Posted Friday, May 04 2007 On May 2, some leaders of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and NSP invited other Jewish, Christian and Islamic leaders to a private meeting with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter to discuss Israel/Palestine and also our strategy for homeland security: the Strategy of Generosity and the Global Marshall Plan. Here's what happened at the meeting.
The Carter Meeting, May 2, 2007.
On Wednesday, I met with former president of the U.S. Jimmy Carter. The two of us chatted about a wide range of issues.
Carter was in Berkeley to speak at the University of California, invited by the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC). He addressed some 2,500 students in Zellerbach Hall (tickets were distributed by a lottery because there were far more students wishing to hear him than there were places available).
His talk to the students was clear, powerful, unambiguous and, in the context of contemporary American politics, courageous (as he has been consistently since he published the book /Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid/. He has been widely attacked in the Jewish world for that book, with the attacks ranging from personal to political. For those of you who read Tikkun and our interview with Carter in the Jan/Feb issue, you may think “Carter’s views have been presented and are well understood.” But in fact his views have been distorted in the media, particularly the Jewish media (namely, the weekly newspapers in major cities around the U.S. that are published by the UJA/Federation of the Jewish community). The stories range from claims that Carter is critical of Israeli policy because the Carter Center receives money from Arab sources to claims that his book is filled with historical errors.
You may have noticed that George Tenet prefers to talk about the aftermath of “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, to wit, the U.S. occupation and the Iraqi insurgency. He admits that the CIA did get some things wrong—such as certifying the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when, in fact, those weapons and stockpiles had been destroyed years before, under UN supervision. In the next breath, Tenet takes pride that the CIA began warning the Administration early on about the insurgency. He deeply regrets that the White House, the National Security Council, and the Pentagon were not interested, and ignored the warnings. ( Collapse )
