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They should have thrown it in the river

Instead, the Israel lobby has made a mess of its war on Carter, says alexander cockburn

Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby in the US - Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew - had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter's Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book and all its aspersions on Israel's treatment of Palestinians would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves?

Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up some interns, and simply sallied forth from the Harvard Law School to buy up every copy of Carter's book and hurl each one into the Charles river. Would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the attempted blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?

Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. The Anti-Defamation League has taken out ads. The lobby's allies in the press have hurled their rotten tomatoes. The



The assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, his book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists

Amazon.com book site features venomous assaults at unprecedented length.

Carter has been stigmatised as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs, an advocate of terror.

But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter's book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, now at number three on Amazon itself. This doesn't prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Once a book by a former President with weighty humanitarian credentials has actually made it into the bookstores, it's a hard job to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse.

The trouble with the Israel lobby, and those American Jews who follow its lead, is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel's equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations to the Palestinians and other bloodthirsty subhumans. Use the word 'apartheid' and they howl with shock

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