On Monday, the New York Times published a characteristically invidious column by former president Jimmy Carter calling on his lame-duck successor, Barack Obama, to recognize a Palestinian state. Intelligent observers have already picked apart the article itself, which has plenty to say about Israeli settlements—most of which is wrong, misleading, or vicious, but makes no mention of Palestinian terrorism, how Hamas and Fatah will work out their differences, how this new state will be ruled, or how it will be prevented from ending up like Syria, Libya, or Iraq. But it’s worth taking a moment to consider the graphics provided by the Times. I don’t know what the thinking was behind them but, as the saying goes, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.”

The main image, at least on the online version of the piece, is an artist’s rendering of a mother bird (a dove?) perched on her nest, extending a green (olive?) branch to what are presumably her two chicks, one slightly larger than the other. Some simple digital wizardry shows the baby birds—who are looking up expectantly at their mother—snapping their beaks in alternation. The image rests, for some incomprehensible reason, on a garish hot-pink background. When I first saw it, I got the message it was meant to convey—”peace”—and moved on. But then I looked again, and realized it more or less sums up a principal reason why, aside from his trademark animus against Israel, everything about Carter’s argument is wrong.