Clarification By Comparison

Jimmy Carter continues his streak of staying front and center with the release of his controversial new book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" The rebukes have been flying off the presses about as fast as the book has. I haven't read the book, perhaps it sucks. A lot of folks who think about the Middle East a lot seem to have problems with it, the title especially. Fine, it's a book, discuss, disagree, who cares. The criticisms focus on the word Apartheid and frankly, it just seems weird that after all these years that it takes an unflattering look at Israel for the right to finally get riled up about Apartheid. I remember participating in debates about my college's refusal to completely divest from companies operating in South Africa (in 1989!). Across boardrooms and Wall Street, many argued that sanctioning Apartheid was not the way to go. On the night Nelson Mandela was elected as Prime Minister, after 30 years of torture and imprisonment (his election in my opinion, a milestone in human history), the right wing business personality Larry Kudlow could only muster, "well, this will be fine as long as he doesn't try to redistribute wealth" or some other banality. So now with an unflattering book, and I just learned, a movement across some campuses to divest from Israel, the evils of Apartheid have reached the status they never had while millions of South Africans were being brutalized - if only to differentiate Israel from South Africa! If nothing else hopefully this will prevent the type of revisionist history that we see happening now with the death of Chilean dictator Augustin Pinochet where some on the right have opined that though Pinochet was a mass murderer and torturer, and stole hundreds of millions from his people, he wasn't so bad.