CNN has spent a great deal of time on an issue that they report themselves is not an issue. Most of it has been spent discussing two maps from Carter’s book or whether Dennis Ross agrees with President Carter’s characterization of Taba or Clinton’s characterization of Taba. There has been no substantive discussion of the major premise of Carter’s book, though the headlines tell a different story.
The current segment begins very dramatically stating that a former president stands accused of taking sides. But then gives us nothing. CNN is imposing editorial in its headline. It is a strategy used to discredit someone or mislead people in a very underhanded way.
The only real story reported here is that Kenneth Stein, a Carter Center fellow, is resigning from the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel at Emory University. For more information on Kenneth Stein see Norman Finkelstein in Counterpunch.
Stein apparently resigned because he did not like President Carter’s book and states that he does not believe that a former president of the United States has special perogative to write history or invent history. However, when pressed, Brian Todd reported on CNN Dec. 7, “that Stein has cited inaccuracies in the book, most of those minor, about dates of events.”
This is a highly sensational and dramatic report based on flimsy or even non existent accusations which raises obvious questions about the motives behind it.
Brian Todd reports for CNN:
Brian Todd: What is your problem with the title “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid�
Stein: There is too much emotion in the Arab Israel conflict already, and I think this adds heat rather than light. When you use the word apartheid, what you are saying is that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is equivalent to what happened to the Blacks in South Africa.
That is precisely the point that Carter makes in the book.
But Mr. Stein doesn’t explain why the situation should not be compared to apartheid. Interviewed by Wolf Blitzer a few days ago all he says is that there are a few dates wrong.
In his book, Carter describes an apartheid-like system imposed by Israel on the West Bank and Gaza. Apartheid or not, he describes and talks about the horrendous oppression, occupation, land confiscation, and other deprivations that Palestinian people are subjected to at the hands of their Israeli occupiers. The criticism so far is that Carter’s book adds too much emotion to the situation and that there are some dates wrong. CNN has devoted 19 minutes to this report alone.
Clearly, the emotion is already there. Stein is quite emotional himself when decrying Carter for using an emotive term. Hopefully President Carter has turned on not just a light, but a flood light for the American people to begin looking at this situation as it is and not as the US media, politicians and the Israel lobby, wants us to see it.
The other accusation (or non accusation) is of plagiarism due to the similarity of 2 maps used by Jimmy Carter to two maps created by Dennis Ross.
The only problem is that NO-ONE is accusing Jimmy Carter of plagiarism, neither Stein nor Ross. CNN goes out of its way to point out that fact. However, this is a don’t-look-at-the-elephant moment. The issue is reported by CNN to create the impression in your mind that President Carter has been accused of plagiarism, even though he hasn’t been.
The actual story here is not what Ken Stein is saying, but what CNN is doing.
Portion with Dennis Ross
Former AIPAC propogandist Wolf Blitzer, probably still angry with Jimmy Carter for correcting all of Wolf’s attempts at misinformation during their interview last week, then brought out Dennis Ross who he introduced as a top US Middle East negotiator. Ross, currently a fellow and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank founded by Martin Indyk of America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and a member of [Scooter] Libby Legal Defense Trust for Ross’ indicted former WINEP colleague, is a former Ambassador to Israel and was on the US negotiating team at Camp David. One might be inclined to think that the “US†team functioned as an independent honest broker. It did not.
This is how another negotiating member of the US team, Aaron Miller, currently director of Seeds of peace, characterized it in an interview for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
“Far too often, we functioned in this process, for want of a better word, as Israel’s lawyer,” said Aaron Miller … “I say this without any effort to diminish the importance, again, of gaining Israeli trust. [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger gained it. [President Jimmy] Carter gained it, and [Secretary of State James] Baker gained it. And they produced agreements. They were also fairer and tougher”.
…The “no surprises” policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. If we couldn’t put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one — Israel.
Robert Malley, another negotiator on the US team, writing on the subject in the New York review of books states the following:
In January, a final effort between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in the Egyptian town of Taba (without the Americans) produced more progress and some hope. But it was, by then, at least to some of the negotiators, too late. On January 20, Clinton had packed his bags and was on his way out. In Israel, meanwhile, Sharon was on his way in.
