Dear Free Press Editors,

I just read Jason Miller's essay called Jesus Knows a Camel... dated 4/7/08. I can't argue with any of it but his statement that Israel is a murderous state. I am a left wing liberal but I am pro-Israel. I have read many smears of Israel on left wing sites. I don't know why it is but people who smear Israel on the left obviously are ignorant of the history and context of what's been going on there since 1948. I suggest that you don't have your writers write about issues when they don't know the history. Stick to what you know. Leave Israel to the experts. It is so complicated that if one just reads the newspaper these days and that makes them think they actually understand the issues--it's not possible. It will take a lot more study. Newspapers do an abysmal job of covering Israel. They always leave out half the story.

There is so much background information that is needed to really understand. So stop blaming the victim. You may think you get it, but you obviously don't if you let that sort of commentary on your site.

The Arab world has used the Palestinians as a political football

Rosalynn, Jeff, and I arrived in Israel Sunday, 4/13/08, after a very exciting and successful election monitoring mission in Nepal (see prior trip report). Since Israel had declined to approve a previously planned visit by three of us Elders (Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, and me), I expected a similar negative reaction when I substituted this trip on behalf of The Carter Center. Sure enough, all my requests to meet with ministers of the government were publicly rejected and, more seriously, three requests from our Secret Service detail to work with Israeli security were rejected. This was our first experience of this kind in more than 125 foreign nations we've visited since leaving the White House. (After several news stories on this subject, when we returned to Israel, Shin Bet security met us at the airport and worked with us.)

Lurid headlines have been blooming in my fair city, Chicago, along with the daffodils. A dozen dead, 40 injured in less than a week. The mayor calls a gun summit. The police chief promises to send SWAT teams in full battle dress to troubled neighborhoods.

“If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.” — Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

Like the war on terror, violence in the ’hood is mostly a macabre abstraction. It’s a game that others play, a spectator sport — unless, until, we’re affected personally.

Peace activist Desiree Fairooz was convicted of disorderly conduct today in US Superior Court. Fairooz approached and called US Secretary of State Condi Rice a war criminal at a congressional hearing in September 2007.

Government prosecutor and pro-war supporter, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, asked Judge Richard Ringell to sentence Fairooz to 90 days in the DC Jail. Ringell told Fairooz that there is a price for civil disobedience that included jail time. However, the judge said he would not be sentencing Fairooz to jail time, according to peace activists who were in court today. Instead Ringell sentenced Fairooz to 5 days jail time suspended, 3 months of unsupervised probation, and the payment of $50 to the victims of violent crime fund activists said.

The US Supreme Court has just dealt a serious blow to voters' rights that could help put John McCain in the White House by eliminating tens of thousands of voters who generally vote Democratic.

By 6-3 the Court has upheld an Indiana law that requires citizens to present a photo identification card in order to vote. Florida, Michigan, Louisiana, Georgia, Hawaii and South Dakota have similar laws. Though it's unlikely, as many as two dozen other states could add them by election day. Other states, like Ohio, have less stringent ID requirements than Indiana's, but still have certain restrictions that are strongly opposed by voter rights advocates.

The decision turns back two centuries of jurisprudence that has accepted a registered voter's signature as sufficient identification for casting a ballot. By matching that signature against one given at registration, and with harsh penalties for ballot stuffing, the Justices confirmed in their lead opinion that there is "no evidence" for the kind of widespread voter fraud Republican partisans have used to justify the demand for photo ID.