Recently, while researching a column that touched on foreign aid, I discovered that Jimmy Carter had once said that Americans “don’t really care about what happens” to the poor of other lands. In fact, when you add private contributions to government assistance, our generosity to them is amazing.
Carter, in short, was being true to his character in the remark — smug, irretrievably condemnatory of the land of his birth, a comfort to those who join in castigating us and fundamentally amiss about a large issue.
All this is in contradiction to the widespread image of Carter as the country’s best ex-president, but maybe this false image is about to butt heads with reality. Maybe the public will start discovering what a befuddled troublemaker he really is, and will desert their misunderstanding of the man, just as 14 members of the Carter Center in Atlanta are resigning from its advisory board in protest of infamies he has put in print.
Those infamies show up in a Carter book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” that holds Israel chiefly responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it traipses through a host of errors detected by critics.
They say he gets it wrong, among many other things, when he says Palestinians embraced a peace proposal by President Bush wholeheartedly from the start, when he says Hezbollah was formed in large part to help Palestinians get their land back and when he says Israel retaliated against Hezbollah massively in the most recent war in Lebanon only because of the kidnapping and killing of a few Israeli soldiers.
The critics’ response is that Palestinians never went along with the Bush proposal’s strictures against terrorist activities, that Hezbollah was formed in part to obliterate Israel from the face of the Earth and that Hezbollah was launching missiles at Israel before Israel hit back. Few would contend Israel has made no errors or committed no misdeeds in its conflicts, but a failure to see how its best intentions have been repeatedly thwarted by enemies wanting to kill every Jew in the nation is to be utterly biased.
One of the critics — a former director of the Carter Center, Kenneth Stein, a long-term friend of his and a professor of Middle East studies — has even accused Carter of “gross inventions” and “intentional falsehoods” in this book.
Carter is 82, and you might excuse him by saying age is catching up with him — that he has slowed down a step or two — except that the book appears in keeping with behavior that existed in his presidency and repeatedly since then.
Here is the man whose presidential policies on the deposing of the shah in Iran and the Iranian hostage crisis have not just a little but a lot to do with the growth of the Islamic fascism that gave us Sept. 11, some say.
Here is a man who has repeatedly played kissy-face with tyrants, who once spoke of Americans as overly worked up about communism and whose uninvited diplomacy — by at least some accounts — helped allow North Korea to proceed with nuclear weapons production, some say.
In a book on Carter, Steven Hayward recalls how he tried to persuade allies to oppose the first Gulf War in the United Nations, and how a Time magazine columnist Lance Morrow said, “Some of his Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason.”
We can avoid the word “treason,” but let’s hope Carter’s latest literary excursion will keep us from using the word “saint.”
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
