16 December Boston Globe editorial - Jimmy Carter vs. Jimmy Carter.

Harry Truman famously said that if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. By refusing Brandeis's invitation to take part in a debate about his new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," former president Jimmy Carter is saying that he can't take the heat -- after giving his book a controversial title and boasting of a desire to be provocative.

Some of the fury Carter has provoked is so overwrought that it appears to confirm his own overstated contention that any criticism of Israel is treated like heresy by the mainstream media. But it is precisely because of the hyperbole of his critics, and the seriousness of the issues he wants to raise, that Carter should agree to debate that inveterate defender of Israel, Alan Dershowitz.

At the least, Carter should welcome a chance to defend his deliberate choice of the emotionally charged word, "apartheid," in his title. In one of the text's three references to apartheid, Carter quotes an unnamed "prominent Israeli" saying, "I am afraid that we are moving toward a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship. The West Bank is not worth it."...

If he were to accept a genuine debate about his use of the word "apartheid," Carter would probably have to admit he was being irresponsibly provocative. The rest of his brief for Mideast peace hardly differs from the consensus of rational Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans. Carter is an orthodox peacenik posing as a heretic. Maybe that's the real reason he has declined to debate.