many of Carter's significant contributions, his new book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has many serious factual errors and his opinions in several cases do not reflect the current reality of Israel's security concerns and commitment to peace.

Ken Stein, a fellow at the Carter Center, resigned last month, saying in a letter that the book was "replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments."

Not long ago, Israel gave up all of Gaza, making painful sacrifices for peace. The response by the Palestinians has been to launch more than 1,200 rockets into Israeli civilian areas.

I know that Carter cares deeply about human suffering. I too want a better future for the Palestinians, but they're being held back by their failure to recognize Israel, their past peace agreements and renounce terrorism.

If Carter wants to focus on saving lives in the Middle East, I wish he would pay more attention to the  Iranian President who says he wants to wipe Israel off the map while he is  developing nuclear weapons.

For more background on Carter's book please see six works by  Ethan Bronner, deputy foreign editor of The New York Times, Professor Alan Dershowitz,  Neal Sher, a New York attorney, and a former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Dr. Mitch Bard, Executive Director, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, and  myself.

Dr. Stein, Dr. Bard and Professor Dershowitz are also available for interviews. You may contact Dr. Bard at mgbard@aol.com or 301-565-3918, Dr. Stein at kstein@emory.edu or 404-727-2798 and Professor Dershowitz at dersh@law.harvard.edu or 617-495-4617. Professor Dershowitz's assistant, Nichele McClendon, may be reached at nmcclendon@law.harvard.edu or 617-496-2020.

I am available at jenniferm@theisraelproject.org, 202-857-6644 (office), or 202-365-0787 (cell).

Sincerely,

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi



Founder & President, The Israel Project

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, By Jimmy Carter, 264 pp. Simon and Schuster. $27.

This is a strange little book about the Arab-Israeli conflict from a major public figure. It is premised on the notion that Americans too often get only one side of the story, one uncritically sympathetic to Israel, so someone with authority and knowledge needs to offer a fuller picture. Fine idea. The problem is that in this book Jimmy Carter does not do so. Instead, he simply offers a narrative that is largely unsympathetic to Israel. Israeli bad faith fills the pages. Hollow statements by Israel’s enemies are presented without comment. Broader regional developments go largely unexamined. In other words, whether or not Carter is right that most Americans have a distorted view of the conflict, his contribution is to offer a distortion of his own. Read More...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Faith, Commitments and Carter's Reckoning
By Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi
 
Last Tuesday, one of America's great healers was driven past me on the way to his final resting place: President Ford, his body in a casket surrounded by police motorcades. The elegant hearse was preceded by the current President, riding in a black limousine. Hundreds of mourners and onlookers lined the streets, bidding their final farewell to a former president.
 
So it was for Reagan.
 
Before long, another President will go - Jimmy Carter. Now 82, Carter, a deeply religious man, is facing his own mortality and trying to clear his accounts before God. He is a former president, yet he is profoundly human.

I had long admired Jimmy Carter, beginning when I campaigned for him during my high school mock election and when I one of his students at Emory University. Read More...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ex-President for Sale
By Alan Dershowitz

It now turns out that Jimmy Carter--who is accusing the Jews of buying the silence of the media and politicians regarding criticism of Israel--has been bought and paid for by Arab money.  In his recent book tour to promote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter has been peddling a particularly nasty bit of bigotry.  The canard is that Jews own and control the media, and prevent newspapers and the broadcast media from presenting an objective assessment of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that Jews have bought and paid for every single member of Congress so as to prevent any of them from espousing a balanced position.  How else can anyone understand Carter’s claims that it is impossible for the media and politicians to speak freely about Israel and the Middle East?  The only explanation – and one that Carter tap dances around, but won’t come out and say directly – is that Jews control the media and buy politicians.  Carter then presents himself as the sole heroic figure in American public life who is free of financial constraints to discuss Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis. Read More...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The World According to Carter
The New York Sun, Nov. 22, 2006
By Alan Dershowitz

Sometimes you really can tell a book by its cover. President Jimmy Carter's decision to title his new anti-Israel screed "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $27) tells it all. His use of the loaded word "apartheid," suggesting an analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, is especially outrageous, considering his acknowledgment buried near the end of his shallow and superficial book that what is going on in Israel today "is unlike that in South Africa—not racism, but the acquisition of land." Nor does he explain that Israel's motivation for holding on to land it captured in a defensive war is the prevention of terrorism. Israel has tried, on several occasions, to exchange land for peace, and what it got instead was terrorism, rockets, and kidnappings launched from the returned land. Read More...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In hindsight, Carter book seen as part of an awkward pattern
JTA, Dec. 26, 2006
By Neal Sher

It was the spring of 1987 and the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi prosecution unit, which I headed at the time, was in the midst of one of our most productive and historic periods.

On April 27, as a result of an in-depth OSI investigation and despite resistance at the State Department, Austrian President and former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who had served as an officer in the Nazi army, was barred from setting foot ever again on U.S. soil. 
 
One week earlier, after eight years of bruising litigation, we deported to the Soviet Union one Karl Linnas, who had been chief of a Nazi concentration camp in Estonia. To do so, we had to outmaneuver concerted attempts to block the deportation by Patrick Buchanan, the Reagan White House’s communications director, and my boss, U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese. Read More...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carter’s Calumny
A review of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006, 288 pages, $27
By Mitchell Bard

By titling his book as he has, Jimmy Carter is not merely being provocative to sell books, he appears to be giving aid and comfort to the new anti-Semites whose goal since the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, has been to link Israel to apartheid South Africa.

Curiously enough, if you read through almost the entire book, which persistently accuses Israel of apartheid acts, you arrive at page 189, where he specifically contradicts the entire thesis by stating, “The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa.” In fact, the only tangential support for the title of the book is an anonymous quotation from an Israeli lamenting the treatment of Palestinians.

It is clear from the beginning, however, that facts are of little concern to Carter who sees Israel as “the tiny vortex around which swirl the winds of hatred, intolerance, and bloodshed.” It is certainly true that Israel is subject to these winds, the question is why he blames the victim. Read More...

Board of Advisors: Senator Evan Bayh (IN), Senator Saxby Chambliss (GA), Senator Norm Coleman (MN), Senator Ben Nelson (NE), Senator Arlen Specter (PA), Senator Ron Wyden (OR), Congressman Rob Andrews (NJ), Congresswoman Shelley Berkley (NV), Congressman Tom Davis (VA), Congressman Eliot Engel (NY), Congressman Frank Pallone (NJ), Congressman Jon Porter (NV), Congressman Jim Saxton (NJ), Congressman Brad Sherman (CA), Congressman Joe Wilson (SC), Actor and Director Ron Silver