Remembrances of former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, should keep in mind how America’s 39th president profoundly damaged the Jewish state, especially with his deceitful 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
But the story of Carter’s attitude towards Israel goes deeper. He was not simply a modern-day anti-Zionist—an ignorant idealogue who wrongly believed that Israeli counter-terrorism policies harmed the “human rights” of the Palestinian people. Carter was, in fact, a traditional, old-fashioned Christian antisemite.
We know this because his many post-presidential activities included teaching Sunday school. In 2007, Simon & Schuster released a 13-disc CD boxed set of recorded sermons that Carter gave at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Ga., called “Sunday Mornings in Plains.”
The sermons contain a slew of chillingly pre-modern antisemitic prejudices. For example, he claimed that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are a sleazy “trick” to enhance personal wealth, and that current Israeli policy towards Palestinians is based upon these “Jewish” values and practices.
In the sermons recorded between 1998 and 2003, Carter attacked Israel by retreading antisemitic tropes dating back to the gospels and patristic writings of the early church. These anti-Judaic beliefs were formulated not in the 1960s or 1970s but between the first and fifth centuries C.E., ensuring well over a millennium of institutional, lethal Christian antisemitism.
It is actually Jesus, incidentally, not “the Jews,” who refers to non-Jews as “dogs” in Matthew 15:26. Why then should Jews today, let alone Israelis, be held responsible for this decontextualized Gospel insult?
In another rant, he characterized Temple-era Jewish ritual sacrifice as a kind of tax fraud that relieved a person of filial responsibility. As Carter said, “Korban was a, uh, prayer that could be performed by usually a man in an endorsed ceremony by the Pharisees—that you could say in effect, ‘God, everything that I own—all these sheep, all these goats, this nice house, and the money that I have—I dedicate to you, to God.’ And, from then on, according to the Pharisees’ law, those riches didn’t belong to that person anymore. They were whose? God’s! So, as long as those riches were, belonged to the person, that person was supposed to share them with needy parents, right? But once it was God’s, it wasn’t theirs, and they didn’t have anything to share with their parents. So, with impunity, and approved by the Pharisaic law, they could avoid taking care of their needy parents by a trick that had been evolved by the incorrect and improper interpretation of the law primarily designed by religious leaders to benefit whom? The rich folks! The powerful people! Because the poor man wouldn’t have all of this stuff to give to God. He would probably—in fact, he might very well have his parents in the house with him or still be living with his own parents.”
And, in a sermon recorded in January of 1998, Carter took this supposed Jewish racism and religious malevolence and tied them to modern-day Israeli policy, saying that “one reason” that Israel embodies the idea of Jewish superiority is because the government is headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has to depend “on the ultra-right or fundamentalist Jews” to give them a majority in the parliament, and “the ultra-conservative Jewish leaders demand always that they have total control over anything that relates to religion inside Israel, in particular in Jerusalem. Well, I’m not here to condemn anyone but to point out that, even within ourselves, there is an inclination for, I’d say, a feeling of superiority. Wouldn’t you think so? Would you agree? I know I have it.”
It’s not clear whether the audience for the former president’s lectures—either in the classroom at the time or around the CD player—were adult theology students, children or both. Even if these were “adult” lessons that young minds were never intended to hear, such statements demonstrated a deep-seated theological hatred of the type many Christians (including the Vatican, in its “Nostra Aetate” declaration of 1965) have disavowed since the Holocaust. Hatred, which, when taught to children century after century, was a crucial condition for Europeans wishing their continent cleansed of Jews.
When people first scrutinized the recordings in 2007, the supremely insightful Phyllis Chesler wrote in an article for PJ Media:
“Anyone familiar with Middle Eastern realities will understand that it is Muslim fanatics who view Christians as unclean infidels, and it is Muslims who persecute, exile, lynch and behead Christians,” she wrote curtly. “Palestinian Islamists have desecrated churches and murdered Christians. The very Israeli Jewish government that Carter is railing against in his Bible classes has protected the holy sites of all religions. And it is ethnic Arab Muslims who have been murdering black African Christians and Muslims in Darfur. Jewish Israelis have not mass-murdered Palestinian civilians or even those Palestinians who have been waging a fierce terrorist and propaganda war against them.
“President Jimmy also presents the allegedly great power of Roman-occupied Jews in Jesus’ time as the emblem for the contemporary cabal of power wielded by Jewish and Israeli Zionists today. In his teachings, the stench of messiah-murder clings to every possible Jewish deed,” she pointed out. “Yes, it is true: Jews did not and do not accept that Jesus is the messiah or even the son of God. But so what? This should not be the source of resentment and enmity between Jews and Christians. Has Carter learned absolutely nothing from the Holocaust? Ah, maybe he has learned everything he needs to know: That the Jews were vulnerable, that their slaughter (in the Holy Land) might occasion no outcry until it is too late.”
Finally, she wondered, “Maybe the crime of the Jew is that of having been there first, of being both the mother and father of religious monotheism. Maybe our descendants, whether they are rebellious followers or detractors, need to get out from under our looming parental shadow. But a true Christian is not supposed to hate. In fact, he is supposed to forgive even those who torment him. To demonize and scapegoat an essentially innocent people is so un-Christian that we might not only ask whether Jimmy Carter is a Jew-hater but whether he is really a good Christian.”
Carter’s was not a “new antisemitism,” it was the old. And it explains plenty.
There’s more. In her piece, Chesler wrote of how Michael Miller, then a student at Columbia University, was one of the first Jews to acquire the CDs, listen to them and produce a transcript of the relevant parts. “Miller told me that he was so alarmed by what he heard that he tried to interest many major Jewish organizational leaders and journalists. For whatever reason, no one got back to him.”
In more recent years, the Jewish establishment has been beset with charges that it protects the Democratic Party more than its own people. In the case of the Anti-Defamation League, at least, there’s some evidence that this might be changing.
Students of antisemitism, most notably the late, beloved Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, described Jew-hatred as “the mutating virus,” explaining that Jews are hated in every era according to the reigning ideology of the time. When Christianity was normative, the Jews were hated for murdering Jesus, and, in our time, when globalism is the reigning virtue, Jews are hated for their state.
Carter was just more inclusive. He found no need to morph. He just added the defamatory stages together.
{Reposted from JNS}
