That is the question many prominent Democrats are asking themselves following the publication of the former president’s new book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” In it, Carter blames Israel for impeding peace and pro-Israel advocates in this country for unduly influencing American foreign policy.
Rightly afraid that they will lose Jewish voters — a strong base of support since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — Democratic leaders have criticized Carter’s assertions. But dealing with Carter will require more than news releases.
In an advertisement published in the country’s leading newspapers, the Anti-Defamation League printed statements from incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Speaker of the House-elect Nancy Pelosi, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Conyers called the book “offensive and wrong,” Pelosi said that, “it is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression” and Dean said that “on this issue President Carter speaks for himself, the opinions in his book are his own, they are not the views or position of the Democratic Party.” Yet Dean also couched his criticism by making it clear that “I have tremendous respect for former President Carter.”
This equivocation — that Dean could still have “tremendous respect” for a former president who has used his position, repeatedly, to smear the Jewish state — is what will prove troublesome for Democrats in the months and years to come. Will the Democrats give Carter a prime speaking opportunity at their upcoming presidential convention, as is traditional for former presidents? Recall the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, when Carter spent the evening, very publicly, sitting next to Michael Moore.
He may be 82 years old, but Carter is not the sort of man who will go away quietly. Ever since leaving office, he has shown a disregard for protocol in carrying out his own independent foreign policy, often at odds with the actual, elected leader of the country.
In 1994, he defied fellow Democratic President Bill Clinton when he visited then-North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. The president of South Korea deemed the meeting “ill-timed” and said that it gave cover to the North Koreans and encouraged them to continue their “stalling tactics” on nuclear proliferation. One Clinton administration official said that Carter’s foiling State Department efforts in the region was “near traitorous.”
Carter has made the familiar assertion that critics of Israel cannot get a fair hearing in the United States. “Because of powerful political, economic and religious forces in the U.S.,” he writes, “Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, voices from Jerusalem dominate our media and most American citizens are unaware of circumstances in the occupied territories.” Yet that lie was quickly and embarrassingly exposed when prominent Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz offered Carter the opportunity to debate and Carter refused.
Since the end of his ignominious presidency, Carter has made a career of coddling the world’s despots, from Robert Mugabe to the dreadful North Korean father and son to Fidel Castro and Yassir Arafat.
Oddly, this was the same president who announced that under his watch, American foreign policy would place a higher priority on human rights. Democrats who support the state of Israel might want to start questioning theirleaders about how they will deal with the problem of Jimmy Carter.
James Kirchick is assistant to the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.
