Update: When Jimmy Carter Speaks The Truth

Jimmy Carter is one of most highly respected former presidents we have. He spent considerable prestige saying something no one else has been willing to say. Disagreeing with Israel is NOT anti-semitism.
Israel is not a modern Democracy in the sense of the one we cherish. Israel has something more akin to a caste system. The more "Jewish" you are in a genetic sense, the more rights you have. At the bottom of the citizen ladder is the Israeli Arabs. They are truly "second class" citizens in the classic sense. While they have many rights, they have much less than Jewish citizens. Even further down the list is residents of the "territories". They have no rights as citizens. They have a few rights as a occupied countries citizen would, they have more rights in Palestine and almost none in any part of Israel. They are truly "third class" citizens. For example, all abandoned land in Palestine is subject to be claimed for Jewish settlements. There are laws whose specific purpose was to drive Arabs off their land and make it "abandoned".
While this is not exactly like apartheid, it is very similar. And it is a system of privileges based on heritage, not hard work. Jimmy Carter just points this and many other problems out.
Update: Another statesman has spoke up.
AlterNet

The head of Israel's largest Holocaust memorial, Holocaust-survivor Yosef Lapid, said that the behavior of some of Israel's settler's toward Palestinians reminded him of the anti-semitism before WWII.

Hurray for Jimmy and Yosef, statesmen among statesmen. Both will pay a heavy cost for their honesty and courage.
AlterNet

Its title -- drawing a not-terribly-subtle parallel between the former president who put human rights squarely in the middle of U.S. foreign policy and Adolph Hitler, a genocidal maniac -- was: "Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem."


Lipstadt accuses Carter of giving "inadvertent comfort" to Holocaust deniers -- the subject of much of Lipstadt's scholarship and two of the three books she's authored. Carter, she wrote, has responded to "criticism" -- "witch-hunt" would be a more appropriate description -- by "reflexively" offering up "innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government." She adds, "When David Duke spouts it, I yawn. When Jimmy Carter does, I shudder."

Carter has repeatedly fallen back -- possibly unconsciously -- on traditional anti-Semitic canards. In the Los Angeles Times last month, he declared it "politically suicide" [sic] for a politician to advocate a "balanced position" on the crisis.

Of course, saying that the political climate in the U.S. is such that just about any vocal criticism of Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories -- that's the subject at hand, although one would be hard-pressed to discern it from Lipstadt's Op-Ed -- guarantees a firestorm of indignant howls is certainly not a "traditional anti-Semitic canard"; it's a fairly accurate description of the pitfalls inherent in modern America's polluted discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One need look no further for confirmation of that than Lipstadt's own toxic response to Carter's book.