Jimmy Carter: Bought & Paid For by the Arab Lobby?

Found these links at Betsy's Page: first, an editorial in The Examiner uses the great word, "ridiculosity," and a great phrase, "specious vacuity."

Oh, did I forget to mention? This is all in reference to Jimmy Carter.

At the root of Carter’s Middle Eastern perspective, of course, is his unalloyed blindness toward the Palestinians in particular and the political Muslim world’s long-running antipathy towards Jews. It is that blindness that prevents him, as The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg noted in a recent review in The Washington Post, from recognizing and accounting for “the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.”

But policy blindness is at least understandable. What is not is Carter’s intellectual dishonesty...

Amen to that.

Betsy also refers us to Jacob Laksin's Jimmy Carter and the Arab Lobby. I thought this part most interesting:

Especially lucrative have been Carter’s ties to Saudi Arabia. Before his death in 2005, King Fahd was a longtime contributor to the Carter Center and on more than one occasion contributed million-dollar donations. In 1993 alone, the king presented Carter with a gift of $7.6 million. And the king was not the only Saudi royal to commit funds to Carter’s cause. As of 2005, the king’s high-living nephew, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, has donated at least $5 million to the Carter Center.

Meanwhile the Saudi Fund for Development, the kingdom’s leading loan organization, turns up repeatedly on the center’s list of supporters. Carter has also found moneyed allies in the Bin Laden family, and in 2000 he secured a promise from ten of Osama bin Laden's brothers for a $1 million contribution to his center. To be sure, there is no evidence that the Bin Ladens maintain any contact with their terrorist relation. But applying Carter’s own standard, his extensive contacts with the Saudi elite must make his views on the Middle East suspect.

High praise for Carter’s work -- and not inconsiderable financial support -- also comes from the United Arab Emirates. In 2001, Carter even traveled to the country to accept the Zayed International Prize for the Environment, named for Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the late UAE potentate and former president-for-life. Having claimed his $500,000 purse, Carter enthused that the “award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahyan.”

Carter also hailed the UAE as an “almost completely open and free society” -- a surreal depiction of a rigidly authoritarian country where the government handpicks a select group of citizens to vote and strictly controls the editorial content of the newspapers and where Islamic Shari’a courts judge “sodomy” punishable by death....

I'm with Betsy, who writes,

I'd like to see the next TV interviewer talking to Carter about his book read this list and then ask him how he maintains objectivity about Israel while raking in money from Arab countries who hate Israel.

And speaking of interviews, see this one in the Seattle Times:

Q: You say that in Israel both the media is more open about discussing these things, that the population as a whole in Israel, I think you said, is more supportive of a solution than the government of Israel.

Carter: [blahblah]

Q: What do you think counts for the fact that in Israel there has been more open debate?

Carter: Well, there are two reasons, basically. … I happen to be a Christian. Since I was 3 years old I've learned about the Hebrews, I've learned about the Israelites, I've learned about God's chosen people, from whom Jesus Christ came, whom I worship. I teach about this every Sunday in my local church and I've been doing it since I was 18 years old, as a matter of fact.

So we naturally are trying to want Israel to be secure and to survive – a commitment I maintain. But that is a permeating concept in this nation.

And the other factor is one owing to an organization, a political action group, called America Israel Political Action Committee, or AIPAC. It's the most effective lobby that I have ever seen, as a president and since then. And it's completely legitimate. They're just doing their job and they are extremely powerful in this country. And their purpose is not to promote peace in the Mideast...

Did you get that? The question is, What accounts for the openness of debate in Israeli society? Carter gives two reasons for this: 1) He is a Christian Sunday school teacher and 2) the Israel Lobby is extremely powerful in America.

Given enough rope, it seems the former president is hanging himself. Let's hope he can keep up with his heavy media schedule; we score every time he opens his mouth.

Postscript: For what it's worth, I thought more about this and realized that Carter wasn't addressing the openness of Israeli society. He's talking about his perception that American debate about Israel is hindered by 1) Christian beliefs about the Jewish people and 2) the censorial nature of the "Israel Lobby," enforced by some vague-yet-extreme "power."

Thus, he's more on top of his game than I assumed at first glance. I'm thinking more and more along the lines of Jeffrey Goldberg, that the purpose of the book is to undercut American Christian support for Israel. After all, they're the only friends Israel has at the moment.

Comments

[scp]

Hmmm. So that's why... Well, let's make him a vegitarian and see what happens.

[Dick McMichael]

I am sure that President Carter would also accept donation's to the Carter Center from Israel if they were offered. I doubt very seriously that any money that goes to the Carter Center goes into Mr. Carter's personal bank account. In fact, he spends a lot of time raising money for the Center, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to world peace. Let's face it, I think you will grab hold of anything you can to try to discredit President Carter because he has the audacity not to give unconditional, unquestioning support to everything that the Israeli government does. You may support any and all actions of the Israeli government, but not all Israelis support every action of the Israeli government. Israel is a democracy and, like America, dissent is tolerated, as it should be. When are you going to criticize President Bush for his close ties with the Saudi royal family? Does that make him an enemy of Israel? Mr. Carter is not an enemy of Israel and it is ridiculous to say that he is.