Jimmuh Chickens Out

Jimmuh Carter is promoting his new book in which he claims to want to "provoke dialogue", but he's backing out of a debate with a critic:

BOSTON (AP) — Former President Carter has decided not to visit Brandeis University to talk about his new book "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" because he does not want to debate Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz as the university had requested.

"I don't want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz," Carter told The Boston Globe. "There is no need ... for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine."

The debate request is proof that many in the United States are unwilling to hear an alternative view on the nation's most taboo foreign policy issue, Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, Carter said.

Carter, who brokered the 1978 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt and who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, has said the goal of his book is to provoke dialogue and action.

"There is no debate in America about anything that would be critical of Israel," he said.

But it's Carter who is unwilling to debate his own best-selling book, controversial because the title's inclusion of the word "apartheid" appears to equate the treatment of Palestinians with the state-sanctioned racial segregation that once divided South Africa.

"President Carter said he wrote the book because he wanted to encourage more debate; then why won't he debate?" Dershowitz said.

Jimmuh should call David Duke. I'm sure Duke can recommend some places he can speak where he won't be challenged.