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Is using the "a" word a nono?

"President Jimmy Carter's latest book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Simon and Schuster 2006), released yesterday, has been primed for controversy. Weeks before it hit the bookshelves, election-hungry Democrats were disavowing it because it used the word "apartheid" to describe the discrimination against Palestinians living in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. House Representative and soon-to-be Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote: "It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously." But does the President's book really warrant the swift condemnation leveled against it by his own party?"

Read this interesting piece on Counterpunch analysing whether Israel is, in fact, engaged in apartheid not unlike that once practiced in South Africa.

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