| Popis: |
This chapter shows how Carter’s anger with President George W. Bush’s pro-war foreign policy and Israel’s stance against Palestinian freedom exploded in 2005 and 2006 in two of his most popular books. Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis protested Bush’s pre-emptive war against Iraq, lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and use of torture techniques against the enemy. It particularly condemned the alliance of Republican politicians with conservative religious leaders. Carter questioned what had happened to the separation of church and state and reminded his readers that Thomas Jefferson had argued that in a free country there must be a wall of separation between church and state. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid stirred a hornet’s nest of criticism by condemning the concrete wall constructed between Israeli and Palestinians areas, the creation of Jewish settlements to drive out Palestinians, and Israel’s general refusal to discuss peace and separate statehood with the Palestinians. By using the word “apartheid,” he suggested that Israel practiced a cruel form of segregation similar to that in South Africa. Carter defended himself but did not back down from use of the word, and critics who did not understand him again labeled him anti-Semitic. Carter continued his work for peace, joined a group of former Nobel Peace Prize laureates called The Elders, and wrote another book, Beyond the White House, in which the influence of his father on his own life again loomed large. |
