The Moral Disintegration of Jimmy Carter

For years I have been defending Jimmy Carter against charges of anti-Semitism. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe that a President of the United States – the freest country in the world – could dislike Jews.

So I chalked up his animus toward Israel and his awful accusations of Israeli apartheid to a faulty moral compass. Even the other day on NewsMax TV my friend Steve Malzberg asked me point blank if Jimmy Carter is an anti-Semite and I said no, blaming his inane statements on Israel to his being what Vladimir Lenin described as ‘a useful idiot.’

Mr. Carter always sides with the weaker party in a conflict notwithstanding their immorality. Let us never forget that the Carter Administration tried to seat the exiled Khmer Rouge as the rightful government of Cambodia even though they slaughtered one out of three Cambodians in the 1975-78 genocide. For Mr. Carter, weakness was itself a sign of righteousness.

But Mr. Carter’s recent accusations of Israeli war crimes, his demand for a United Nations investigation into Israel’s actions in Gaza, and his call for Hamas – a genocidal terror organization – to be recognized as a legitimate political partner by Israel is making it near impossible not to ascribe to Carter some nasty feelings toward the Jewish state.

Where is Mr. Carter’s call for the world to recognize the legitimacy of Al Qaida or the Taliban? Why isn’t Mr. Carter calling on Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to recognize the legitimacy of Boko Haram? Why is it only the Jews who have to recognize the legitimacy of the terror organizations sworn to their annihilation?

Mr. Carter’s pronouncements on the Middle East have become so toxic that had he not once been the American Commander-in-Chief they would be dismissed as the ravings of a man utterly out of touch with reality. But notwithstanding all the damage to his credibility, and notwithstanding his own grandson Jason, currently running to be Governor of Georgia, basically asking him to shut up, he remains obsessed with the Jews and Israel. While ISIS is trying to carry out the slaughter of Yazidis and Christians in Iraq, while Libya descends into a hellish morass of violence, and while hundreds of thousands die in Syria, Jimmy Carter remains fixated on the crimes of the Jewish state.

I grew up in the United States during the 1970’s when we danced to disco music, wore leisure suits, and watched the Brady Bunch. But as if that weren’t torture enough, we had Jimmy Carter as president. I can still recall how depressing it was to watch his taciturn face announcing one catastrophe after another, from the skyrocketing misery index, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the capture of our hostages in Iran, to the tragically botched rescue attempt to free them. Fortune did not smile on Jimmy Carter and he was, poor thing, hapless at nearly everything he touched.

But Mr. Carter’s biggest failing was to be bereft of a moral compass. To be sure, his heart wished to do good. It’s just that his head was often confused as to what the good was. Throughout his career he invariably found himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their oppressed peoples, not because he was insensitive but because he was confused.

Mr. Carter always subscribed to what my friend Michael Scroccaro calls ‘Underdogma,’ a knew-jerk reaction to champion the cause of the underdog however immoral the party. Poverty dictates virtue and weakness dictates righteousness. So, if the Israelis have jets and the Palestinians only rockets then that must necessarily mean that the Israelis are the aggressor.

Mr. Carter’s underdog obsession is what motivated him to legitimize Fidel Castro and take his side in a bio-weapons dispute with the United States and to praise North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung with the words: “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent,…and in charge of the decisions about this country.” This is the Korean dictator who, together with the tyrannical son who succeeded him, starved to death about 3 million of their own people. Carter added absurdly, “I don’t see that they [the North Koreans] are an outlaw nation.” He also hailed Marshal Joseph Tito as “a man who believes in human rights,” and said of murderous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe in enhancing human rights.” Carter told Haitian dictator Raul Cédras that he was “ashamed of what my country has done to your country,” which made most Americans ashamed of Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Carter is like a Timex watch. He takes a licking but keeps on ticking (though a Timex is, of course, much more accurate). No matter how wrong he is on the issues, no matter how many times his predictions about how organizations like Hamas will change, he just keeps coming back with more advice. This was the man whose record as Chief Magistrate has become a benchmark for presidential failure. Still, he refuses to get the message. He just won’t go away.

Fair enough. It’s a free country. And he has the right to be wrong.

But Carter’s nonstop criticism of Israel and his emergence – in the words of Alan Dershowitz – as a “cheerleader” for Hamas has confirmed in the minds of many that Carter has more than a bit of a problem with the Jewish state.

Mr. Carter said in 2006 that Israel’s policies in the West Bank were actually worse than apartheid South Africa. He followed this disgusting libel with his infamous 2009 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” in which he claimed that due to “powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the U.S., Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, voices from Jerusalem dominate our media.” We’re skirting awfully close to a protocols-of-Zion style argument here, that the Jews control the media and American foreign policy.

Here’s a priceless clip of Jimmy Carter on the Today Show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KunaaFqFCoE


It's a bit long but I thought it deserved posting.

Perhaps the clincher is Mr. Carter's pronouncement that the key factor that prevents peace is the continuing building of Israeli settlements in Palestine, driven by a determined minority of Israelis who desire to occupy and colonize east Jerusalem and the West Bank.According to Carter, Palestinian terrorism, Iranian nukes, tyrannical Arab governments, and murderous Islamist religious militancy are not the causes for Middle East conflict. No, it's the Jews.

What has surprised the world in Israel's third war against Hamas since 2005 is how even countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria have not come to Hamas' defense or criticized Israel. And when a country like Saudi Arabia and a brutal dictator like Bashar Assad have more moral sense than a former American president, you've got to wonder about more than his moral compass.

http://observer.com/2014/08/the-moral-disintegration-of-jimmy-carter/

could this be the Cause?

Carter's Arab financiers



9:27 p.m., Wednesday, December 20, 2006





To understand what feeds former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Israeli frenzy, look at his early links to Arab business.

Between 1976-1977, the Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, poorly managed and highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). According to a July 29, 1980 Jack Anderson expose in The Washington Post, the bank's biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter's confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance.

At that time, Mr. Lance's mismanagement of the NBG got him and the bank into trouble. Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), known as the bank which would bribe God, came to Mr. Lance's rescue making him a $100,000-a-year consultant. Abedi then declared: we would never talk about exploiting his relationship with the president. Next, he introduced Mr. Lance to Saudi billionaire Gaith Pharaon, who fronted for BCCI and the Saudi royal family. In January 1978, Abedi paid off Mr. Lance's $3.5 million debt to the NBG, and Pharaon secretly gained control over the bank.

Mr. Anderson wrote:Of course, the Saudis remained discretely silent… kept quiet about Carter's irregularities [and] renegotiated the loan to Carter's advantage.

There is no evidence that the former president received direct payment from the Saudis. But according to the bank files, [it] renegotiated the repayment terms savings $60,000 for the Carter family The President owned 62% of the business and therefore was the largest beneficiary. Pharaon later contributed generously to the former president's library and center.

When Mr. Lance introduced Mr. Carter to Abedi, the latter gave $500,000 to help the former president establish his center at Emory University. Later, Abedi contributed more than $10 million to Mr. Carter's different projects. Even after BCCI was indicted and convicted - for drug money laundering, Mr. Carter accepted $1.5 million from Abedi, his good friend.

A quick survey of the major contributors to the Carter Center reveals hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi and Gulf contributors. But it was BCCI that helped Mr. Carter established his center.

BCCI's origins were primarily ideological. Abedi wanted the bank to reflect the supra-national Muslim credo and the best bridge to help the world of Islam, and the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists.

Shortly after assuming office, in March 1977, Mr. Carter made his first public statement regarding a Palestinian homeland. Since then, he has devoted much of his time to denouncing Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism, which he claims is not only abominable oppression and persecution of the Palestinians, but also damages U.S. interests in the region.

By the time BCCI was shut down in July1991, it operated in 73 countries with a deficit of $12 billion, which it had managed to hide with wealthy Arab shareholders and Western luminaries. Among them Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan of Abu Dhabi, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Yasser Arafat and Palestinian terrorist groups, and who branded the United States: our enemy number one; Former head of Saudi foreign intelligence service, and King Faisal's brother-in-law, Kamal Adham who with another Saudi, the banker of the royal family, Khaled bin Mahfouz, staged BCCI's attempt to illegally purchase the Washington-based First American bank, in the early 1980s.

Story Continues

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/dec/20/20061220-092736-3365r/?page=1


Carter's Arab financiers

continued from page 1



True to its agenda, BCCI assisted in spreading and strengthening the Islamic message; they enabled Pakistan's nuclear ambitions, and helped the Palestinian leadership to amass a $10 billion-plus fortune, used to further terrorist activities and to buy more influence in the West.

BCCI founders also supported the Islamic fundamentalist opposition to the Shah of Iran, and saw it as an opportunity to undermine Western influence in the Gulf. They assisted the revolution financially, reinforcing their position within the leadership of the Iranian revolution. Ironically, the success of that revolution cost Mr. Carter his presidency.

BCCI's money also facilitated the Saudi agenda to force Israel to recognize Palestinians rights, convincing Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to sign the Camp David Accords in September 1978. Since then, Mr. Carter repeatedly provided legitimacy to Arafat's corrupt regime, and now, like the Saudis, he even sides with homicidal Hamas as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter again laid responsibility for U.S. bias against the destitute, depressed and (consequently) violent Palestinians on American policy makers helplessness, over the last 30 years, against the menacing tactics of the powerful American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC).

However, it seems that AIPAC's real fault was its failure to outdo the Saudi's purchases of the former president's loyalty.There has not been any nation in the world that has been more cooperative than Saudi Arabia, the New York Times quoted Mr. Carter June 1977, thus making the Saudis a major factor in U. S. foreign policy.

Evidently, the millions in Arab petrodollars feeding Mr. Carter's global endeavors, often in conflict with U.S. government policies, also ensure his loyalty.

Rachel Ehrenfeld is the director of the American Center for Democracy.


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/dec/20/20061220-092736-3365r/?page=1

could this be the Cause?

Carter's Arab financiers
Quite possible, that and he is crazy as a loon.

I tire of the media telling us who are the 'bad' guys in international situations when most americans don't even have a passport to travel to or experience anything outside our own American borders.

The media asks for opinions in this land of free speech and people form those opinions usually only on what they have read and chose to believe.

I don't know who is the aggressor or the 'terrorist' because I am not there. I do know how unfortunate it is that the region has been under such a violent divide since the time the israli state was formed.

yep,If in doubt,Blame Israel!

Carterism at its best!

I think my point was , because Im not there , I don't 'blame' either one or hold either one to be the mere 'victim'

both seem to be participating in something that is costing innocent lives,,

I have at least traveled there and personally know people from there and living there,,,etc,,,,

You are not in Washington D.C. either.

yes, I too tire of the constant media bashing of Israel's attacking Palestinians and Israels war crimes. An unbiased media would be refreshing for a change.

yes, because so many Palestinians own the news media that they present Israel as the constant aggressor and villain,,,,

The Palestinians are simply the pawns of Hamas. It's the Liberals and the UN that want to paint Israel as the aggressor.

and the jewish media owners? what do they want to paint Israel as?

seems like both sides have representation then,,,,,huh?

Stereotype much do you?

nope,it's those Useful Idiots For Palestine!

which part is untrue? that there are jewish media owners? or that a jewish media owner would be most likely NOT to paint Israel with negative spin?

The word "media" covers a wide variety of medium types, from radio stations, to TV stations, to newspapers and magazines, to websites and blogs. To imply that all media are owned by Jews is to be in error.

I didn't imply all media is owned by Jewish, I pointed out something about the media that IS owned by Jewish,, which does exist.


like when this thread refers to 'black conservatives', they certainly aren't trying to imply all conservatives are black,,,right?