It’s no secret that there’s not a whole lot of love lost between former President Jimmy Carter and the Jewish state (and those who care about her). There has, however, a been whole lot of lovin’ between Carter and Israel’s enemies. Also Carter and tyrants around the world – but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.
So, earlier this week, tongues were wagging when Carter recently offered a public apology to the American Jewish community—he even used the term “al het” from the Yom Kippur liturgy, which in modern Hebrew means any sort of request for forgiveness (though he used a weird transliteration for it)—for all the nasty things he’s said about Israel over the years. Here’s what he said:
“We must recognize Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances, even as we strive in a positive way to help Israel continue to improve its relations with its Arab populations, but we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel. As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so.”
Uh huh.
As National Review’s sagacious (and terrrrrribly funny) Jay Nordlinger has put it, “No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is.”
Long before the rest of the West would even acknowledge them, Carter was cozying up to terrorist despots, including Yasser Arafat, the “father of modern terrorism.”
(Try to hold down your lunch if you look at this photo of Carter and his wife laying a wreath at Arafat’s grave. Or read the accompanying article in which Carter praises Arafat as one who “fought for just causes.” In addition to his murderous record, once he had legimitate power, Arafat built a kleptocracy that enriched his cronies(and his wife) while depriving the Palestinians of even the most basic civil rights. For one of the best exploration of Carter’s bizarro-world love for Arafat, along with other troubling quirks, read Nordlinger’s excellent take-down here.)
His 2006 screed
Of course, Carter’s antipathy toward Israel culminated in the 2006 book that brought the calumny that Israel is an “apartheid state” right smack into the mainstream – and onto the country’s best-seller lists. Scholar Michael Oren, now the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., wrote at the time that Carter’s objections to Israel seem to be religious – that he was trying to make Christians re-think their support for the Jewish state.
His book wasn’t just an attack on Israel, Oren was saying, as much as on the “grafting-in” theology that animates millions of American Christians who feel a strong connection to the Jewish people and Jewish state:
In his apparent attempt to make American Christians rethink their affection for Israel, Jimmy Carter is clearly departing from time-honored practice. This has not been the legacy of evangelicals alone, but of many religious denominations in the U.S., and not solely the conviction of Mr. Bush, but of generations of American leaders. In the controversial title of his book, Mr. Carter implicitly denounces Israel for its separatist policies, but, by doing so, he isolates himself from centuries of American tradition.
(Carter’s own theology about Jews seems to be closer to the “traditional”—medieval–kind that led to neat things like Jewish villages getting burned.)
Of course, at the time, when there were prominent Israel advocates arguing against his book, Carter responded that the fact that people insisted on challenging his arguments was “proof that many in the United States are unwilling to hear an alternative view on the nation’s most taboo foreign policy issue, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.”
Right, they’re just not willing to hear another perspective. It can’t be that he’s wrong, dead wrong.
So what’s with this apology?
It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that his grandson Jason is looking to run for the Georgia state senate in a heavily Jewish Atlanta district, now would it?
Nah.
