The World According To Jimmy Carter

No, you'd be making a judgment.



Oh the irony! No, I'd say it was clearly biased and didn't paint the whole picture.



You are welcome to your opinion, of course. I don't happen to agree because I think Dershowitz read the whole book with a giant pro-Israel chip on his shoulder. But that's just my opinion.

I wrote


Freeduck


Yes. And some would say that if Dershowitz didn't have the chip on his shoulder he still wouldn't be credible about Carter's book because he wasn't there and had no experience with it. It's sort of like you aren't allowed opinions about kids if you don't have any or you can't be an advocate for women's issues if you're a man or you can't be pro-choice if you never had an abortion, etc. But if you are pro-something unpopular, then you can't comment because your bias removes any credibility you would otherwise have.

Knowing something of the history of Israel, Palestine, etc., though I claim no expertise in that, I didn't see a single thing Dershowitz said that was not factually correct nor have I seen any commentary by anybody else who has disputed his assertion that Carter left out the facts that he did.

I have often heard Carter heap praise on Arafat and comment on the plight of the Palestinians. And I have often heard him criticze Israel while I have never heard him critcize Palestine, so could we not assume something of his own bias there?

And would it be reasonable to assume those who are so strongly resisting any criticism of Carter here or trying so diligently to deflect it to something else might also have their own anti-Israel bias stirred into the mix here?

I fully admit my pro-Israel point of view makes me want to believe Dershowitz's account.

I also think I am capable of seeing facts presented dishonestly regardless of the subject too. I don't think Dershowitz did that. (And I don't like the guy.)

No offense, but none of that has any bearing on my point, which is that if I'm going to take someone's word for something, it's going to be because I have reason to believe that they wouldn't distort something to fit their own agenda. In the case of Dershowitz, I don't have that reason. So I will choose to read the book myself. If it turns out that all of what he said is true, I'll let you know. But I'm not taking his word for it when he clearly has an axe to grind. And you shouldn't either, though that is your perogative.

Ok. Very honest of you to say so.

Did i say that anybody must leave their own country? In fact, i want the ones that don't come here legally to stay home.

Nope, that was for what others said after your post. Foxfyre answered already.

Carter has an anti-Israel bias, Or at least certainly, more favorable to the Palestinnians. So, realizing that, can one take his blame Israel stance at face value?

He might have a bias. But how do you know that his stance is actually "blame Israel"?

I wonder if you'll admit that you want Dershowitz to be wrong.

Like you said, you have not read his book. Have you actually listened to this man?

Yes. Have you?



I don't have a preference, but if I finish the book and it turns out he's right I'll let you know. Look, if someone who didn't have a clear bias said the same things I'd be more willing to buy it. In fact, if it were even more specific and less subjective I'd be more willing to believe it.

Here's the official Washington Post book review on Carter's book. Anybody want to suggest that the Post is a fanatical rightwing pro-Israel publication? (Emphasis mine)

What Would Jimmy Do?
A former president puts the onus for resolving the Mideast conflict on the Israelis.Reviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg
Sunday, December 10, 2006; BW03

PALESTINE PEACE NOT APARTHEID
By Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster. 264 pp. $27


Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based.

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. 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."

In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state. True, some Israeli leaders have used the security fence as cover for a land-grab, but Carter does not acknowledge the actual raison d'etre for the fence: to prevent the murder of Jews. The security barrier is a desperate, deeply imperfect and, God willing, temporary attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from detonating themselves amid crowds of Israeli civilians. And it works; many recent attempts to infiltrate bombers into Israel have failed, thanks to the barrier.

The murder of Israelis, however, plays little role in Carter's understanding of the conflict. He writes of one Hamas bombing campaign: "Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996." That spree of bombings -- four, actually -- was unfortunate for the peace process, to be sure. It was also unfortunate for the several dozen civilians killed in these attacks. But Israeli deaths seem to be an abstraction for Carter; only the peace process is real, and the peace process would succeed, he claims, if not for Israeli intransigence.

Here is Carter's anti-historical understanding of the conflict. He writes:

"There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East:

"1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and

"2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories."

In other words, Palestinian violence is simply an understandable reaction to the building of Israeli settlements. The settlement movement has been a tragedy, of course. Settlements, and the expansionist ideology they represent, have done great damage to the Zionist dream of a Jewish and democratic state; many Palestinians, and many Israelis, have died on the altar of settlement. The good news is that the people of Israel have fallen out of love with the settlers, who themselves now know that they have no future. After all, when Ariel Sharon abandoned the settlement dream -- as the former prime minister did when he forcibly removed some 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip during Israel's unilateral pullout in July 2005 -- even the most myopic among the settlement movement's leaders came to understand that the end is near.

Carter does not recognize the fact that Israel, tired of the burdens of occupation, also dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements (the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was elected on exactly this platform) because to do so would fatally undermine the thesis of his book. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is being marketed as a work of history, but an honest book would, when assessing the reasons why the conflict festers, blame not only the settlements but also take substantial note of the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.

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."

There are, of course, no references to "Israeli authorities" in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it "ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians." He goes on, "In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples." One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis -- in their deviousness -- somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry.

There is another approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, of course -- one perfected by another Southern Baptist who became a Democratic president. Bill Clinton's Middle East achievements are enormous, especially when considering the particular difficulties posed by his primary Arab interlocutor. Jimmy Carter was blessed with Anwar al-Sadat as a partner for peace; Bill Clinton was cursed with Yasser Arafat. In his one-sided explication of the 1990s peace process, Carter systematically downplays Clinton's efforts to bring a conclusion to the conflict, with a secure Israel and an independent Palestine living side by side, and repeatedly defends the indefensible Arafat. Carter doesn't dare include Clinton's own recollections of his efforts at the abortive Camp David summit in 2000 because to do so would be to acknowledge that the then-Israeli prime minister, the flawed but courageous Ehud Barak, did, in fact, try to bring about a lasting peace -- and that Arafat balked.

In a short chapter on the Clinton years, Carter blames the Israelis for the failures at Camp David. But I put more stock in the views of the president who was there than in those of the president who wasn't. "On the ninth day, I gave Arafat my best shot again," Clinton writes in My Life. "Again he said no. Israel had gone much further than he had, and he wouldn't even embrace their moves as the basis for future negotiations." Clinton applied himself heroically over the next six months to extract even better offers from Israel, all of which Arafat wouldn't accept. "I still didn't believe Arafat would make such a colossal mistake," Clinton remembers, with regret. According to Carter, however, Arafat made no mistakes. The failure was Israel's -- and by extension, Clinton's.

Carter succeeded at his Camp David summit in 1978, while Clinton failed at his in 2000. But Clinton's achievement was in some ways greater because he did something no American president has done before (or since): He won the trust of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He could do this because he seemed to believe that neither side was wholly villainous nor wholly innocent. He saw 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. In other words, he took the Christian approach to making peace. ?

Jeffrey Goldberg is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of "Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide."
SOURCE

Heavens no, I would never pay to read anything of his, but then, I don't need to, he is very clear in his speechs of where he is with Israel.

The WP review is interesting, and some of it I agree with, but it's still just somebody's opinion and certainly doesn't justify calling Carter "dishonest" or "ignorant". Goldberg is saying that Carter has a bias, and maybe he does. He certainly appears to not be aligned with the conventional American bias. However, if someone has a bias, and I disagree with them, does that automatically mean that I have an equal and opposite bias?

Nobody asked me, but my personal opinion is that Carter probably is somewhat biased because of his experience working in the territories. But because we so seldom hear anything from people there, his views deserve to be heard.

Ones views of whatever bias' that Carter has could be viewed as an opinion, however, when carter shows a blatant bias in his writings & his speeches, then it seems to me that the opinion is based on fact.

Sorry, I need something a little more specific then that before I'm going to trash a man.

Ok, good for you, we are all free to our own opinions & should have some facts before we do form that opinion.
I don't know how old you are, but I was an adult when Carter was the president, it was awful for those of us living/working overseas on a US military base. Since his presidency, he has done some good with the Habitat for Humanity project, however, he has also done some harm with his meddeling.

I won't dispute that Carter has a right to be heard. I think, though, it is fair game to question whether something disingenuous or incompetent 'deserves' to be heard. In the serious issue of Israel/Palestine and the other issues simmering in the Middle East, I think it extremely important that our national leaders get it right and that they are called out on it when they get it wrong.

Apart from the book, Carter's unwavering defense of Arafat who made zero efforts for peace between Israel and Palestine and Carter's consistent non-recognition of Israels efforts for peace between Israel and Palestine adds a huge amount of credibility to what Stein, Dershowitz, the Washington post all say about Carter's position on that. And if they all dispute Carter's version about that, it is a good bet that they got it right and he got it wrong about the rest too. (I don't think anybody has said Israel is perfect either and has made no errors of either commission or omission.)

I did ask you (FD) however, how you know Carter's book reads like a memoirs rather than as a history.

season's greetings, ducks !

i looked at the maps you provided... and from what i can tell, they are not identical works in copyright terms.

the shape of israel and it's surrounds are the same, but hey, that's the way that the world has agreed they look. it would be the same with two professionally drawn maps of the u.s. or the u.k. or whatever.

could be wrong, i don't think the case is gonna go anywhere.

I agree with georgeob1 who says (I paraphrase) that he believes Carter was a good man but a bad leader. I wasn't old enough to care when he was president, but I do believe he has good intentions and has done a lot of good. I don't agree with his religious take on things, though, but whatever works for others I can't judge.