'Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid'....Eh?

The 1922 portrait of Dr. Stadelmann [mustache removed] by the famous Otto Dix, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, W.Landmann Collection

 

Absolutely furious, and quite rightly so, Mac Brachman kindly sends me the link to Jeffrey Goldberg's WaPo review today of President Jimmy Carter's "despicable book", sending me into a spin of unprecedented proportions on this seemingly peaceful Sunday morning.

President Jimmy 'Cowardly Appeasement Policy' Carter is a disgrace. This we know. We also know that he is a rabid anti-Semite, a coward, and acknowledge the fact that the agreement signed 25 years ago with Iran releasing the 52 American hostages was negotiated and signed by President Jimmy "Cowardly Appeasement Policy" Carter, on January 20th 1981, the day of President Reagan's inauguration, as his last glorious act as President of the U.S. just before he handed the sullied reigns over to Ronald Reagan.

As I have written before, almost all the trouble with the Iranian Mullahcracy and their murderous activities throughout the Middle East are deeply rooted in Carter's ignorance which in no small part resulted in the diplomatic obligations set out in the Algiers Accords Agreement, which codified the January 1981 deal between the United States and Iran under which the hostages were released, approx. 8 billion dollars in Iranian assets were unfrozen, and an arbitration tribunal was established in the Netherlands to settle claims between the two countries. In the first part of the document, the United States pledged that it "will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran's internal affairs." Elsewhere, the United States pledged to "bar and preclude" any claims filed by the hostages against Iran.

Under the Agreement, the United States is obligated "to terminate all legal proceedings in United States courts involving claims of United States persons and institutions against Iran and its state enterprises, to nullify all attachments and judgments obtained therein, to prohibit all further litigation based on such claims, and to bring about the termination of such claims through binding arbitration...."

Here is the crucial Document, part of the United States-Iran Agreement on Release of the American Hostages Executive Order 12283, January 19th 1981 : Non-Prosecution Of Claims Of Hostages And For Actions At The United States Embassy And Elsewhere

The other parts of the Agreement, largely relevant to the release of all Iranian assets, including the property of the former Shah of Iran, and the revocation of trade sanctions against Iran, can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

The Agreement of course has President Jimmy Carter's fingerprints all over it. President Reagan was inaugurated the day the hostages were released, and lumbered with the Algiers Accords agreement already signed on that very day. The hostages were released 20 minutes after the inauguration speech was delivered.

Carter's announcement on the morning of January 20th 1981: "I know you have been up all night with me and I appreciate it very much. We have now reached an agreement with Iran which will result, I believe, in the freedom of our American hostages. The last documents have now been signed in Algiers following the signing of the documents in Iran which will result in this agreement."

Jimmy Carter's last full day as President of the United States was a marathon struggle against the clock and the seeming determination of the Iranian authorities to deny him a reunion with the American hostages as a climax to his Presidency. Throughout a night and day of sustained tension, Carter and his aides clung to the hope that he would be able to greet the hostages on their arrival in West Germany, then return here in time to attend Ronald Reagan's inauguration.

The prospect of ending the crisis and making the trans-Atlantic dash in the closing hours of the Carter Presidency had enthused his staff like nothing else since his defeat on November 4th 1980. But it was not to be. Shortly after Pars, the Iranian press agency, gloated publicly that Carter would not be able to welcome the hostages as President because their release would be delayed until after his term expired - a claim that remained to be proved - Carter bowed to the inevitable and accepted Reagan's request that he serve as a special envoy to greet the hostages.

In the closing moments of his pitiful presidency Jimmy Carter would have been prepared to sign anything Iran had to offer, simply to have the glory of the release of the 52 hostages, and the end to the Iran crisis, attributed to him, as a sealed climax to his presidency. His dearest wish above all else to have a triumphant end to his presidency, but at what expense. This is the agreement that the State Department is dumped with today, but of course the ever biased MSM would never mention that.

As my friend and inimitable blogger Francis Porretto quite rightly points out in the comments below:

If there's anything truly significant about Carter, it's that even his supporters from those days will no longer rise to his defense. They, too, know that in electing him the Republic made a terrible mistake -- what historial Paul Johnson, in his book Modern Times, called "America's suicide attempt." Pray that the attempt is never repeated; we wouldn't want to "get lucky" the next time.

So against this backdrop of unbelievably cowardly behavior, we have the 'brave, Nobel Prize winning' former President of The United States, telling 'a story' in his newly published book, as Goldberg puts it "that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based." What absolute and utter baloney! The man has been anti-Israel as long as I remember, and blamed the Jews for every negotiation failure that ever took place involving the lying two-faced Yasser Arafat. The man whose entire life was dedicated to keep the violence going. The West periodically mixed in their pet conspiracies, charging Israel at various stages that it equally wished the violence to continue. "Poppycock", as Professor Kenneth Stein demonstrates in the two part interview on Fox & Friends found here.

'The Palestinians' (whatever that means) can do no wrong in the eyes of the former President, even  scolding President Clinton for daring to see "the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for what it is: a tragic collision between right and right, a story of two peoples who both deserved his sympathy", whilst Carter's all too obvious anti-Semitism posing as 'peace-seeking Christian approach' is ever present:

On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made.

"With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."

Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins -- and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew -- he is on a mission from God.

Carter's interest in the Middle East is longstanding, of course; he brokered the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979, and he has been rightly praised for doing so. But other aspects of his record are more bothersome. Carter, not unlike God, has long been disproportionately interested in the sins of the Chosen People. He is famously a partisan of the Palestinians, and in recent months he has offered a notably benign view of Hamas, the Islamist terrorist organization that took power in the Palestinian territories after winning a January round of parliamentary elections.

There are differences, however, between Carter's understanding of Jewish sin and God's. God, according to the Jewish Bible, tends to forgive the Jews their sins. And God, unlike Carter, does not manufacture sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed.

This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. [bold mine] Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The "imprisonment wall" is an early symptom of Israel's descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that "the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land."

The agenda is, as always with people like Carter, painfully evident:

Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, "It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities -- the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier."

John @ Powerline comments on Jimmy Carter's op-ed in the LA Times, where he attempts to answer his critics:

He retails the same myth that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt peddle: you can't have an honest discussion of the Middle East here in the United States because the Jewish Lobby is too strong. [...]

"Choice sites in Palestine"? There aren't any. "Displaced citizens"? I guess that means Carter doesn't like the settlements. But Jews have as much right to live in the West Bank as Arabs. More fundamentally, Carter's obsessive focus on the settlements--as though they were the reason why the Palestinians and other Arabs have been trying to exterminate the Jews since 1948!--reveals a mind that is, to say the least, unbalanced. In his hate-fueled last years, Jimmy Carter has come to inhabit a world in which reality is optional.

Indeed. As I have said many times before, President Carter, you are an anti-Semitic, bitter, delusional, conspiracy-creating, cowardly, spineless, pusillanimous disgrace, and a liar, and I wholeheartedly agree with Alan Dershowitz, who calls the book's title 'indecent'! Refusing to argue the point with Dershowitz really drives home President 'Truthiness' Carter's message that " the goal of his book is to provoke dialogue and action". Indeed.

Comments

[Michael The Angel]

Many of these comments, especially, those attributed to Stein, are so vague and superficial. One has to give a lot of credit to this compassionate former President. Most of American Presidents die after the end of their terms. They just cease to exist and to be of influence. Carter is a man of character and faith. If you don't like that, that's your own problem. I suppose that most, if not all those who criticise Jimmy Carter actually lack character and purpose in life. In fact, if they die young, then this might be better for themselves and for the rest of the world. In Jimmy Carter the word of the Old Testament comes clearly true: And they shall be fruitful, even at old age. So, may be those critics should go and get busy with some nice activity and enjoy life- because, that's all they are going to get out of it before they die and be forgotten forever-and watch the righteous do what is honorable, just, and true in the eyes of the One and True God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah.

[Crusader.NoRegrets.]

Jimmah, why won't you just die of old age already?

"Hope I die before I get old" - Pete Townsend, in 'My Generation'.

Yup, hope we all die before we get 'Jimmah Carter' old.

[Ghost Dansing]

Must be a recent "falling out" between Dr. Stein and Jimmy Carter (or maybe ongoing friction over a number of years... read below). Stein wrote:

Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, Routledge, June 1999. (Second Printing, 2000).

The Blood of Abraham in collaboration with President Jimmy Carter, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton-Mifflin, 1985, revised and paperback edition, 1986.

http://www.ismi.emory.edu/stein.html

I will be very interested in hearing specifics regarding inaccuracies... Dr. Stein provides an example in the NYT article. Here is an excerpt from the NYT:

"Mr. Stein was executive director of the Carter Center from 1983 to 1986 and had continued to serve as a Middle East fellow until Tuesday. In 1985, he wrote a book with Mr. Carter, “The Blood of Abraham: Insights in the Middle East,” which was published by Houghton-Mifflin.

Mr. Stein said the former president had come to speak to his class as recently as last month. Mr. Stein declined to detail all the inaccuracies he found, saying he was still documenting them for a planned review of the book; but he did offer a few examples.

Mr. Carter, he said, remembers White House staff members in 1990 being preoccupied by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait when the former president tried to describe to them talks he had had with Middle Eastern leaders. But the White House briefings occurred in the spring, Mr. Stein said, and the invasion of Kuwait was not until August.

“You can’t write history simply off the top of your head and expect it to be credible,” he said.

Mr. Stein also said he had been struck by parts of Mr. Carter’s book that seemed strikingly similar to a work by a different author, but he would not disclose the details.

“There are elements in the book that were lifted from another source,” Mr. Stein said. “That other source is now acting on his or her own advice about what to do because of this.”

David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, dismissed Mr. Stein’s claims. “We’re confident in his work,” Mr. Rosenthal said of Mr. Carter. “Do we check every line in every book? No, but that’s not the issue here. I have no reason to doubt President Carter’s research.”

Still other observers familiar with the sometimes contentious relationship between Mr. Carter and Mr. Stein said Mr. Stein might have been motivated by more than preserving academic integrity.

“He feels snubbed he wasn’t given any kind of acknowledgment for the work he’s done with Carter,” said Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Tulane University in New Orleans. “It’s a bit of bruised ego and philosophical difference being displayed in public here.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/washington/07book.html?bl&ex=1165813200&en=104d1d193de53345&ei=5087%0A

Mentioning "apartheid" in the tile of the book is a political land mine.

An article in the Guardian Unlimited in February 2006 provides an example:

"Brothers in arms - Israel's secret pact with Pretoria"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1704037,00.html

[Sissy Willis]

I call him Jimmy "Truthiness" Carter in light of his preference for "concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."

[Fausta]

There's a vacancy at the Carter Center:
A veteran Middle East scholar affiliated with the Carter Center in Atlanta resigned his position there Monday in an escalating controversy over former president Jimmy Carter's bestselling book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Kenneth W. Stein, a professor at Emory University, accused Carter of factual errors, omissions and plagiarism in the book. "Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information,"

Carter is a disgrace.

[Ghost Dansing]

Looking further... some interesting facts that would suggest Carter's book is still attempting to address core issues that were sidelined (albeit with the hope of future rectification) at Camp David:

"The Camp David Accords were signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 17, 1978, following twelve days of secret negotiations at Camp David. The two agreements were signed at the White House, and were witnessed by United States President Jimmy Carter. Sadat also said he wanted them to be called the Carter Accords.

Upon assuming office on January 20, 1977, President Carter moved to rejuvenate the Middle Eastern peace process that had stalled throughout the 1976 presidential campaign in the United States. Following the advice of a Brookings Institution report, Carter opted to replace the incremental, bilateral peace talks which had characterized Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy following the 1973 Yom Kippur War with a comprehensive, multilateral approach. This new approach called for the reconvening of the 1973 Geneva Conference, this time with a Palestinian delegation, in hopes of negotiating a final settlement, however this never materialized.

Carter also wasted no time in visiting the heads-of-state on whom he would have to rely to make any peace agreement feasible. By the end of his first year in office, he had already met with Anwar Sadat of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, Hafez al-Assad of Syria, and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel. Carter's and Vance's exploratory meetings gave him a basic plan for reinvigorating the peace process based on the Geneva Conference and Israeli withdrawal on all fronts, including the West Bank.

President Anwar Sadat came to feel that the Geneva track peace process was more show than substance, and was not progressing, partly due to disagreements with Syria. He also lacked confidence in America to pressure Israel after a meeting with Carter. His frustration boiled over, and after meetings with Israelis, secret even to the Americans, in November 1977 he became the first Arab leader to visit Israel, thereby implicitly recognizing Israel, where he addressed the Knesset about his views on peace, the status of Israel's occupied territories, and the Palestinian refugee problem. This tactic went against both America's and the Soviet Union's intentions, which were to revive the Geneva Conference.

The time that has elapsed since the Camp David Accords has left no doubt as to their enormous ramifications on Middle Eastern politics. Most notably, the perception of Egypt within the Arab world changed. With the most powerful of the Arab militaries and a history of leadership in Arab world under Nasser, Egypt had more leverage than any of the other Arab states to advance Arab interests. Sadat's alacrity at concluding a peace treaty without demanding greater concessions for Israeli recognition of the Palestinians' right to self-determination incited enough hatred in the Arab world to bring about Sadat's assassination in 1981. Egypt was also suspended from the Arab League from 1979 until 1989.

Also, the Camp David Accords prompted the disintegration of a united Arab front in opposition to Israel. Egypt's realignment created a power vacuum that Saddam Hussein of Iraq, at one time only a secondary consideration, hoped to fill. Because of the vague language concerning the implementation of Resolution 242, the Palestinian problem became the primary issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict immediately following the Camp David Accords (and arguably, until today). Many of the Arab nations blamed Egypt for not putting enough pressure on Israel to deal with the Palestinian problem in a way that would be satisfactory to them.

Lastly, the biggest consequence of all may be in the psychology of the participants of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The success of Begin, Sadat, and Carter at Camp David demonstrated to other Arab states and entities that negotiations with Israel were possible — that progress results only from sustained efforts at communication and cooperation. Despite the disappointing conclusion of the 1993 Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel, and even though the 1994 Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace has not fully normalized relations with Israel, both of these significant developments had little chance of occurring without the precedent set by Camp David."

You'll note the problem of "self determination" remains central... Israel's position today is different than it was at the time of Jimmy Carter, Sadat and Begin... the whole thing is rooted in the problems of receding European Colonial foreign policy, and it is all much more complicated than the usual rhetoric would suggest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination

For example... regarding the historical context of the Palestinian issue:

"Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem (including the Old City) and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip from 1949 through 1967. Throughout those years, the King of Jordan had annexed the West Bank, providing its residents with citizenship, but not with the right of mobility across the Jordan River. The king forbid the use of the word "Palestine" on official documents. The Jordanian position on this was that historically the East and West Bank had been one cultural entity and thus one nationality though Palestinians dispute this. This led to open fighting between Palestinian refugees and the Jordanian government in 1970. However, in 1988, the Jordanian government relinquished its claim to the West Bank. Egypt never annexed the Gaza, and denied its residents of citizenship and did not allow its residents to move into Egypt or anywhere else. Despite this Egypt was not subject to a rebellion. In fact, the Palestine Liberation Organization was created in 1964 by the Arab League in Cairo, Egypt, and was controlled by and large by the Egyptian government. Neither country attempted to relieve the refugee crisis (although Jordan did alleviate this somewhat by granting Palestinians citizenship) and neither allowed (to different extents) self-determination in these territories. . The PLO stated its goal to be the destruction of the State of Israel through armed struggle, and replacing it with an "independent Palestinian state" between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israelis argue this would deny self-determination by the millions of Israelis now living there.
You will also note that even on the current issue of Iraq, the Baker-Hamilton recommendations for regional diplomacy returns to the inclusion of the issues between Israel and the Palestinians... suggesting this Republican administration had missed the mark consistently in its foreign policy."

A lot of water has passed beneath the proverbial bridge since Camp David... however Israel's relations with the Palestinians remain a central issue... and the inclusion of the recommendation that this be addressed in the recent Baker-Hamilton recommendations for Iraq suggest the current Republican administration erred in significant ways by making Iraq central to its foreign policy for the Middle East as opposed to the Palestinian question.

[Ghost Dansing]

As you know I would disagree with Alexandra and Francis on final points. Alexandra, because the Carter administration existed only four years within the context of a long American history with the Middle East, not to mention a Post-Nixon, Post-Vietnam, and Cold War zeitgeist that flavored every aspect of his circumstance and decision making. And... America was already in crisis.

To discuss Carter's policies without addressing the fact that the Mullah's he was dealing with in the hostage situation were the result of a failed American foreign policy that assisted in the overthrow of a Democratically elected government in Iran, and the advocacy of a monarchy that, at least in the view of many Iranians of the time, and the International Community, as well as the United States, ultimately exacerbated its decline through the SAVAK and human rights abuses.

I'm not sure Jeffrey Goldberg is giving Carter enough credit either... his attribution of anti-semitic motivations comes from citation of Carter's personal discourse with an Israeli leader; Golda Meir.

"On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made."

"With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/07/AR2006120701835.html

I'm not sure Goldberg knows the full context of this exchange, and I would defer to Carter, who was there, to illuminate the meaning and intention. Goldberg also indicates that the purpose of this being cited in Carter's book was to drive a wedge between Israel and Evangelicals in America... I doubt if this type of thing would do that, because the "faith based" support of Evangelicals for Israel is not rooted in a sense of Israel's righteousness, but in interpretations of End-Times Apocolypse.

I'd disagree with Porretto, because Carter's understandings of America's root Foreign and Domestic problems were prescient; specifically economic dependence on Middle Eastern oil and refusal to place Human Rights at the center of our Foreign Policy, haunt us today with the current failed Republican administration belatedly providing lip-service to both of these, while continuing to pursue policies that undermine both our economic stability and credibility in foreign affairs.

Also, in rebuttal to Porretto... in Carter's short time in office he did manage to diplomatically engineer a peace agreement between the Arabs and Israelies that had up to his time proved to be intractable. Granted, some Israelies and Palestinians did not want this... however the world did. It was and remains an impressive achievement... and if not for that achievement, we would be in a lot worse shape than we are today... and today isn't very good.

Of course "refuseniks" on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides of the fence would disagree.

[Francis W. Porretto]

But Alexandra, we elected Carter for one reason and one reason only: because he had no connection to the disgraced Richard Nixon. In other words, we voted "against" without troubling ourselves over what we were voting for.

And so we got Jimmy Carter, the least Presidential president of all time. His sole response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to withdraw the United States from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. His response to the Communist takeover of Nicaragua was to bribe the Ortega regime with offers of grants and interest-free loans. His reaction to the seizure of our embassy in Tehran and the 53 persons sheltering within it was to waffle and agonize for 444 days.

If there's anything truly significant about Carter, it's that even his supporters from those days will no longer rise to his defense. They, too, know that in electing him the Republic made a terrible mistake -- what historial Paul Johnson, in his book Modern Times, called "America's suicide attempt." Pray that the attempt is never repeated; we wouldn't want to "get lucky" the next time.