JOLLY DAYS

Jimmy Carter Sells

Passive-aggressive ex-president Jimmy Carter has been going the rounds, hawking his wares — a tendentious book this time — to raise money for his monument to himself, the Carter Center. Carter has been trying to repair his reputation after a failed presidency in fitful public lobbying to improve his tarnished image — that of a depressive technocrat and incompetent leader. Sabotaging his best efforts to appear impressive, Carter's morally demented comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa — unsupported in his book and cynically deflected by Carter when confronted in interviews — is an ethically compromised attempt to make money by slandering the democratic state.

[via Glenn Reynolds]
Here is a WaPo article by Michael Kinsley about Carter's book.

[ In Carter's book]…”Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” It's not clear what he means by using the loaded word “apartheid,” since the book makes no attempt to explain it, but the only reasonable interpretation is that Carter is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa. …

I mean, what's the parallel? Apartheid had a philosophical component and a practical one, both quite bizarre. Philosophically, it was committed to the notion of racial superiority. No doubt many Israelis have racist attitudes toward Arabs, but the official philosophy of the government is quite the opposite, and sincere efforts are made to, for example, instill humanitarian and egalitarian attitudes in children. That is not true, of course, in Arab countries, where hatred of Jews is a standard part of the curriculum.

An obvious — if necessary to state, given these times — conclusion by Kinsley:

There used to be Jews living in Arab nations, but they also fled, in 1948 and subsequent years — in numbers roughly equivalent to the Arabs who fled Israel. Now there are virtually no Jews in Arab countries — even in a moderate Arab country such as Jordan. How many Jews do you think there will be in the new state of Palestine when its flag flies over a sovereign nation?

And the most tragic difference: Apartheid ended peacefully. This is largely thanks to Nelson Mandela, who turned out to be miraculously forgiving. If Israel is white South Africa and the Palestinians are supposed to be the blacks, where is their Mandela?

And what of Jimmy's money ?:

But it’s the financing behind Georgia’s Carter Center and the Jimmy Carter Library that raises serious doubts that the former president is, in actuality, a wholly neutral intermediary in the troubled region.

[review of…] annual reports … indicate millions of charitable dollars have flowed into the center from His Majesty Sultan Qaboss bin Said Al Said of Oman, Jordan, from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and from the Government of the United Arab Emirates.

Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been donated to the center by the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development. H.R.H. Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah of Morocco has also contributed tens of thousands of dollars.