There appears to be no bottom to the pit of speciousvacuity in which former president Jimmy Carter has been falling since his massive repudiation by voters in his 1980 election loss to Ronald Reagan. Carter’s latest book — “Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid” — poses a ridiculous argument and commits unforgivable intellectual sins while doing so.
The ridiculosity underlying Carter’s book is his assertion that Israel is imposing apartheid on the Palestinians by such measures as constructing the West Bank fence intended to keep suicide bombers and other terrorists from crossing into Israel to kill and maim.
Carter clearly doesn’t care that Israel remains the sole true democracy in the Middle East and affords Arabs living within its borders voting rights and economic privileges unknown anywhere else in the region.
To classify anti-terrorist measures as forms of apartheid is to indicate a complete lack of understanding of the reality facing Israel every day.
Since Carter’s book appeared, it has sparked heavy and unrelenting criticism from thoughtful people across the political spectrum, as well as the resignation of Dr. Ken Stein, one of the nation’s most respected Middle East scholars, from a Carter-led academic institute at Emory University.
At the root of Carter’s Middle Eastern perspective, of course, is his unalloyed blindness toward the Palestinians in particular and the political Muslim world’s long-running antipathy towards Jews. It is that blindness that prevents him, as The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg noted in a recent review in The Washington Post, from recognizing and accounting for “the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.”
But policy blindness is at least understandable. What is not is Carter’s intellectual dishonesty, as described by Stein in his recent letter of resignation: Carter’s latest tome is “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.” Stein further claims that “aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book.”
Everybody is entitled to their opinion, just not to their own set of facts. That observation has particular relevance for Carter because, as Stein noted in his letter, “being a former president does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook.”
Carter would do himself and his countrymen a favor by permanently resisting the urge to offer any further commentary on world affairs.
