Carter’s “Apartheid” and MSM’s “Swiftboating”

Words have meaning, or facts don’t.

The meaning and use of words are really matters of power. As the meeting of Alice with Humpty Dumpty in Wonderland went:

Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.
Alice: The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.
Humpty Dumpty: The question is: which is to be master - that's all.

Words have denotations, a particular factual reference, and connotations, associated meanings. Most listeners do not distinguish denotations and connotations in common usage. The borders are unknown – the facts not being known – or the associated meanings created have taken over popular understanding. A society’s wordsmiths, its powerful writers and politicians, exert much influence over how this plays out.

We see this with such words as “swiftboating,” which the liberal media has negligently defined as “unsubstantiated” attacks on a politician, it only applying to exposures of Democrats, ignoring eye-witness depositions and the non-MSM investigative unearthing of John Kerry’s exaggerations and lies.

We see this with the international propaganda effort to label Israel an “apartheid” state. It’s a well-considered and coordinated campaign, to make Israel a pariah.

Former president Jimmy Carter is a willing co-conspirator, and he didn’t start recently.

None other than John Kerry’s hagiographer, Douglas Brinkley, revealed what Carter was advising Yasser Arafat on how to describe the 1987-1993 Palestinian intifada:

Carter advised him to tell the world of the Palestinians' situation in speeches designed ``to secure maximum sympathy." …Brinkley said Carter told him, referring to the civil rights injustices that occurred in the southern United States in the 1960s, that ``the intifada exposed the injustice Palestinians suffered, just like Bull Connor's mad dogs in Birmingham."

Carter ratcheted up his animosity to Israel in his latest description of Israel as an apartheid state, and seeks to mask his purpose by saying, as the Associated Press reports “I have spent a good part of my life seeking peace for Israel based on justice for the Arabs.”

One-sided “justice” is otherwise known as a kangaroo court and, in this instance, annihilation of Israel and Jews.

In an interview with Yossi Beilin, leftist Israeli politician and architect of the Oslo peace accords, he was asked what he thought of the Israel-apartheid comparison.

“It’s really crazy,” Beilin told me. “Only ignorant people, or people with malice, can say something like that. The ignorance is either about what apartheid was all about, or about Israel,” he said.

Benjamin Pogrund, former deputy editor of South Africa’s Rand Daily Mail, explains:

Apartheid … comes easily to hand: it is a lazy label for the complexities of the Middle East conflict. It is also used because, if it can be made to stick, then Israel can be made to appear to be as vile as was apartheid SA and seeking its destruction can be presented to the world as an equally moral cause.

The influence of such intellectual laziness, or animosity, in using falsely inflammatory words is international.

Cardinal Karl Lehmann, chairman of the Conference of German Catholic Bishops, deplored Wednesday remarks by bishops who said walls around Palestinian communities reminded them of the Warsaw Jewish ghetto….

Two Catholic bishops in a party that visited Yad Vashem this week had been quoted saying they were shocked to see on the same day images of the ghetto where the Nazis confined Warsaw Jews and the confinement of Palestinians in the West Bank by walls. …

Lehmann said, "The German bishops are aware of their historical responsibility. We know that we have to constantly show this anew by being sensitive in our choice of words."

When our major media display tolerance for, indeed participate in, the adulteration of language and facts, as with “swiftboating,” they are also creating the fertile ground for other adulterations of language, as for calling Israel an “apartheid” state.