In turning down an invitation to debate Alan Dershowitz at Brandeis University, the AP reported, Carter said “that the school’s debate request is proof that many in the United States are unwilling to hear an alternative view on the nation’s most taboo foreign policy issue, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.”

The senility exposed by this statement aside (namely, defining a debate as censorship), one wonders if anti-Israel rioting and Jew-beating on university campuses don’t count. Indeed, the “alternative” view is quite prevalent in the U.S.:

From the New York Daily News:

In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.

In three weeks of interviews, numerous students told the Daily News they face harassment, threats and ridicule merely for defending the right of Israel to survive.

From John Podhoretz in the NY Post, 2002:

A man wearing a Jewish ritual skullcap was severely beaten on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Students and faculty attending religious services at the Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish meeting house, were pelted with rotten eggs. The Hillel house itself has been defaced with graffiti.

The worst incident happened last week at San Francisco State University, where there is clearly no division between anti-Israel political sentiment and naked anti-Semitism. Demonstrations against Israel have been a daily occurrence there for months, and the rhetoric on campus has taken a literally medieval anti-Semitic turn.

Laurie Zoloth, a professor at San Francisco State University, put it bluntly and powerfully in a widely circulated e-mail: “I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled ‘canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites.’ ”

…In an account confirmed by other witnesses, Laurie Zoloth described the disgusting denouement following a “Peace in the Middle East” rally sponsored by the SFSU Hillel.

A group of students, numbering around 50, had remained to chant afternoon prayers. At that moment, “Counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to ‘Get out or we will kill you’ and ‘Hitler did not finish the job.’ I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone . . .

“The police could do nothing more than surround the Jewish students and community members who were now trapped in a corner of the plaza, grouped under the flags of Israel, while an angry, out of control mob, literally chanting for our deaths, surrounded us. . . . There was no safe way out of the Plaza. We had to be marched back to the Hillel House under armed S.F. police guard, and we had to have a police guard remain outside Hillel.”

And from John Leo, 2002:

Consider some signs of the times: a pig’s head left at the door of the Hillel building at Indiana University, swastikas on a Jewish structure at the University of Colorado, a Hillel center window smashed at the University of California at Berkeley and “F— the Jews” written on the building.

At the University of California at San Diego, an annual “Anti-Zionism Week” (recently given the more upscale name, “From Oppression to Liberation Week”) is supported by student fees. “Very, very anti-Semitic stuff” circulates on the San Diego campus, one Jewish student said, including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a fake Talmudic quotation giving permission for Jewish males to violate any non-Jewish female over the age of 3. At the University of Chicago, a Jewish student group said, “Jews are being mistreated and intimidated on campus … anti-Semitism has been made acceptable, even fashionable, by a long process of academic delegitimizing of Israel and Judaism.”

Chris Silver, co-chair of the Israel Action Committee at Berkeley, said something similar: “There is a lot of anti-Semitism that goes on here separate from the massive amount of anti-Israel sentiment that can be found in every department and in every classroom.” (Off-campus, too. Amiri Baraka, New Jersey’s poet laureate, is in the news for anti-Semitism again, this time for some doggerel implicating Jews in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.)

And of course there’s the consistent, daily, one-sided reporting by all but a handful of media outlets, something that Honest Reporting keeps extensive track of, plus all the anti-war rallies in recent years, which equate Israel with Nazism.

Indeed, one might go so far as to say that Carter’s “dissenting” view is the prevailing one. But when one’s real objection to occupation by Jews is their occupation of any space on this earth at all, this fact could get lost on a person. Or perhaps Carter just wants there to be more discussion about why beating and/or killing Jews makes sense.

Then again, Carter’s “independent” voice could have more to do with his being in the employ of wealthy Arab sheikhs, dictators and terrorists. He’s being paid to think what he thinks and to spread that thinking, making him the modern-day Joseph Goebbels.

That Carter has come to disguise it less and less the closer he gets to his deathbed is a godsend, lest the very recent perception of him as the “dignified” and “best ex-president” be sustained to the point of his getting a state funeral when he finally croaks — something that’s looking less and less likely to happen to this plagiarist, liar, America-hater and bigot.

Carter said his book’s title was meant to spur debate, but when he is given the opportunity to defend the work, he reminds us that this is Jimmy Carter, the Sunday school sermonizer who is above any discussion and only talks at folks, not with them. (How much do you want to bet that he’s in love with his initials and feels they give him didactic license?)

To his credit, Carter did issue a letter to American Jews amid the controversy over his book’s title, “sympathiz[ing] with Israelis who fear terrorism,” as the AP reported. In other words, “I know you’re scared. But it only hurts for a second. Don’t resist; you’ll only make things harder for yourself.”

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