I want to briefly revisit the subject of Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. A few weeks ago, I criticized a New York Times article that presented a misleading characterization of Carter’s use of the term “apartheid” in the title.

In that post, I didn’t comment directly the propriety of Carter’s use of the term “apartheid,” which he attempts to separate from the South African case by writing that “The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa — not racism, but the acquisition of land.”

On reflection, though, I do want to object to Carter’s use of the term for the same reasons I object to Nazi analogies – it inflames rather than informs, bringing to mind powerful negative associations that operate outside of rational thought. Here’s part of what I wrote in the post on Nazi analogies:

The other problem with invoking the Nazis is that the negative associations associated with controversial persons, historical figures, etc. are activated outside of consciousness. In the political science and psychology literatures, this has been shown to happen immediately and automatically. Thus, someone raising the Nazis can trade on the negative associations attached to the Nazis even as they disavow the exploitation of those associations. The same applies with race, as in the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which activated racial considerations without specifically mentioning race (as Tali Mendelberg showed in an excellent Public Opinion Quarterly article).

As much as Carter may protest, he’s creating an association between Israeli and the racist South African government in the mind of his readers.