Sanctimonious Hypocrisy: ex-President Jimmy Carter - the world's premier moral equivocator

Former US President Jimmy Carter equates female genital mutilation and sex slavery with Catholic Church's refusal to ordain women:

ATLANTA — Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter says religious leaders, including those in Christianity and Islam, share the blame for mistreatment of women across the world.

The human rights activist said Friday religious authorities perpetuate misguided doctrines of male superiority, from the Catholic Church forbidding women from becoming priests to some African cultures mutilating the genitals of young girls.

Carter said the doctrines, which he described as theologically indefensible, contribute to a political, social and economic structure where political leaders passively accept violence against women, a worldwide sex slave trade and inequality in the workplace and classroom.

President Jimmy Carter bravely fending off the approach of an aquatic bunny rabbit  in 1979

Jimmy Carter gives credit to Canada for "Argo" hostage rescue

Two taboo words about Libya: "Exit Strategy"

Though they finally engaged this week, every day of America's and the Western allies' prolonged inaction during the Libyan revolt put NATO's credibility at risk. Each rebel death seemed a painful reminder of a lesson established by Jimmy Carter's inept handling of the Khomeniites' takeover of Iran and George H.W. Bush's betrayal of Iraqi Shiite rebels in the first Gulf War, that "to be America's enemy is dangerous, to be its friend is fatal."

So, as was the case in Afghanistan and Iraq, a new coalition has entered the fray in Libya. And like in the previous two interventions, we know we want regime change, but we don't quite know what to do if things get ugly afterwards. 

Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke was paraphrased as saying "no plan survives contact with the enemy." Perhaps that was what Barack Obama, a master of disinformation, was thinking when he said on Tuesday that America's "Exit Strategy" would begin this week. That was a rather unusual pronouncement considering that so far, not only is there no real exit strategy for Libya, but we don't even have a clearly defined entry strategy.

As of today, NATO left the the US disappointed by only agreeing to assume responsibility for the No Fly Zone, leaving attacks against Gaddafi's ground troops the responsibility of whomever will take that role. It will likely fall to the US, the UK and possibly Canada and France to assume that responsibility.

There is a school of thought present among a certain category of Western "progressive" whose devotion to Marxist ideology makes them consider capitalism and perceived imperialism to be worse crimes than the Taliban's brutality and its denial of civil rights and education to Afghan women, or to the fratricidal bloodbath that would have consumed Iraq if the coalition had withdrawn prematurely. But them aside, notwithstanding the lack of effective strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq, no reasonable person would argue the world isn''t better off for having the Taliban and Saddam Hussein removed from power.

So far, no one knows much about the Libyan opposition, much less what a government that replaces Gaddafi will look like, but we do know a world without Gaddafi running a country is a better one.

The precedents for Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq may be in the presence the US maintains to this day in Germany and Japan, decades after the 2nd World War concluded. Those countries are now democratic and among the most stable and prosperous in the world.  What this teaches us, but no one is willing to admit, is that like in the cases of other successful major military interventions, the only real exit strategy is to wait until the job of stabilizing a country is complete.

The annual hypocrisy of Idiot Apartheid Week is upon us ...or Why I've come to appreciate "Israeli Apartheid Week"

In Israel, it's time for the annual American Apartheid Week. 

Campuses across the Middle East's only liberal democracy will be holding seminars and protests this year to denounce the apartheid to which the Indigenous populations of the Americas are subject. The natives of the Americas were and are the victims of one of the most effective genocides in history,  their contemporary numbers are fractional compared to their population  prior to the invasion of the Americas by European settlers. The Europeans and their colonialist successors in the "New World" are responsible for the pre-colonial cultures having been mostly destroyed and forgotten.

Even though Indigenous peoples in the Americas have voting rights, they are treated as second class citizens who face discrimination at every turn. The American settlers continue to occupy their lands, reaping wealth from their conquered resources while the true owners of these riches remain impoverished and relegated to non-contiguous Bantustans called "reservations."

Of course there is no American Apartheid Week in Israel. There isn't a country in the world where some people weren't dispossessed in favor of its current population, and grievances regarding that, to some degree, past and present, exist almost everywhere.

Israel is engaged in a land dispute with Palestinians who, while their treatment is exponentially better than the historical sufferings of our First Nations, are still subject to myriad indignities until that conflict is resolved.

But in one of the great ironies that typifies the profound stupidity of North American radicals, they are using facilities built on land stolen from the indigenous population to hypocritically condemn Israel for acting in self-defense.

The rallying cry for activists who opposed South Africa's racist apartheid system was "One man, one vote!" If the real goal of the bigots behind "Israeli Apartheid Week" were that, then they could have declared victory before they started. Israeli Arabs have always had the vote.

People like the discredited Canadian Arab Federation's Khaled Muammar quote Jimmy Carter for support of their position without understanding him or realizing even Carter said, "There is no semblance of anything relating to apartheid within the nation of Israel." While Muammar has made unsubstantiated accusations of racism being at the root of Israeli policy, Carter has stated that Israeli practice in the West Bank "is not based on racism as it was in South Africa, but is based on the desire by a minority of Israelis to acquire land that belongs to the Palestinians."

Those familiar with the agenda of the anti-Israel fanatics who populate "Israeli Apartheid Week" seminars know that they are mostly divided into two camps, radical leftists and Islamists. Within those two camps are two types: those who understand that Israel does not practice apartheid but are happy to attempt to slander what they see as a "Western, imperialist, colonialist outpost in the Middle East," and those who are either too uniformed or too stupid to comprehend the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

These are motley gang who pretend to be "peace activists" and want to send a boat to break a military blockade of Gaza that is designed to prevent Iranian arms shipments that would spark another war. They claim to want to help the "starving" people of Gaza, while denying the reality that Gaza has well-stocked markets, multi-level malls, luxury hotels, and has one of the highest female obesity rates in the world.

Typical of the hypocrisy of holding Israeli Apartheid Week in a country that has eradicated most of its native population is an attitude reflected by Toronto lawyer, Zahra Dhanani.

Dhanani, up until very recently a member of the disgraced Toronto Community Housing Corporation Board, which was compelled to resign en mass by Mayor Rob Ford, gave an interview last year where she decried Israeli actions as "genocide." She may be unaware that "genocide" means the murder of a race. When genocide occurs, the population of the victims drastically declines, as was the case of the native population in Canada, whose land she enables new settlers to occupy through her work as an immigration lawyer. The Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank has more than tripled since 1967, which would make that the opposite of genocide.

Hazardous products are required to carry warning labels; unfortunately, hazardous people are not.  But for a week in March, these camps of enraged, obtuse participants at "Israeli Apartheid Week" do society a big favor by separating themselves from the rest of us while engaging in a bigot-fest. In so doing, they let us see who they are and what they truly stand for. They have created a self-imposed Idiot Apartheid Week.

Their annual Idiot Apartheid Week (IAW) helps us all. When you meet someone, instead of having to wait for them to make some idiotic pronouncement to establish if you're dealing with a bigot or a fool, knowing that someone is an IAW participant saves you the time and trouble.



info on this available from Blazing Cat Fur

There actually is apartheid in the Middle East. It's practiced by Israel's neighbours in the form of brutal repression of women and religious minorities and in the legalized murder of homosexuals. But we won't see the characters at Idiot Apartheid Week denouncing those crimes against humanity. That would be inconsistent with their idiocy.

Intellectually vacuous Quebec Solidaire leader Khadir tries to explain how he wasn't trying to enforce a boycott of a small-business that he harassed.

The man CTV has referred to as an economic terrorist in his own community, Amir Khadir, has produced a weaselly tome trying to explain his harassment of a store-owner in his legislative district. In doing so, Khadir demonstrates that he doesn't know what the word "apartheid" means and lacks the critical thinking ability to explain it in reference to Israel beyond, "because Tutu and Mandela and Jimmy Carter say so." He  has overlooked the fact that Carter has since apologized for using the "apartheid" term in reference to Israel.

What a tool.

FOX News asks: Is Obama Channeling Jimmy Carter?

The American people are proud – proud of our country and our accomplishments. We don’t do humiliated well.

The last president to learn that lesson was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was that rare bird -- a one-term president – mainly because he made the United States look weak on the world stage.  

He cozied up to North Korea, sending hundred of millions of dollars in aid to the outlier nation, which nonetheless continued to pursue its nuclear ambitions.  

He was mocked by Russia, despite memorably exchanging a kiss with Communist leader Leonid Breshnev to celebrate the signing of the Salt II treaty. The Russians celebrated on their own by invading Afghanistan a mere six months later. 

Where his “love your enemies” program really came unglued, of course, was in Iran. After lecturing the Shah – a long-time ally of the U.S. – on human rights and pressing him to release thousands of dangerous dissidents, he allowed the takeover of Iran by Islamic extremists, who promptly took our embassy staff hostage. In one of the most humiliating chapters in our history, Carter’s administration was unable to secure the release of the hostages. A bungled rescue attempt was the last straw. Americans veritably raced to the polls to elect Ronald Reagan president. 

Is any of this sounding familiar? It should. Like Carter, President Obama arrived in Washington naively convinced that he could woo the despots of the world by dint of his winning personality. In North Korea, in Iran, we continue to pander to tyrants who delight in embarrassing us

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