Let's talk Apartheid

A while back, some unknown former president that I'm sure nobody has ever heard of published a book overviewing all sides of the arguments between Israel and Palestine, as well as offering some solutions to these problems. This book angered many of our comrades on the right side of the fence. How dare a former president write a book critical of Israel!, they screamed. Worse yet, this former president used the word "Apatheid" in the title of his book as a description of what Israel was doing to Palestine, and such claims against Israel are outrageous and racist!, they also claimed.

Well.

They're gonna fucking hate this news item: "Olmert fears apartheid in the Mideast."

For those of you who are scratching your heads over just who "Olmert" is, he's the prime minister of Israel. You know, head of state, yadda yadda... The linked article has further details on his comments:

JERUSALEM -- In unusually frank comments, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Thursday that "the state of Israel is finished" unless a Palestinian nation is created, saying the alternative is a South African-style apartheid struggle. [...]

"The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights," Olmert told Haaretz [a major Israeli daily newspaper]. "As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

So there you have it: the chief executive officer of Israel compares his country's treatment of Palestine to the racist apartheid system that gripped South Africa so many years ago. On the heels of this news, I betcha three things won't happen:

- The Right won't apologize to President Carter for their vicious attacks on his character
- The Right won't be even a tenth as much angry with Olmert as they were with Carter
- And, most importantly (or should I say "pathetically"?), the Right won't read Olmert's comments and rethink their views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict

Because, after all, they could never, ever be wrong! Not even when the head in a country whose reprehensible actions they so slavishly defend says they're wrong.