Jimmy Carter — you are a very bad man

MOVED UP TO THE TOP, NOT BECAUSE I HAVE ANYTHING TO ADD, BUT BECAUSE THE COMMENT SECTION HAS BECOME ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING TO APPEAR ON MY BLOG, AND I DON’T WANT IT TO GET LOST AS I PUBLISH NEW POSTS.

If you’re a Seinfeld fan, you may recall the episode in which Baboo, an Indian restauranteur, having been deported because of Jerry’s carelessness, wags his finger at Jerry, and repeatedly says “He is a very bad man.” That phrase keeps popping into my brain every time I hear anything about Jimmy Carter or, worse, actually see him speak.

We know that his most recent book about the Middle East is filled with falsehoods and that he plagarized and distorted stolen materials for his book. Cinnamon Stillwell, writing at the San Francisco Chronicle, gives a long laundry list of his policy failures, missteps, stupid decisions, and profound moral errors. Name a modern dictatorship and he’s in bed with the leader. Name a failed peace initiative that empowered the people bent on death and destruction, and he’s at the root of it. I will forever hold him responsible for the situation we find ourselves in today vis a vis the Muslim world because, when the Iran Revolution took place in 1979, it was his groveling ineptitude that emboldened the revolutionaries, not only to take on their own government, but to begin looking at the United States as a reasonable and viable target for their World Caliphate goals.

All of the splenetic feelings that guide me when I think about Carter bubbled up ferociously when I finally got around to watching Monday’s Jay Leno, which had Carter as the first guest. Although World Net Daily has come under some legitmate attack for its more loony news stories, I can tell you that its reporting about Carter’s appearance on that show is absolutely accurate:

Without mentioning the onslaught of attacks by Palestinian terrorists, former President Jimmy Carter told a national audience watching the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” there is “horrible persecution” of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis, and he is urging a return to peace talks between the residents of the embattled region.

“In Palestinian territory, there is horrible persecution of the Palestinians who live on their own land,” Carter said.

“A minority of Israelis want to have the land instead of peace. The majority of Israelis for the last 30 years have always said [they] will exchange their own land in exchange for peace. But a minority disagrees and they have occupied the land, they have confiscated it, they have colonized it, and they forced Palestinians away from their homes, away from their pastures, away from their fields, cut down the olive trees and severely persecuted the Palestinians.”

The 82-year-old Carter was on Leno’s show last night to promote his new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Leno said to the president who held office more than 25 years ago, “But when Israel gives something back, it doesn’t seem like they get anything for it. It seems like it just moves some angry people closer to them.”

“No, that’s not true at all,” responded Carter. “Israel hasn’t really tried to give ‘Palestine’ back to the Palestinians. They did give up some of Gaza. And then they moved out, and the Palestinians captured one soldier and tried to swap [him] for 300 children – some as young as 12 years old – and 94 women, but the Israelis wouldn’t swap. So then Israel reinvaded Gaza. But if Israel ever wants peace – and they do want peace – a majority of Israelis have always said, ‘Let’s get rid of the land, and let’s have peace.’ That’s what we need to have.”

What was the worst thing about watching that for me was the Mr. Bookworm, who is not the news junky I am, bought into it completely. To him, it sounded reasonable: there should be peace in the Middle East and, clearly, Israel has to make the concessions.

He was surprised when I told him there was a difference between a kidnapped soldier and 300 prisoners who were properly tried and convicted for murdering or attempting to murder Israeli citizens. He was surprised when I told him that amongst these prisoners there was Samir Qantar, who led a group into an Israeli home, and dragged the father and four year old daughter onto the beach. Once there, they shot the father in front of his child, then smashed the little girl’s head against rocks before beating her to death with a rifle butt. In the meanwhile, the mother, desperately trying to shelter her infant daughter, inadvertently smothered the child in an effort to keep her from crying and alerting the murderers. Those kind of people are in prison. Those are the kind of people the Palestinians — and Carter — demand in exchanged for a kidnapped young man whose only crime is being an Israeli citizen.

Mr. Bookworm was also surprised when I told him that, since the Israelis voluntarily left Gaza, giving the Palestinians exactly what Carter insisted would be the paradigmatic land for peace deal, the Palestinians responded by (a) lobbing hundreds of Kassam missiles into Israel (with five more this week alone); (b) digging tunnels to smuggle terrorists and arms into Israel; (c) and breaching the boundaries into Egypt in an effort to augment their munitions supply.

What was most depressing about Mr. Bookworm’s ignorance was the fact that others watching Carter spread his evil lies don’t have someone like me sitting at their side to give them the facts. All they have is that down-home Southern voiced venom trickling into their ears, filling their heads with poisonous misinformation.

The only good thing about Jimmy Carter is his age. He’s 82, which means that his maximum life expectancy is about 6 more years. That’s a long time, but the fact is, he may become infirm before then, which should keep him housebound and, more importantly, silent. Believe me when I say that I am not wishing for anything that would bring an unnatural end to his natural life. I would never, never, never advocate the assassination of a Democratically elected official, no matter how repugnant his views. I’m just happy to know that, when it comes to Carter, the Rolling Stones were right on when they sang “Time is Mine Side.”

UPDATE: David Horowitz also takes on Jimmy Carter’s manifestly anti-Semitic views. Carter vehemently denies being an anti-Semite, but I think that the shoe fits, given his pronouncements about how the evil Jewish state has destroyed the peace and peace-loving Palestinians. An opinion that deviates this far from reality has to be driven by some other force and, in this case, anti-Semitism seems as good an explanation as any. Here is how Horowitz destroys just one of Carter’s many lies:

It is a lie that Palestinians “had their own land, first of all, occupied.” This is like saying that Texans had their own land occupied by Hispanics, ignoring the fact that Hispanics were there first. The very word Palestine is a Roman appellation for the people called Philistines, who were not Arabs but red-haired sailors from the Aegean. The Jews were there as well.

In short, first of all the Jews were in the land before the Arabs.

Second of all, the Arabs who inhabited the Palestine Mandate in 1948, at the time of the creation the state of Israel, considered themselves Syrians.

Third, the Palestine Mandate was not created on land taken from the Syrians or the Arabs. It was taken from the Turks.

It was not taken from the Turks by the Jews, but by the British and the French. They took it because Turkey sided with Germany in the First World War and, of course, lost. The Turkish empire had ruled the entire region including Syrian, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan for four hundred years before Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan were artificially created by the English and the French. Jordan – a state whose majority is Palestinian – occupies 80% of the Palestine Mandate.

So it is a preposterous lie to say that the Palestinians had their own land and that it was occupied by the Jews.

Fourth, the individual plots of land that Jews now own were in the first instance bought from the Arabs who regarded themselves as Syrians and who lived in the area of Israel. The only property that was confiscated was confiscated as a spoil of the aggressive war that five Arab states waged against Israel from the day of its birth. Five Arab armies invaded Israel, a sovereign state, with the declared intent of “pushing the Jews into the sea.” The cry today of the Muslim majority in the Middle East is to “liberate Palestine from the river to the sea.” In other words push the Jews into the sea.

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