Here is a review of Carter’s recent book that appeared in the New York Times. The furor that the book has generated in America is clearly, as I have said before, an evidence that the American Jews have grown to be thoroughly spoiled and brutally headstrong . The moment someone describes the Israeli position candidly, the Jews call it anti Semitism. It is a pity that the world has not been able to resolve a clear and simple case of Israeli aggression against the people of Palestine in over 50 years.

Javed I. Chaudry

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Carter Book Stirs Furor With Its View of Israelis’ ‘Apartheid’

Paul Connors/Associated Press

Jimmy Carter’s new book: “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.”

On Tuesday night in Phoenix, after signings and interviews to promote his new book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” President Jimmy Carter made a hastily arranged visit: an hour long gathering with a group of rabbis.

 “We ended up holding hands and circled in prayer,” Mr. Carter said in a telephone interview from Phoenix, adding that the rabbis requested the meeting to discuss his book.

It was an unusual interruption during an unusually controversial book tour, which began with a few faint complaints last month and has escalated to a full-scale furor, with Mr. Carter being trailed by protesters at book signings, criticized on newspaper op-ed pages and, on the normally sedate “Book TV” program on C-Span2, being called a racist and an anti-Semite by an indignant caller.

Such backlash is triggered by Mr. Carter’s assertions that pro-Israel lobbyists have stifled debate in the United States over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; that Israelis are guilty of human rights abuses in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories; and that the editorial pages of American newspapers rarely present anything but a pro-Israel viewpoint.

But the bulk of outrage has come from his use of the word apartheid in the title, apparently equating the plight of today’s Palestinians to the former victims of government-mandated racial separation in South Africa.

Jewish groups have responded angrily, saying that Mr. Carter’s claims are dangerous and anti-Semitic. But Mr. Carter is steadfastly defending the book, saying he believes there is a valid comparison between Israelis and the white South Africans who oppressed blacks.

“It was obviously going to be somewhat provocative,” Mr. Carter said of the title. “I could have said ‘A New Path to Peace’ or something like that.”

But Mr. Carter said he felt apartheid was the most pertinent word he could use, and in retrospect he would not change any of the book’s content.

His book details his version of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning with the 19th century. He concludes that Israel is now following a “system of apartheid,” in which Israelis are dominant and Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights.

The book was published Nov. 14 by Simon & Schuster. It is at No. 7 on The New York Times’s best-seller list, and has sold more than 68,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which measures 60 to 70 percent of a book’s sales.

In the interview Mr. Carter defined apartheid as the “forced separation of two peoples in the same territory with one of the groups dominating or controlling the other.” Under that definition, he said, the United States practiced a form of apartheid during its “separate but equal” years of segregation.

Opposition to the book has appeared widely on newspaper editorial pages, including in The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In an essay titled “It’s Not Apartheid,” Michael Kinsley lambasted the book in The Washington Post on Tuesday. “It’s not clear what he means by using the loaded word ‘apartheid,’ since the book makes no attempt to explain it, but the only reasonable interpretation is that Carter is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa,” Mr. Kinsley wrote.

In The Jerusalem Post, David A. Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, called the book “outlandishly titled.”

Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said: “The title is to de-legitimize Israel, because if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn’t really deserve to be a democratic state. He’s provoking, he’s outrageous, and he’s bigoted.”

This week the Anti-Defamation League began running ads criticizing Mr. Carter in major newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Mr. Carter has also fought off charges that he misappropriated material in a book by Dennis Ross, a former envoy to the Middle East who is now a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News.

And Kenneth W. Stein, an adviser to Mr. Carter, resigned last week from the Carter Center after calling the book “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.”

Mr. Carter contradicted those claims, saying he had never read Mr. Ross’s book “The Missing Peace.” “I wrote every word myself,” he said. “I didn’t plagiarize anything.”

Mr. Carter has a longstanding interest in the Middle East conflict. When he won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the prize committee cited his role in the 1978 Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt.

Mr. Carter wrote in an essay in The Los Angeles Times on Friday that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s lobbying efforts have produced a reluctance to criticize the politics of the Israeli government. The editorial boards of major American newspapers and magazines, he continued, have exercised self-restraint on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians.

A vocal pro-Palestinian viewpoint, he said, is “nonexistent in this country to any detectable degree.”

Which is the claim that Mr. Foxman said he found most offensive. “The reason he gives for why he wrote this book is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media,” he said. “What makes this serious is that he’s not just another pundit, and he’s not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States.”