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The Latest Round-up of Awesome Jimmy Carter Apology News
By Adam Chandler / January 14, 2010
For those of you keeping track at home, the Jimmy Carter Apology Express has NOT been met at the station by the always apoplectic ZOA (Zionist Organization of America). Jimmy Carter (former U.S. President, peanut enthusiast, and erotica writer), in an oddly-timed pre-Christmas apology to American Jews, offered his belated Al-Het for "stigmatizing Israel" over the years.
The gesture was met with both reluctant acceptance by Jewish organizations needing to appear magnanimous (see: Foxman, Abraham) and consternation by various Jewish figures who still dislike Jimmy and/or saw the timing of Carter’s apology a little too closely linked to grandson Jason Carter’s run for the Georgia State Senate.
The ZOA falls into the latter camp, issuing their rejection some two-and-a-half weeks after the Carter apology was announced. The ZOA was firm in the assessment of Carter’s apology, deciding to actually reject it twice. In the second pronouncement, the ZOA references a characteristically harsh op-ed written by Carter in the Guardian literally hours before his apology to American Jews washed ashore in the New World. The ZOA statement called upon the ADL, NJDC, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (named for a historic lover of apologies) to retract their ambivalent approvals of Carter’s apology some fifteen days after they were originally issued.
I’m sure I will eventually have to apologize for asking this, but…how does any of this political pussyfooting help the people actually suffering because of the obstinacy surrounding this conflict?
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Carter is good man and when good men grow old, truth becomes even more important to them. Whether it is bulding a house for the poor the right way, or trying to guide a nation to be inclusive. It’s a turn the other cheek lesson Israel…I hope someday you will get it.
I have to admit Disco, I had to look up the word "plaudits". That’s Ok though, even us old men can still learn fancy new words ‘that are hardly used’..Anyway, let me say this as plain as I possibly can. What is it about "It’s a turn the other cheek lesson", that you just don’t understand? Jimmy Carter is OLD..Repeat, OLD…He is way beyond BS anymore. If in our aged years if not to teach the young what we have learned, then what have we done? Truth is important to him Disco; not trying to impress people with his intellect.
It’s interesting that as an ex=president Carter earns such plaudits for his humanitarianism. But it’s important to remember that as a president his do-goodedness was seen everywhere by everybody as disastrous, something that no president since has wanted to repeat.
 Quite simply, there is a big difference between rhetoric and reality, and Carter seems to have forgotten that. I don’t think Carter is evil or antisemitic; rather, when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. He is so tied into a peace treaty that he is more intent on having a signed peace of paper than actual peace. What he forgets is that the one success he presided over, the Israeli Egyptian peace treaty, happened because an Arab leader wanted to make peace, not because some preachy US diplomat invented a plan that sounded fair and shoved it down peoples’ throats.Â
The USA can’t make the Arab world change, but it can use pressure to force Israel to change certain policies, so that’s what Carter recommends doing. But it’s flawed reasoning. It’s like if you’re spotting someone doing bench presses at a gym and you try to help by raising one side of the bar because that’s all you can reach. Â
Oh, and needless to say, his apology was awkward and not very convincing, to say the least. Â
 “We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter."
~Denis Diderot~
And there’s Carter’s boiling, vocal and egregious vilification of Israel. His singular, and seemingly pathological hatred of the Jewish State has no rationale or intellectual source other than what I think is a very obvious, but suavely disguised, pro-Arab anti-Semitism.
What has he said that supports such a harsh indictment? Certainly not the op-ed referenced here. Are you talking about Carter or Abu Nidal, or can you really not see the difference between them?
It doesn’t help our cause to react so strongly to Israel’s critics, and to threaten blacklisting as you’ve done in your post.Â
Carter is a joke — a one-term president everyone in the political firmament considers a cautionary tale at best. The worst insult a news analyst can hurl at Barack Obama’s fumbling first year in office is to compare him to Jimmy Carter’s earnest, post-scary Republican, and fundamentally doomed flash-in-the-pan administration that lead to even more scary Republicanism. Carter is the unfortunate link between Nixon and Reagan. Not exactly the role model, or legacy, Obama is looking for.Â
Carter, long lauded by the far left for his supposed breakout skills in Middle Eastern diplomacy, presided during the Iranian Islamic revolution which he did nothing to stop and much to abet with his failed military attack, and he looked idly on as the Soviets invaded of Afghanistan. Both are watershed events in the Middle East that have done more, way more, to reshape the modern world than a cold-as-ice detente between a strong yet internally doubting Israel and a thoroughly defeated Egypt — who, incidentally, are both relatively small players on the global stage. This is Carter’s statecraft? I’d rather have a peaceful Iran and a tense border with Egypt than the other way around.Â
And there’s Carter’s boiling, vocal and egregious vilification of Israel. His singular, and seemingly pathological hatred of the Jewish State has no rationale or intellectual source other than what I think is a very obvious, but suavely disguised, pro-Arab anti-Semitism. Which there is a long history of in the US and the UK by missionaries since the early 20th century, but that’s another story entirely. (Read Michael Oren’s excellent "Power, Faith and Fantasy" to learn more.) The point is that Carter is an enemy, not a friend or even a dispassionate observer, of Israel.
He should be treated as such by Jewish organizations, and human rights groups everywhere.Â
I will not assert that Carter is ridiculous, but he certainly looks ridiculous. Israel is evil, but he’s sorry for calling it evil. Or Israel’s occupation of the west bank is apartheid, but in a nice way. He’s a politician and doesn’t know how to be a saint and a politician at the same time.
I do think Carter’s op-ed was harsh, it just happened to be more nuanced than his normal tithings. He paints a very sad picture of Gaza (which he rightly should) but follows it by saying:
"Despite offers by Palestinian leaders and international agencies to
guarantee no use of imported materials for even defensive military
purposes, cement, lumber, and panes of glass are not being permitted to
pass entry points into Gaza. The US and other nations have accepted
this abhorrent situation without forceful corrective action.
I have discussed ways to assist the citizens of Gaza with a number of
Arab and European leaders and their common response is that the Israeli
blockade makes any assistance impossible. Donors point out that they
have provided enormous aid funds to build schools, hospitals and
factories, only to see them destroyed in a few hours by precision bombs
and missiles. Without international guarantees, why risk similar losses
in the future?"
 What I see as implicit (which I suppose is
usuallyalways subjective when it comes to this conflict) in Carter’s statement is that Gaza is ruined, Israel (and Israel alone) is not letting them rebuild (Gaza does share a border with Egypt which he could have mentioned since he invoked other countries), and that others are ambivalent to invest in Gaza’s rebuilding because Israel (seemingly unprovoked [he says there has been a year without terror {really? no rockets?}]) will inevitably knock all the infrastructure out again. Of course Likud is not helping either, I really do agree with you on that. I just think that if Carter wanted to be evenhanded, he could have ascribed (even implicitly) some blame on Hamas, terrorism, and the other forces that ultimately cause Israel to use its might for such a cause. I hope that makes sense.
and don’t see anything uncharacteristically harsh in it. Maybe other things he’s said or written have demonstrated some anti-Semitic animus, but I don’t see it here.
There are many of us who want Israel to enjoy long-term stability who think Likudist intransigence isn’t getting us there any quicker.
As for the suffering: some of that, for sure, can be laid at the foot of the Palestinian leadership, which has time and time again compromised the safety of its own people in order to score a territorial/political gain. But the raid on Gaza has a lot to do with that, too. There are humanitarian consequences for preemptive/retaliatory attacks, especially those launched by a heavily-armed party.
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