Former President Jimmy Carter, seated, blows a kiss as he signs copies of his book ‘Palestine Peace Not Apartheid’ at the Changing Hands bookstore Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2006, in Tempe, Ariz. (AP Photo/Paul Connors)
Notice how young the girl carrying a copy of the book – presumably to be autographed – is. Shame on Carter for poisoning the minds of the young.
And still on the subject of Carter poisoning people’s minds:
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 ‚Äì some as young as 12 years old ‚Äì and 94 women, but the Israelis wouldn’t swap. So then Israel reinvaded Gaza. But if Israel ever wants peace ‚Äì and they do want peace ‚Äì 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.”
And then there’s this:
Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, “It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities — the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier.”
I’m 100% with Omri on this one.
Just to be clear: we’re not suggesting that Jimmy Carter is anti-Semitic because he’s criticizing Israel. We’re not suspicious of him because his supposedly rationally-justified recommendations are indistinguishable from what an anti-Semite would recommend. We’re suspicious because he doesn’t seem to have any rational justification for his demonization of Israel, and those demonizations seem more or less indistinguishable from those of anti-Semites. We’d just like to know if he’s criticizing Israel because he thinks that Israeli officials were involved in killing Christ, or if he thinks that Israeli officials were involved in killing Christ because he criticizes Israel for everything else.
