{Originally posted to the author’s website, The Lid}
In a recent interview, former President Jimmy Carter spoke of a resurgence of open racism, saying, “I don’t feel good, except for one thing: I think the country has been reawakened the last two or three years to the fact that we haven’t resolved the race issue adequately.”
Carter laid the racism at the feet of the Republican Party, saying that criticism of President Obama had “a heavy racial overtone” and that Donald Trump had “tapped a waiting reservoir there of inherent racism.”
It seems as if the peanut president is simply saddened by the fact that Obama’s policies have not helped the country which is the source of the criticism, and he doesn’t understand the voter anger at the government (of any race) held by the voters attached to Trump (and even Bernie Sanders).
In the interview Carter said, “When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.” But, if the former president really believes that, he should look at his own life, since he has displayed anti-Semitism during much of his presidential and post presidential career.
According to many observers Carters anti-Jewish bigotry stems from his feeling that he lost reelection campaign because he became the first Democrat since 1920 not to receive a majority of the Jewish vote. Carter got 45%, Reagan received 39%, and 3rd party candidate John Anderson got 14%. It is also that perceived abandonment behind Carter’s disdain of Israel.
Ambassador Marc Ginsburg was Jimmy Carter’s deputy senior adviser on the Middle East, and from 1977 through 1980 was White House liaison to the State Department. He has a unique perspective of Jimmy Carter’s Middle East dealings. According to the Ambassador, the reason Carter goes out of his way to bash Israel is that he feels American Jews did not fawn over him enough for all that he did for Israel.
…When former President Jimmy Carter revealed that Israel has more than 150 nuclear weapons, he clearly had a motive, according to his administration’s deputy senior adviser, Marc Ginsberg: “I think there’s no doubt — particularly given the vantage point I had in the White House at the end of his administration — that he resents the way in which Israel and the American-Jewish community have failed to express sufficient gratitude for his efforts on behalf of peace in the Middle East.
“In my judgment, there’s no other explanation,” Ginsberg says.
(…) “There’s no doubt he knows exactly what he is doing when he’s making these statements, or making misrepresentations that Hamas has agreed to recognize Israel if certain conditions occur, or to the book he wrote [‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’] referring to Israel.”
Believe it or not, when he was in the Oval Office, President Carter rejected someone for a position on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Council because the guy’s name was too Jewish. That’s right the Holocaust Memorial Council. Monroe Freedman, who was executive director of the council during Carter’s presidency, told a reporter that Aaron Klein, that a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian, was rejected from the council’s board by Carter’s office because the scholar’s name “sounded too Jewish.”
Freedman said he sent a memo to Carter’s office containing recommendations for council board members. The memo was returned with a note on the upper right hand corner that stated, “Too many Jews.” The note, Freedman said, was written in Carter’s handwriting and was initialed by Carter.
Ultra-liberal famous law professor Alan Dershowitz also feels that Carter is a Jew-hater. In an essay talking about Carter’s anti-Semitic claims that the Jews control foreign policy and the media, he wrote:
The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It is Carter, not me, who has made the point that if politicians receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter’s own standards, it would be almost economically “suicidal” for Carter “to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine.”
(…) If money determines political and public views as Carter insists “Jewish money” does, Carter’s views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter’s off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter.
Ken Stein was director of the Carter Center and even collaborated with Jimmy Carter on the book, “The Blood of Abraham,” resigned in protest from the center after Carter published his biased tome “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.”
According to Stein, Carter had a deep distrust of the American Jewish community, and other supporters of Israel. In a 1991 research interview with Carter for his book “Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace,” Carter recollected that:
[Vice president] Fritz Mondale was much more deeply immersed in the Jewish organization leadership than I was. That was an alien world to me. They [American Jews] didn’t support me during the presidential campaign [that] had been predicated greatly upon Jewish money … Almost all of them were supportive of Scoop Jackson—Scoop Jackson was their spokesman … their hero. So I was looked upon as an alien challenger to their own candidate. You know, I don’t mean unanimously but … overwhelmingly. So I didn’t feel obligated to them or to labor unions and so forth. Fritz … was committed to Israel … It was an act just like breathing to him—it wasn’t like breathing to me. So I was willing to break the shell more than he was.
William Bradford Smith, Chair of the Division of History, Politics & International Studies at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, once sent a letter to the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia, which said in part:
When I taught at Emory University, I used to see former President Jimmy Carter on a fairly regular basis, and it was all I could do at times to stop myself from spitting at him.
Carter’s hatred of Israel and, by extension, of all Jews (and make no mistake, if you spend any time in the man’s presence, his discomfort at being in the same room with someone who merely appears to be Jewish is palpable), is rooted in the man’s megalomania, and his unflinching belief in his own rectitude.
Looking at his real track record of bigotry, perhaps Jimmy Carter should examine his own life before makes false charges of bigotry against others. Thankfully the drug he is taking that was tested in Israel seems to have eradicated the cancer in his brain (yes the nation and people he abhors may have saved his life). I only wish him a long life to examine the hatred in his own heart.