Days of Confusion and Purpose

“Above all, Carter has contributed, often intentionally, to the growing international campaign to demonize Israel and purge the Middle East’s sole democracy from the community of nations.” [Jacob Laksin, “Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews”].

With the recent burial of Carter, the media treated him overly kindly. In fact, the singular act of his presence during the Begin-Sadat inauguration as opposed to Sadat’s action is an overlooked step. Mitchell l Bard, an established analyst says, “Though hailed as a peacemaker, his actions and statements, particularly after leaving office, show a much darker side steeped in anti-Semitism.”

Carter’s fall from political grace had been as swift as his rise a handful of years previously. He had been “hot political property in 2006” as well as in 2008. He campaigned for his party’s 2010 candidates from afar, holding risers “but not hitting the campaign trail in most of the contested races. “Those mass rallies of Obama frenzy were surely of the past.”

It was Carter who, in a 1977 commencement address, admonished Americans for what he sneeringly dubbed their “inordinate fear of communism.” In 2002, he paid court to Fidel Castro, becoming the 1st American ex-president to honor the longtime Cuban dictator with his official presence.

Carter had routinely inserted himself into political disputes the world over, often, as above, to the detriment of US principles and interests. No conflict, however, had so preoccupied the 39th president as the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians at the time.

Since the moment in 1978 when the previous enemies shook hands, Carter had increasingly seen his role as that of an apologist for the “Palestinians” and prosecutor, judge and jury of Israel. Carter’s attempt to link territories surrounded by Israel’s security barrier to South African “Bantustans” fails even the most elementary test of historical logic.

Double standards, a recurring feature of Carter’s political career, find its expression in his book, the ungrammatically titled “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.” To read it is to witness not an objective mediator, as Carter imagines himself to be, but an unscrupulous propagandist, who masks his ill-concealed aversion to Israel in a posture of neutrality.

Carter’s repeated attempts to pass himself off as a victim of pro-Israel interests bent on silencing debate impressed few in the Jewish community. Even close supporters and allies of the ex-president found that they “could no longer stand by as he voiced his support for ‘peace’ in the Middle East while indulging in anti-Israel invective and peddling sinister allegations about non-existent persecutors.

Of these, the most prominent-and, ultimately, the most damaging for Carter’s self-professed reputation as a speaker of unpopular truths—was his longtime colleague Kenneth Stein. A professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History and Israeli Studies at Emory University, the home of the Carter Center, Stein had co-authored a book with Carter in 1984 titled ‘The blood of Abraham’. As the 1st executive director of the Carter Center, stein had often advised carter about history and politics of the Middle East.

Over the years, however, Stein had grown disenchanted with Carter’s increasingly pronounced bias against Israel. In the 1990’s, Stein penned a personal letter to Carter voicing these concerns: ‘If you continue on the course of only criticizing or minimizing Israel in your public presentations, you will be doing yourself a potentially devastating disservice, particularly if you want to be reengaged in any capacity in any future Middle East diplomacy.

With the publication of ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’, Stein decided that he had finally had enough. He severed his 23-year affiliation with the Carter Center and, in his resignation letter, released a scathing indictment of Carter’s book.”

Instead of impressing Arab leaders on his travels of the necessity of recognizing Israel and renouncing their support for terrorism – an essential 1st step to any lasting peace settlement, Carter has preferred to pressure Israel, the one country that has repeatedly signaled its willingness, in word and deed, to make compromises with its neighbors.

Fouad Ajami explains how a broken link with the public, and a war in Afghanistan he neither embraced and sold to his party, nor abandoned served a time of puzzlement for President Obama. Further, his fall from political grace had been as swift as his rise a handful of years previously. He had been ‘hot political property in 2006’ as well as in 2008. He campaigned for his party’s 2010 candidates from afar, holding risers ‘but not hitting the campaign trail in most of the contested races. Those mass rallies of Obama frenzy were surely of the past.

The vaunted Obama economic stimulus, at $802 billion, had failed. The “progressives” wanted to double down, and had they had their way, would have pushed for a bigger stimulus, but the American people were in open rebellion against the economic tragedy of public debt, higher taxes and unending deficits.

On May 20, 2011, Stanley Kurtz asked the question, “Does President Obama’s radical past tell us anything about his stance on Israel today?” He believed Obama’s radical history speaks as an ultra-liberal, much further to the Left as he claims to be.

Many will have seen a YouTube clip from 1978 of an exchange between one Ben Nitay, a 29 year old economic consultant known today as Benjamin Netanyahu, and 33 year old Fouad in a jet-black beard. In this encounter, which took place a scant 2 years after the IDF’s dramatic rescue of Jewish hostages held by “Palestinian “ terrorists at Entebbe [an operation in which Jonathan Netanyahu lost his life], Fouad is very much the angry Arab, peppering an unflappable Bibi with aggressive questions about Israel’s policies towards the “Palestinians”.

Netanyahu publicly expressed concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions as early as the 1990’s. His warnings intensified during his 1st term as Prime minister [1996-1999] and continued throughout his political career, becoming a central theme of his tenure. Notably, in 2012, he used a dramatic “red line” illustration at the UN General Assembly to highlight the urgency of stopping Iran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu’s opposition to the 2015 nuclear deal [JCPOA] cemented his long-time standing focus on this issue. On the other hand, Fouad Ajami taught himself more about Israel than any Arab intellectual of his generation. He wrote:

“The Zionists built a durable state. It was military but not militaristic. It took in waves of refugees and refashioned them into citizens. It had room for faith but remained a secular enterprise. Under conditions of a long siege, it maintained a deep and abiding democratic ethos. The Arabs could have learned from this experiment, but did not.”

He told truths about the Arabs to America. But perhaps his greater legacy will prove to be the truths he told about Israel to the Arabs.