Att dra sig ur debatter -- två exempel

Henrik Alexandersson noterade att TV-meteorologen Pär Holmgren så att säga hade lämnat walk over inför en debatt med en kritiker av de alarmerande växthuseffektsteorierna. (Råkade skymta Pär på Kunskapskanalen i dag, där han hävdade att vi kommer att få en höjning av havet på en meter inom några decennier.)


Nu har tydligen även förre presidenten Jimmy Carter -- han som den senaste tiden uttalat sig i extremt kritiska ordalag mot Israel och judarna -- lämnat in något som man nog kan tolka som walk over rörande en debatt om Palestina på ett amerikanskt universitet. Mer i The Boston Globe.

Här är Carters rådgivare Eizenstats och Carters egna kommentarer rörande den planerade debatten i samband med Carters boklansering:

...before accepting, he called longtime friend and former adviser Stuart Eizenstat, a member of Brandeis's Board of Trustees, for advice.

Eizenstat said he advised Carter not to accept because he did not know whether the professor had an agenda.

A member of Carter's staff later asked whether Reinharz could extend an invitation, instead, so Eizenstat said he approached Reinharz [the president of the university] with an idea: invite Carter to debate Dershowitz, who had recently reviewed Carter's book and who had previously expressed a desire to debate Carter several times.

A debate "would make this a real academic exercise," Eizenstat said. ". . . The president of the university is not in the business of inviting someone, even a former president, for a book tour."

Reinharz thought the debate was "a terrific idea," he said in a telephone interview.

Carter, however, was stunned by the proposal.

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

Man kan ju undra vad som menas med ordet arrogans... :-)

I Boston Globe-artikeln finns även lite om orsaken till ex-presidentens rykte:

"There is no debate in America about anything that would be critical of Israel," [Carter] said in an interview Wednesday night.

But a furor has erupted because of the use of the word apartheid, which seems to equate the oppression of Palestinians with that endured by black South Africans under that country's now-defunct system of state-mandated racial segregation.

Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights organization, said Carter "should be ashamed of himself." And Kenneth W. Stein, one of Carter's former aides, dropped his association with the Carter Center in Atlanta, a human rights organization founded by the former president and his wife Rosalynn.

Andra bloggar om: debatt, politik, växthuseffekten, miljö, jimmy carter, judar, palestina, israel, mellanöstern