You’ve
\ngot to admire Jimmy Carter. No matter how wrong he is, no matter how
\nmany times he is refuted, no matter how inane his ramblings, he just
\nkeeps on coming back for more. Forget the fact that he was eviscerated
\nin a landslide election where the American people overwhelmingly voted
\nto shoo him from the presidency. And forget the fact that historians
\nand the public rate him as arguably the worst president of all time.
\nCarter doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. We’re stuck with him
\nforever. He just won’t go away.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Most recently Carter shared his
\npenetrating insight that opposition to President Obama is fueled by
\nracism. Obama himself disagreed with the great oracle from Plains. More
\nimportantly, Obama’s biggest critics still like him a lot more than the
\nex-President, even though Jimmy is a white man.<\/p>\n
But leaving aside that inconvenient fact for a moment, it seems
\nincredible that Carter would accuse Obama’s critics of racism when
\naround the world Carter is perceived to be an anti-Semite. His nonstop
\ncriticism of Israel as an apartheid state and his refusal to
\nacknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself – he has accused Israel of
\natrocities in Gaza while not leveling similar criticism at the Hamas
\nterror organization which rained incessant missiles on Israeli families
\n– has confirmed in the minds of many that Carter just has a bit of a
\nproblem with the Jewish state.<\/p>\n
But I for one have never bought it.<\/p>\n
Carter, I have argued, is not so much an anti-Semite as, what Lenin
\nfamously called, ‘a useful idiot,’ his mistake being to always side
\nwith the weaker party in a conflict notwithstanding their immorality.
\nLet us never forget that the Carter Administration tried to seat the
\nexiled Khmer Rouge as the rightful government of Cambodia even though
\nthey slaughtered one out of three Cambodians. For Carter, weakness was
\nitself a sign of righteousness.<\/p>\n
I grew up in the United States during the 1970’s when we danced to
\ndisco music, wore leisure suits, and watched the Brady Bunch. But as if
\nthat weren’t torture enough, we had Jimmy Carter as president. I can
\nstill recall how depressing it was to watch his taciturn face
\nannouncing one catastrophe after another, from the skyrocketing misery
\nindex, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the capture of our
\nhostages in Iran, to the tragically botched rescue attempt to free
\nthem. Fortune did not smile on Jimmy Carter and he was, poor thing,
\nhapless at everything he touched.<\/p>\n
But Carter’s biggest failing was to be bereft of a moral compass. To
\nbe sure, his heart wished to do good. It’s just that his head was often
\nconfused as to what the good was. Throughout his career he invariably
\nfound himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their
\noppressed peoples, not because he was an insensitive man but rather
\nbecause he was a confused man.<\/p>\n
Carter always subscribed to what my friend Michael Scroccaro calls
\n‘Underdogma,’ a knew-jerk reaction to champion the cause of the
\nunderdog however immoral. Poverty dictates virtue and weakness dictates
\nrighteousness. So, if the Israelis have jetfighters and the
\nPalestinians only Katyushas then that must necessarily mean that the
\nIsraelis are the guilty party.<\/p>\n
Carter’s obsession underdog obsession is what motivated him to
\nlegitimize Fidel Castro and take his side in a bio-weapons dispute with
\nthe United States and to praise North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung with
\nthe words: “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent,…and in charge of
\nthe decisions about this country.” Carter added absurdly, “I don’t see
\nthat they [the North Koreans] are an outlaw nation.” He also hailed
\nMarshal Joseph Tito as “a man who believes in human rights,” and said
\nof murderous Romanian dictator Nicolas Ceausescu, “Our goals are the
\nsame: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe
\nin enhancing human rights.” Carter also told Haitian dictator Raul
\nC\u00e9dras that he was “ashamed of what my country has done to your
\ncountry,” which made most Americans ashamed of Jimmy Carter.<\/p>\n
From all this I concluded that Jimmy Carter was not anti-Semite so
\nmuch as a man hopelessly na\u00efve and utterly lacking in moral judgment.
\nTruly, a well-meaning idiot.<\/p>\n
To be sure, I received a great deal of criticism from informed and
\nintelligent readers who told me I was the one who hopelessly na\u00efve.
\nJimmy Carter was a glaring anti-Semite. Was I blinded by my own theory?<\/p>\n
Therefore, when Carter said in 2006 that Israel’s policies in the
\nWest Bank were actually worse than apartheid South Africa, I began to
\nquestion whether my readers were right. When he followed up in his 2009
\nbook “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” that due to “powerful
\npolitical, economic, and religious forces in the U.S., Israeli
\ngovernment decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, voices from
\nJerusalem dominate our media,” I said to myself anyone who rolls out
\nthe old Jews-control-the-world theory probably is an anti-Semite. And
\nthen the clincher seemed to be Carter’s recent pronouncement that “the
\nkey factor that prevents peace is the continuing building of Israeli
\nsettlements in Palestine, driven by a determined minority of Israelis
\nwho desire to occupy and colonize east Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
\nYou mean Palestinian terrorism, Arab aversion to democracy, and sixty
\nyears of Arab wars to annihilate Israel had nothing to do with the
\nabsence of peace? Surely this man was a bigot! And yet, something
\ninside told me that Carter did not harbor any unnatural hostility to
\nJews.<\/p>\n
I was therefore delighted to chance upon Prof. Alan Dershowitz’s
\noutstanding series of articles detailing the millions of dollars of
\nknown funding that Carter has personally and institutionally taken from
\nleading Arab sources, including Saudi King Fahd, the now-defunct BCCI
\nbank that was controlled indirectly the Saudi royal family, Shiekh
\nZayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and Agha Hasan Abedi, among others. These
\nmillions, some of which even went to bail-out the Carter family peanut
\nbusiness in the late 1970’s, finally vindicated my earlier theory.<\/p>\n
Jimmy Carter is not an anti-Semite. He is simply a man with a price.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n