Sunday, August 31, 2008

Political guts in short supply

Aug.31, 2008


Political guts in short supply

IT surprised many why former US president Jimmy Carter was absent from the podium at last week's Democratic Party convention. Convention organisers did honour Carter with a short video clip highlighting his work with Hurricane Katrina victims and a brief walk across the Pepsi Center stage, but did not give him an opportunity to speak at the forum.
According to party officials, the treatment Carter received was the bare minimum that could be done for a former president.
It was a sharp break with the tradition of giving speech time to living former presidents, and it left a bitter taste among many Democrats.
Now it has been explained that the Democratic leadership believed that Carter's views on Israel and its occupation of Palestinian land made him undesirable to be given a prominent position at the convention.
The party leadership feared that Carter's presence on the podium would have alienated Jewish voters.
It is an emphatic reaffirmation of how the Jewish lobby is holding American politics to ransom, particularly when it comes to anything that has to do with Israel and how American politicians, whether Republican or Democrat, care little for their national interests while dealing with Israel-linked issues.
The low-profile treatment at the party convention was Carter's "punishment" for speaking out against Israel in a book he published in November 2006. In the book, he accused Israel of practising apartheid against the Palestinians.
Since then that Democrat leaders have been trying to distance themselves from Carter and to convince the Jewish lobby that he does not represent the party line.
That is the sad state of affairs in US politics where truth is sacrificed to serve Israeli interests. In Carter's case, the Israelis and their lobbyists in Washington conveniently forgot that it was under Carter's mediation that they had managed to "neutralise" Egypt in the Arab-Israeli conflict through the Camp David peace treaty of 1978.
Within American politics, the Democratic leadership opted to ignore the reality that Carter had done nothing to tarnish the party's image or damage its national interests.
The clincher here is that the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was party to denying the former president his rightful place and prominence at the party convention. Judging from his statements at the outset of his campaign for nomination, Obama appeared to be a man who would have no qualms while calling a spade a spade. That was an unfounded expectation, as the Carter case established. Obviously, Obama was in short supply when it comes to political guts. That should raise the broader question of how anyone could expect him to rise to the challenges attached to the job if he is elected president.
We in the Middle East have already abandoned all hopes that we could expect a substantiated effort for fair and just regional peace if Obama were to be elected president. And now it is time for the American people to realise that many of the political leaders of their great nation are as shallow and hollow as anyone could be while dealing with Israel, but Obama seems to have gone for the cake in damaging party idealism and interests and proving that Israel comes first no matter what.