From a Pro-Arab website:
Former US president Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, was a true friend of Palestine. Despite a decidedly checkered presidency on issues ranging from human rights abroad to austerity at home, he will be remembered as one of the first and most distinguished international observers to foresee Israel’s apartheid system in Palestine.
In 2006, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he equated Israel’s occupation in the West Bank to the apartheid system of South Africa. Carter defined apartheid as the “forced separation of two peoples in the same territory with one of the groups dominating or controlling the other.” What follows, he concluded, is that Israel was creating a “system of apartheid” where a minority of Israeli settlers were ruling over a Palestinian majority who are deprived of basic human and civil rights.
Carter went further. In an interview with MSNBC, he called Israel’s rule in the West Bank “a horrendous example of apartheid” and “one of the worst examples of human right deprivations that I know.” In fact, Carter went on to warn that Israel’s apartheid system was even worse than South Africa. As he later told CBS: “When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200 or so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.”
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From the JP:
Among many other time-tested attributes, the Jewish people have a long memory. Aid us in the manner of the ancient Persian King Cyrus, and we will remember you forever fondly. Cross us as Seleucid King Antiochus IV did, and we will curse you every Hanukkah.
Our talent for remembering is particularly salient today after the death, at age of 100, of former president Jimmy Carter.
While the rest of the world is now hailing him as a statesman who, after his failed one-term presidency, rose to become an unstinting peacemaker, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a paragon of now non-existent virtues, many Jews will have a far more ambivalent reaction.
The man whose legacy could have been cherished by future Jewish generations, with streets in Jerusalem named for him and communities created in his honor, will be at best forgotten, if not reviled. That is the tragedy of Jimmy Carter, a leader who could have gone down in Jewish history as a second Truman, will be recalled, if at all, as another Bernie Sanders.
The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the Jewish state owes Carter an immense historical debt. In an anomalous way, his insistence on including the Soviets in the Middle East peace process immediately after Egypt succeeded in evicting them convinced president Anwar Sadat of the need to act swiftly and independently of the United States.
The result came in November 1977, with Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Israel. Carter, to his credit, leaped into the diplomatic breach, and devoted 13 presidential days to forging the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel. Though never close to yielding a warm peace, that treaty has since withstood tectonic pressures and relieved Israel of the threat of large-scale Arab armies.
But, sadly, that achievement proved to be a one-off. The self-proclaimed champion of human rights, Carter was comfortable with Middle Eastern dictators like Sadat, Hafez al-Assad, and the shah of Iran, but endlessly critical of Israel’s democratically elected leaders, beginning with Menachem Begin.
No sooner were the Camp David Accords signed in 1979 than Carter embarked on a 40-year smear campaign against Israel.
In my meeting with him several years after, Carter insisted that Israel was violating UN Resolution 242 by not withdrawing to the pre-Six Day War boundaries and failing to create a Palestinian state.
My assurances that the resolution specifically voided the return to the indefensible 1967 borders and made no mention of the Palestinians, much less of a state, were righteously rejected.
Dark obsession with Israel
From a mere misreading of 242, Carter descended into a dark obsession with Israel, casting it as the source of all Middle Eastern instability and a world-leading violator of human rights. His 2004 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, though based on half-truths and outright lies, effectively legitimized Israel’s delegitimization.
Yet, while reviewing the book for the Wall Street Journal, what shocked me so profoundly was Carter’s not-so-subtle antisemitism. He lambastes secular Israelis for abandoning Jewish law and condemns National-Religious Jews for fulfilling it. Whether Right or Left, Jews can do no right by Jimmy Carter. The one-time peanut farmer from Georgia who spent a lifetime repenting for his earlier racism against Blacks, conveniently forgot that the KKK also murdered Jews.
CARTER WASN’T satisfied with merely libeling Israel. His final decades were devoted to whitewashing Hamas and presenting it as an organization opposed to terror and dedicated to peace.
That was the message he conveyed on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and in public appearances worldwide. While shunning meetings with Israeli leaders, he embraced Khaled Mashaal, Ismail Haniyeh, and other terror chiefs.
He supported the Goldstone Report that condemned Israel for committing war crimes during the 2008-09 conflict with Gaza and accused Israel of systematically starving Gaza’s civilian population. The terrorists’ attempts to bore under Israel’s border were, in Carter’s telling, “defensive tunnel[s] being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.”
Sanctimonious and prideful, Carter was never popular among his successors, Democratic and Republican alike, who generally shunned him. A story told me by an Israeli official who participated in the Camp David talks summed up the reasons for this aversion.
Visiting Israel in the ’80s, well after Begin’s resignation and physical decline, Carter asked this official to arrange a phone call. The conversation lasted a few minutes, at most, the ex-official told me, during which Carter talked endlessly and Begin said nothing.
That did not prevent Carter from immediately going to the press and reporting on how he and Begin discussed the peace process and other Middle East affairs. “It was a total lie,” the official told me. “A fiction.”
A tarnished legacy
That, unfortunately, is how many Israelis will remember Jimmy Carter, a person for whom the truth, especially about Israel, was easily discounted. A person who expressed not the slightest gratitude for the Israeli medical technology that successfully treated his melanoma or for the Israeli prime minister who assured him, inaccurately, “that you’ve inscribed your name forever in the history of... the people of Israel.”
Not a Cyrus nor a Truman, in the end, Jimmy Carter, but a Nebuchadnezzar who befriended Haman.
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Jimmy Carter’s death has unleashed a predictable flood of tributes. From his humanitarian work to his “commitment to peace,” the accolades are rolling in. But let’s not mince words: for anyone who cares about Israel and the future of the Jewish people, Jimmy Carter’s legacy is not worthy of praise. It is a stain—a decades-long campaign to undermine the Jewish state and empower its enemies. And yet, some Jewish organizations, most notably the American Jewish Committee (AJC), cannot resist their compulsion to whitewash Carter’s record.
In their official statement on Carter’s passing, the AJC declared, “Jimmy Carter’s decades-long commitment to advancing peace earned him a place on the world stage as a respected statesman and humanitarian. We will always be grateful for his role in facilitating the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.” That’s it? No mention of his anti-Israel rhetoric, his toxic “apartheid” slander, or his cozying up to Hamas leaders who have Jewish blood on their hands? The AJC’s statement is not just tone-deaf; it’s a betrayal.
Carter’s record on Israel is infamous. His 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, accused Israel of imposing apartheid on Palestinians—a libel that delegitimizes the Jewish state and fuels the very antisemitism that Jewish organizations claim to oppose. Carter’s meetings with Hamas, an organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews worldwide, were not about “peace.” They were about legitimizing terror.
Jewish organizations like the AJC should have been leading the charge to call Carter out. Instead, they fell over themselves to avoid offending the memory of a man who spent decades undermining Israel’s existence. The AJC’s spinelessness is not unique; it exemplifies the broader failure of establishment Jewish organizations to stand up for Jewish honor and Jewish pride.
This pattern is nothing new. From their willingness to platform antisemites like Ilhan Omar to their obsessive need to “balance” criticism of Israel with validation of its detractors, many mainstream Jewish organizations have prioritized appeasement over advocacy. They crave approval from the very forces that despise us, mistaking subservience for diplomacy. And in doing so, they undermine the strength, dignity, and security of the Jewish people.
October 7th should have been a wake-up call. The massacre of innocent Israelis by Hamas terrorists exposed the true stakes of Jewish survival and the utter moral bankruptcy of the “Land for Peace” delusion. Yet even in the wake of this atrocity, many Jewish leaders remain stuck in the same failed paradigms, unwilling to defend the Jewish people with the courage and conviction that the moment demands.
