Kenneth Stein spoke about his decision to quit the Carter Center after publication of the odious “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” The LA Times has an in-depth article of what Stein told an audience at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
In his first detailed public comments since his resignation last month, Kenneth W. Stein, who was the center’s first executive director, told a Los Angeles audience Thursday that his concerns grew out of what he called Carter’s “gross inventions, intentional falsehoods and irresponsible remarks.”
[…] But it was in his account of a 1990 meeting with Assad that Carter made his most egregious error, Stein said. Carter wrote that Assad had said that he was willing to negotiate with Israel on the status of the Golan Heights, which Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967.
But Stein said his own notes of the Damascus meeting show that Assad, in response to a question from Carter, replied that Syria could not accept a demilitarized Golan without “sacrificing our sovereignty.”
Stein also disputed Carter’s statement in the book that Assad expressed willingness to move Syria’s troops farther from the border than Israel should be required to do. “Why does Carter do that?” Stein asked his audience. “To make Israel appear intransigent.” Carter also wrote of his attempts to report on his talks with Assad and other Middle Eastern leaders to White House staffers who were preoccupied with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. However, Stein said the White House briefings occurred in the spring of 1990 and the invasion was not until August.
Read it all. And if you’re not registered, go to Bugmenot to get around the Times’ registration process.
Sad thing is that there are a couple of hundred people in that group and the ones who resigned with Stein, a mere dozen, seem to be almost all Jewish.
Don’t give too much credit to the L.A. Times. While you would think this was an issue with national (or international) importance, they used the excuse of Stein’s lecture to bury this article in Saturday’s local-news section — which virtually no one reads (unless they’re looking for furniture ads).
If you want an idea of what the L.A. Times considers important Middle East coverage, check out this headline and subhead from the front page of the following day’s paper: “The Mideast’s Most Wanted: Israel hunts militants it considers terrorists. The Palestinian leader needs them to come out of hiding to fight Hamas.”
In it, we learn that Israel has been “slow to keep its promises” to grant amnesty to what the Times calls “quiet” Fatah militants, including one who “swears he has not fired his M-16 rifle at an Israeli in nearly four years.” That’s the kind of objective in-depth reporting we’ve come to know and love from our home-town paper.