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She examined my passport again, “Do know any Palestinians?” she asked.

I smirked and lied, “No.”

I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ | Ferrari Sheppard – 2/10/2014; also posted: I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ – Stop Being Famous – 1/24/2014.

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Carter taught Christian students in Plains Georgia that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are tricks to enhance wealth, and that current Israeli policy toward Palestinians is based on these “Jewish” values and practices.

Carter at Cardozo: It’s Not the “New-Anti-Semitism” — It’s the Older Kind | FrontPage Magazine – 4/10/2013.

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How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised?

Non believer?

And what?

Unclean, what?

They called them DOGS! That’s true.

Jimmy Carter’s Bible Class as Transcribed and Commented Upon by Michael Miller, 8/15/07 | Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors – 8/15/2007; posted 4/1//2013.

That was a long time ago, Mr. Carter.

Related: Is Bible Teacher Jimmy Carter an Old-Fashioned Jew-Hater?: But How Can a True Christian… :: The Phyllis Chesler Organization – 11/15/2007.

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The history of Palestinians was something I was familiar with as well, only because in high school, my friend’s parents were Moroccan Jews with staunch right-wing Zionist views. They’d go on about how Palestinians were worth shit and how they were sucking off the land they stole, and how they were not from Palestine, but Jordan. Truth be told, my friend’s parents’ passion about their ‘homeland’ made me sick. As a black person living in the United States, I could not relate to their love for their proclaimed homeland because I never had one. My ancestors were captured from various regions of Africa and forced onto ships bound for the Americas. Therefore, when questioned about the geographic origins of my ancestors, my answers were as vague as Africa is big.

I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ | Ferrari Sheppard – 2/10/2014.

It appears the young celebrity creating his celebrity flew to Israel on The Carter Center’s dime (“In the weeks preceding my departure from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to Tel Aviv, I received travel warnings from The Carter Center, the organization responsible for sponsoring my trip”) with a reactive and retributive attitude forged in self-righteous alienation, never mind that, for example, about 1.7 million Israelis live in the same funky poverty for which he would claim to stand in the interest of social justice.

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Crying Isn’t a Weakness: StyleLikeU’s Closet Profile on Ferrari Sheppard – YouTube – 11/19/2013.

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The Genius Of The Crowd: Charles Bukowski – YouTube – Posted 12/19/2007.  Related text: The Genius Of The Crowd by Charles Bukowski — Hello Poetry

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Related on this blog (a whole section): Anthropolitical Psychology | BackChannels

Our worlds are as small or as large as the information we acquire about them, and they are also as false or honest as the methods we use to comprehend whole issues and the integrity and curiosity with which we pursue them.

I get a little “Jewed out” myself, sometimes, and somewhere between the ever present clouds of the Holocaust and constant distributed cheerleading (deserved) and defense (also deserved) of Israel.  Nonetheless, riding beside my own brand of international humanism (thanks, Felix Adler and Abraham Maslow — two more Jews), Judaism itself and its call to conscience (yo, Jimmuh: Jesus was Jewish!) remains for me an integral part of seeking social justice and what is good in living individually and communally.

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Despite months of lobbying by anti-Israel activists and a desperate last minute petition drive, the 141st APHA annual meeting and exposition held in Boston. defeated an anti-Israel resolution by 74 to 36 votes. The resolution was discussed by the association’s Joint Policy Committee. The anti-Israel campaign was led by activists of BDS, the global movement for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, which was initiated by Palestinians in 2005 and is coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee established two years later.

Pro-Israeli activists defeat anti-Israel resolution on Palestinian health issues | JPost | Israel News – 11/10/2013

The forces of Jew Hate, a term earthier and less sanitized than “anti-Semitism”, have created on-campus and political bubble environments sufficient to enclose the “open-minded”, who may not be as much so as presumed, nor more cagey than vulnerable.

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As I stood in line at JFK waiting to be interrogated by security agents prior to boarding a flight to Tel Aviv last January, I thought of all the reasons why I didn’t belong there. I’m only half Jewish, for starters – and it’s the wrong half. I only know a couple of Hebrew words. I have a lot of what an Un-Jewish Activities Committee might call “Palestinian sympathies.”

Learning from Israeli Secularism | The Humanist Community Project – 5/29/2013.

Jewish ethnicity and the embrace and expression of faith may vary quite within the Jewish community, but it may not be possible these days to escape the influence of the wisdom of Hillel the Elder, himself quite possibly the elder contemporary of Jesus, from any contemporary stance.  One might also go back a little farther in time to “The Akedah” and the undefined test given Abraham, a test either of obedience, which children believe without question, or of conscience, which adults may perceive with penetration – and perceive as Abraham failing (God never speaks to him again; an emissary in the form of an angel has to intercede in the murder; a substitute ram is made to appear for the knife Abraham would have too willingly used on Isaac: had he only spoken up, or, in the modern vernacular, spoken truth to power on behalf of Isaac and Sarah).

Israel provides a broad suite of basic services, including the training of Abbas’s police force, to the generations of refugees who remained on the land after the Arab war of annihilation in 1948.  When the hate recedes, when the threat of violence against Jews fades on to the pages of history, the Jews and other Israelis — Christians, Muslims, and others — will prove as helpful as can be, but those days seem always set farther away by smears.

Reference

American Task Force on Palestine

Annual report shows 1.7 million Israelis living below poverty line | JPost | Israel News – 12/17/2013.

Campus Watch

Hillel: If Not Now, When? (Jewish Encounters): Joseph Telushkin: 9780805242812: Amazon.com: Books

Hillel – Israel & Judaism Studies

Increase in Palestinians Treated in Israeli Hospitals | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com – 8/2/2013.

Is Bible Teacher Jimmy Carter an Old-Fashioned Jew-Hater?: But How Can a True Christian… :: The Phyllis Chesler Organization – 11/15/2007.

International Solidarity Movement | Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom.

International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – NGO Monitor – 2/27/2012.  Related: CAMERA: Whitewashing ISM – 9/1/2004.

Israel arrests Al-Qaida recruits trying to bomb U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv – Diplomacy and Defense Israel News | Haaretz – 1/22/2014.

Israel – Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)

I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ – Stop Being Famous – 1/24/2014; I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ | Ferrari Sheppard – 2/10/2014.

Jimmy Carter’s Bible Class as Transcribed and Commented Upon by Michael Miller, 8/15/07 | Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors – 8/15/2007; excerpt re-posted to present site 4/11/2013.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/08/jimmy_carters_human_rights_dis.html – 8/26/2007 (added here 10/9/2014).

Learning from Israeli Secularism | The Humanist Community Project – 5/29/2013.

List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2013 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Suicide and Other Bombing Attacks in Israel Since the Declaration of Principles (Sept 1993) – List: 1994 – 2012 – Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Carter Center: Advancing Human Rights and Alleviating Suffering

The Genius Of The Crowd by Charles Bukowski — Hello Poetry – n.d.

Which crowd?

Addendum

Since posting the above blog, this gem has been published in the New York Observer: Boteach, Rabbi Shmuley.  “The Moral Disintegration of Jimmy Carter.”  August 11, 2014:

Mr. Carter’s underdog obsession is what motivated him to legitimize Fidel Castro and take his side in a bio-weapons dispute with the United States and to praise North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung with the words: “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent,…and in charge of the decisions about this country.” This is the Korean dictator who, together with the tyrannical son who succeeded him, starved to death about 3 million of their own people. Carter added absurdly, “I don’t see that they [the North Koreans] are an outlaw nation.” He also hailed Marshal Joseph Tito as “a man who believes in human rights,” and said of murderous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe in enhancing human rights.” Carter told Haitian dictator Raul Cédras that he was “ashamed of what my country has done to your country,” which made most Americans ashamed of Jimmy Carter.

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