Carter: Our Worst Ex-President?
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, January 12, 2007 4:20 PM PT
The Presidency: When those close to a person of eminence sever ties because of his objectionable beliefs, something is very wrong. That's exactly where one disgraced ex-president finds himself these days.
Time was that Jimmy Carter, the ex-president in question, could rely on his reputation as a foreign democracy monitor and charitable home builder to maintain a modicum of public affection and respect.
Sadly, that time now seems past. With his recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Carter has deservedly been hammered for his twisted anti-Israel beliefs. Now, his namesake Carter Center has been rocked by the departure of a number of well-respected board members, angry over the book.
We've read the book, and it's a doozy. Its anti-Israel bias begins with the title — which likens Israel's legitimate efforts to defend itself from terrorism by building a fence with the racist system of apartheid — and permeates the entire book.
Israel's supporters understandably are outraged. The book tries to strike a note of moral equivalence between Israel and the terrorist thugs who now control the West Bank. In one typical passage (pages 205 and 206), Carter writes:
"There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East: 1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and 2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories."
There you have it: History as moral equivalence, no good guys, no bad guys. Both sides wrong.
In fact, as Carter knows, the "some Israelis" he references are in fact marginalized and largely pushed to the side in Israel's public debate. That's not the case with the "some Palestinians" he mentions, who are actually in charge of the West Bank now.
It's a sad fact, but the war between Israel and the Palestinians could be over, once and for all, tomorrow. And the Palestinians could have their state. All they'd have to do is make a clear, unequivocal statement that Israel has a right to exist. But they've never done so, contrary to what Carter suggests.
Such dishonesty stems in part from Carter's compromised position as head of the center. As we noted two weeks ago, since the center's founding in 1982 it has received millions in funding from Arab sources — including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Are such donations morally wrong? No. But taking that cash makes it hard to argue, as Carter does, that he is a neutral arbiter of a conflict that pits Arabs against Israelis. Or for Carter to imply that Jewish Americans, in exercising their right to free speech, are nefariously using their money and influence to kill all debate.
So when Carter says that "severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts" keep Americans from knowing about Palestinians' suffering, it's really just shorthand for "the Jews control the media" — an old anti-Semitic canard.
These lies are of a piece with others found in Carter's book.
One of the truly big whoppers is that Yasser Arafat, Hamas and others in the Palestinian leadership are men of peace. This is an absurdity, by any stretch of the imagination. These are men of terror, and should be treated as such.
Carter on page 62 recounts a meeting with Yasser Arafat in 1990. He quotes Arafat, uncritically, saying: "The PLO has never advocated the annihilation of Israel." Arafat blames the idea on "Zionists."
Since Carter lets this lie go completely unchallenged, he must believe it. In fact, the very reason for the PLO's founding was to eliminate Israel. There are many other lies, large and small.
On page 39, for instance, Carter says that U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 have as a basic premise that "Israel must withdraw from occupied territories." Strange, because the book itself has the texts of both 242 and 338. Neither says Israel "must" withdraw.
We could go on and on. The book is that bad. It's ruined a president's reputation. Sadly, Carter's descent seems to have also delegitimized his once-respected Carter Center. As we noted, since the firestorm over the book began, 14 members of the Carter Center's 200-person board have quit in protest.
In two letters, they charge Carter with "malicious advocacy" against Israel, adding that "we can no longer endorse your strident and uncompromising position."
We're pretty sure Carter's reputation will remain in tatters, given his anti-Israel diatribes. The peanut farmer from Georgia, once the leader of the free world, now seems a very small man indeed. |
