ANOTHER CRITIQUE OF CARTER'S BOOK

Israel's Right to Life - Paul Merkley (Christianity Today)
Former president Jimmy Carter's views are not irrational, they are just unbalanced - driven by an unquenchable private need for vindication. He cannot let go of the fact that the only part of his Camp David Accords of 1978-1979 which has lasted (and that just barely) is the achievement of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. He proclaimed at the time that the U.S., Egypt, and Israel were committed under the Accords to persuade the Palestinians and all the Arab nations to resolve their quarrel with Israel along parallel lines. Carter has been working out his frustration regarding the failure of the larger hopes for "Middle East peace" ever since.

But Carter's Camp David formula was built on a fantasy: that the Arab world's complaint against Israel has to do with geography. The creation of the State of Israel is an intolerable reversal of the judgment of the Prophet Muhammad that, for their refusal to heed his voice, "humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them [the Jews] and they were visited with wrath from Allah" (Sura II: 61; cf., Sura III: 112). It is for this unforgivable assault on the credibility of Islam that Israel cannot be permitted to stand.

There is not a word about Islam in Carter's book. Neither is there any developed attention to the dynamic of terror. Carter refers to "the revered prisoner, Marwan Barghouti." Barghouti is "revered" because he is directly responsible for the murder of several Israeli citizens. To Israel it makes sense that he should be a prisoner. To Carter, it does not.

Carter does not mention those philanthropic Jews who put up millions of dollars in early 2005 in order to meet the needs of a Palestinian population in Gaza said to be suffering because of Israeli oppression, transferring ownership and custody of the scientifically advanced, productive greenhouses and orchards - the most advanced facilities of their kind in the world - cost-free, to the local Arabs. The Arab response was to trash everything, carry off all the pipes and equipment and hoses and sprinklers, and then to plant in the garbage dump that remained beds for the missiles which rain down terror over the Negev today.

The Palestinian people, who elected Hamas to be their government, consistently tell pollsters, by whacking great margins, that there will never be peace until Israel ceases to exist. The Palestinians are never going to embrace a healthier attitude so long as international voices with the prestige of Jimmy Carter keep up their unrelenting assault on Israel's right to life.