A DEVASTATING CRITIQUE OF CARTER AND HIS ANTI-SEMITISM

BELOW IS JUST AN EXCERPT, BUT I URGE YOU TO READ THE WHOLE THING.

Our Worst Ex-President by Joshua Muravchik (Commentary)
Jimmy Carter’s recent obsessions are of a piece with his strange, and sometimes dangerous, ideological career.

Carter has lately turned his focus anew to the Arab-Israel conflict. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is his second book on the subject, a reprise in shriller terms of the themes sounded in his earlier The Blood of Abraham (1985). Carter’s interest in the conflict is in one sense natural: the agreement he mediated between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978 stands as one of the few solid achievements of his presidency. Yet the intensity of his rhetoric suggests that his absorption with this issue derives from something deeper than the pleasure of returning to the scene of past triumphs.

For someone who once played and still fancies himself in the role of mediator, Carter’s visceral attitudes to the two sides are strikingly disparate. He finds something to like in every Arab leader he meets. In light of Camp David, his fondness for Sadat is easy to understand. But he also seems to have felt warmly toward Syria’s dictator Hafez al-Assad, who in the late 1970’s led the recriminations against Sadat for allegedly betraying the Arab cause in making peace with Israel. Upon meeting Assad in 1978, Carter noted in his diary that “[t]here was a lot of good humor between us, and I found him to be constructive in attitude.”

The Palestine Liberation Organization also tried to scuttle the Camp David agreement, but this hardly seems to have diminished Carter’s affection for Yasir Arafat. In the new book, Carter writes blandly that “When I met with Yasir Arafat in 1990, he stated, ‘The PLO has never advocated the annihilation of Israel. The Zionists started the “drive the Jews into the sea” slogan and attributed it to the PLO.’” This fabrication Carter quotes without comment, leaving the reader to take it at face value. In fact, of course, the covenant of the PLO states that the

partition of Palestine, which took place in 1947, and the establishment of Israel are fundamentally invalid. . . . The Palestinian Arab people . . . reject all alternatives to the total liberation of Palestine.

There is no doubt that Carter is familiar with this, because (as we learn from Brinkley) in a private meeting he lobbied Arafat unsuccessfully to amend it. On that meeting, Carter is mum here.

Besides giving a pass to Arafat’s mendacities, Carter also assisted him more actively by, in Brinkley’s words, seeking to “reshap[e] how Yasir Arafat was understood in the United States, not as a terrorist but as a peacemaker.” Toward that end, Carter volunteered as a ghostwriter, “draft[ing] on his home computer the strategy and wording for a generic speech Arafat was to deliver soon for Western ears.” In 1990, when Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait led to a devastating loss of funding for the PLO, Carter appealed to Saudi Arabia to turn the spigot back on. As Brinkley summarizes the ex-President’s feelings for the PLO chieftain, this was a “fondness . . . that transcended politics, based on their emotional connection and the shared belief that they were both ordained to be peacemakers by God.”

No such emotional connection, certainly, characterizes Carter’s feelings about most Israeli leaders he has met—including Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert. Universally, they seem rather to evoke his dislike, and Israel as a whole seems to have the same effect on him. In his new book he complains about the country’s secularism, noting that the Bibles handed to recruits at the completion of military training are “one of the few indications of a religious commitment that I observed.” But he has no use for religious Israelis, either, complaining that “very conservative religious parties [are] granted almost exclusive control over all forms of worship.” One cannot help comparing this with Carter’s praise of the Saudi royal family for “preserving the proper degree of religious commitment” in their country—a country where Christian Bibles are sometimes confiscated at the border and Jews were long barred altogether.

Whether Carter’s liking for Arabs and dislike for Israelis is cause or effect, an overwhelming bias resonates on almost every page of his new book. Thus, he repeatedly denounces Israel for violating Palestinian human rights—a denunciation that sits oddly not only with his fatuous approval of such world-class human-rights abusers as Ceausescu, Kim, and Milosevic, but also with his delicately constrained comments on the human-rights practices of the Saudi rulers, who in his unctuous words “offset their absolute authority with a remarkable closeness to their subjects.”

And what about the human rights of the Palestinians at the hands of their own leaders? According to Freedom House, the degree of freedom enjoyed in parts of the West Bank and Gaza administered by the Palestinian Authority has scarcely exceeded that in the parts administered by Israel. But Carter has remained silent about the abuse of Palestinians by Arafat and his successors.

To make Israel the culprit of his historical narrative, Carter is compelled to turn many things upside down. In the 1970’s, he writes, “rejection of Israel was shared by the leaders of all Arab nations, following four wars in the previous 25 years.” This sentence gives the impression that the “four wars” somehow caused Arab rejectionism, when the inverse is true: rejection of Israel was the reason for the wars. In another inversion, he claims that Israeli plans to divert water from the Jordan and the Sea of Galilee were what prompted the founding of the PLO in 1964. In fact, when the Arab states turned down a U.S. plan for the distribution of water because it would allow “the Zionists to consolidate their existence,” Israel secured American approval to divert a smaller amount on its own, to which the Arabs retaliated by diverting water upstream of Israel and by forming the PLO as an anti-Israel guerrilla movement to continue the war of annihilation by other means.

In still another passage Carter writes: “One of the vulnerabilities of Israel and a potential cause of violence is the holding of prisoners,” thus making it out that Israel’s imprisonment of terrorists causes violence when it is terrorist violence that causes imprisonment. In a like vein, he asserts that “Palestinian leaders unequivocally accepted” the Bush administration’s “road map” while “Israel has officially rejected its key provisions with unacceptable caveats and prerequisites.” The reason Israel announced caveats is that it took the document seriously. The Palestinians may have accepted the road map rhetorically, but they have not fulfilled, and have declared they will not fulfill, its cornerstone requirement—namely, that “Palestinians declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere.”

Of this, Carter breathes not a word. Instead, over and over again he denies, omits, obscures, justifies, or defines away Arab terrorism against Israel. In one place, for example, erasing the distinction between victims who are deliberately targeted and those who are harmed accidentally, he asserts that “the killing of noncombatants in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon by bombs, missile attacks, assassinations, or other acts of violence cannot be condoned.” Eliding yet another distinction, he uses the euphemism “dissidents” for terrorists. In another place, he claims absurdly that “As a people, [Palestinians] were branded by Israeli officials as terrorists, and even minor expressions of displeasure brought the most severe punishment.” As for what the PLO was doing all those years when Israel was falsely “branding” the Palestinians as terrorists, it seems that after 1969, when he became chairman of the PLO, “Arafat turned much of his attention to raising funds for the care and support of the refugees.”

It is not only Arafat whose pacifism Carter credits. Now that the PLO has been upstaged by Hamas, he finds peaceful intentions in that quarter, too—even in the face of Hamas denials that it adheres to any such view. Reporting credulously that “Hamas would modify its rejection of Israel if there is a negotiated agreement that Palestinians can approve,” he has urged Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to forge a coalition government with this terrorist organization that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Hamas, Carter writes, has “meticulously observed a cease-fire commitment,” and “since August of 2004 [it] has not committed a single act of terrorism that cost an Israeli life.” How Carter purports to know this, no one can say, since throughout the book he provides neither footnotes nor citations. As it happens, Hamas announces its operations on its websites and elsewhere. In the time frame Carter specifies, Hamas claimed responsibility for fifteen terror attacks that killed 26 Israelis: two young children and eleven other civilians, and thirteen soldiers. Two of the soldiers were killed in the course of the kidnapping of a third, Gilad Shalit, in an incident that Carter himself refers to (naturally faulting Israel).

Finally, while minimizing any Arab wish or intent to destroy Israel, Carter professes himself uncertain about the intentions of the other side. In The Blood of Abraham he wrote:

Without ever abandoning their most ambitious goals of a uniquely Jewish nation, with boundaries similar to those in the time of King David and surrounded by acquiescent and peaceful neighbors, the Jews have been willing to pursue them in incremental steps, even compromising for a while when necessary.

Although he does not repeat this assertion in the new book, he has never retracted or revised it. In his view, the underlying source of the conflict is “Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land.” Thus he concludes:

The bottom line is this: peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens—and honor its own previous commitments—by accepting its legal borders.

As for the “general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups,” they too need to make it clear that they “will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism”—but only “when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.” In other words, it is all right for terrorism against Israel to continue. Until when? Well, since Carter dismisses Israel’s repeated declarations that it accepts both international law and the road map, this formulation can only mean that the terror should continue until Israel bows to the interpretations and conditions set by the Arabs.

When it comes to Israel, it would take a book to catalogue all of Carter’s false or wildly misleading statements on matters historical, political, military, and diplomatic. Kenneth Stein, a Middle East expert at the Carter Center who had helped write The Blood of Abraham, resigned to protest the latest book. “It is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments,” Stein wrote. “Aside from the one-sided nature of the book . . . there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book.”

What is to explain Carter’s passion against Israel? This question is not easy to answer. A recent article in the online journal FrontPage enumerated some of the millions of dollars that the Carter Center receives from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Arab states, but it is hard to know whether this is inducement or merely a benefit of Carter’s position. It is also true that opposition to Israel fits seamlessly into the ex-President’s leftist/third-worldist outlook in general. But this too does not explain the blind intensity of his obsession.

Something of the old-fashioned pre-Vatican II Christian animus toward Jews may be at work in Carter. In The Blood of Abraham, he claimed pointedly that Jews regard themselves as a chosen “race.” (In fact the biblical idea of a “chosen people” is not racial: anyone may join this “race” by conversion.) A similar spirit creeps into several passages of his recent book. In one place he writes of a visit “with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities—the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost 2,000 years earlier.” In another he says of Israel’s anti-terrorist barrier (which he refers to variously as the “segregation barrier” and the “imprisonment wall”): “The wall ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians. In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples.” In still another, he claims that Jewish discrimination has caused “a surprising exodus of Christians from the Holy Land.” (A more powerful cause is persecution of Christians by Muslims; but Carter says nothing, for example, of the YMCA in the West Bank town of Qalqilya that was ordered closed by Hamas officials and then burned to the ground.)

Sounding a more contemporary note of Jew-bashing, Carter echoes newly revived speculations about a conspiracy among American advocates of Israel’s cause. “Because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the United States,” he writes, “Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, [and] voices from Jerusalem dominate in our media.” Who might those “powerful . . . religious forces” be? The Christian Right supports Israel, but no one has ever accused it of dominating the media. Carter can only mean the Jews.

In a speech at a book event in November, Carter dwelled at length on the so-called Geneva Accord, an unofficial 2003 proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement in which he was involved. Then he added: “Never, in this country, do you hear any of these issues proposed publicly by an elected member of the House or the Senate or in the White House or NBC or ABC or CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times. Never.” His point was that the “media” suppress views like his own. In truth, when the accord was announced, a New York Times editorial hailed it as “truly momentous,” and the other papers mentioned by Carter also praised it in editorials and gave it ample coverage in news and feature stories. But he will not see what he will not see.

As Carter’s latest book and speeches have begun to evoke criticism from Jewish groups and others, he has taken on a new role: that of the martyr. After declining to debate Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz at Brandeis University, he took umbrage when the university, for its part, declined his request that it hire a private plane to bring him to speak alone. The incident led him to declare in the press: “My most troubling experience has been the rejection of my offers to speak, for free, about the book on university campuses with high Jewish enrollment.” In sum, Carter, who seems to think of himself as a latter-day prince of peace, and who has performed “miracles” in North Korea and elsewhere, is now being persecuted for his goodness by the Jews.