The Onion called and asked for its story back.
The #HolocaustCommission met President Jimmy Carter as part of a consultation on how UK should remember the Holocaust pic.twitter.com/wzdnCWq1YD
— UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov) May 30, 2014
I doubt Carter can remember whether or not he put on his diaper, let alone the Holocaust.
But more to the point: Carter really does have a hard time remembering the Holocaust, or at least mentioning it.
Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” while exceptionally sensitive to Palestinian suffering, ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion and murder committed against Jews. It trivializes the murder of Israelis. Now, facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes in defense.
One cannot ignore the Holocaust’s impact on Jewish identity and the history of the Middle East conflict. When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them. Jimmy Carter either does not understand this or considers it irrelevant.
His book, which dwells on the Palestinian refugee experience, makes two fleeting references to the Holocaust. The book contains a detailed chronology of major developments necessary for the reader to understand the current situation in the Middle East. Remarkably, there is nothing listed between 1939 and 1947. Nitpickers might say that the Holocaust did not happen in the region. However, this event sealed in the minds of almost all the world’s people then the need for the Jewish people to have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. Carter never discusses the Jewish refugees who were prevented from entering Palestine before and after the war. One of Israel’s first acts upon declaring statehood was to send ships to take those people “home.”
A guiding principle of Israel is that never again will persecuted Jews be left with no place to go. Israel’s ideal of Jewish refuge is enshrined in laws that grant immediate citizenship to any Jew who requests it. A Jew, for purposes of this law, is anyone who, had that person lived in Nazi Germany, would have been stripped of citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws.
Compare Carter’s approach with that of Rashid Khalidi, head of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute and a professor of Arab studies there. His recent book “The Iron Cage” contains more than a dozen references to the seminal place the Holocaust and anti-Semitism hold in the Israeli worldview. This from a Palestinian who does not cast himself as an evenhanded negotiator.
In contrast, by almost ignoring the Holocaust, Carter gives inadvertent comfort to those who deny its importance or even its historical reality, in part because it helps them deny Israel’s right to exist.
Which is hardly surprising, given he has recently changed his legacy from worst US President in history to worst US President in history who is also a vile antisemite.
Update: An oldie but a goodie:
