Jacob Laksin: Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews
The ensuing decades have entrenched this view of his failed presidency. But they have also exacted a toll on his personal reputation, which he and his supporters hoped to save from the wreckage of his administration. Carter set out to be an exemplary ex-president—indeed, to redefine that role into one involving a level of moral activism and diplomacy other former chief executives had considered unseemly. But after a quarter century out of office and in the headlines, Jimmy Carter is now generally adjudged to have debased what before him was a ceremonial role marked by discreet silence and attendance at the funerals of foreign leaders. Rather than advancing American interests, he has become a hectoring critic of his country who exempts dictators from the high standards of human rights he otherwise claims as his legacy. The moral double standards are nowhere more visible than in his persistent and intemperate attacks on Israel, which are so obsessive as to raise the question of whether an agenda of anti-Semitism underlays the obvious anti-Zionism.
Carter’s apparent sympathy for foreign dictators and antipathy for Israel antedates his founding of the Carter Center, a combination research institute and bully pulpit affiliated with Atlanta’s Emory University that would become the equivalent of a White House for his ex-presidency. It was Carter who, in a 1977 commencement address, admonished Americans for what he sneeringly dubbed their “inordinate fear of communism.” This tendency has become even more pronounced in his political afterlife. In the course of a 1994 visit to North Korea, for example, he declared, against all evidence, that the Stalinist regime of Kim Il-Sung was committed to providing international inspectors with access to its nuclear sites. Not only that but, in Carter‘s judgment, North Korea could be trusted to suspend its development of nuclear weapons. All these confident assurances notwithstanding, in 2002 North Korea expelled weapons inspectors and revealed that it was operating a clandestine nuclear program. Shortly thereafter, in October of 2006, North Korea, having been given protective cover by Carter’s credulous intervention, exploded a nuclear device.
It was not the last time that ex-President Carter put himself at the service of a communist regime. In 2002, he paid court to Fidel Castro, becoming the first American ex-president to honor the longtime Cuban dictator with his official presence. Taking diplomatic niceties to the extreme, Carter not only lavished praise on Castro for Cuba’s supposedly successful health and education systems but also demanded that the United States abrogate, without concomitant human-rights concessions from Havana, its economic embargo. Carter has routinely inserted himself into political disputes the world over, often, as the above instances show, to the detriment of U.S. principles and interests. No conflict, however, has so preoccupied the 39th president as the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It is an issue that has commanded his interest since 1978, when, thanks largely to the willingness of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to break with the rejectionist Arab consensus against recognizing Israel, he helped broker the peace accords between the two nations, an achievement that led to a Nobel Prize. Since the moment that he helped get these two leaders to shake hands, however, Carter has increasingly seen his role as that of apologist for the Palestinians and prosecutor, judge and jury of Israel....