The worst US President in history, Jimmy Carter, is clearly anti-Israel. But as I’ve argued in the past, he is also anti-Semitic.
Now some of his Bible class CDs have come to light, which demonstrate his anti-Semitic beliefs.
While former president Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid generated many accusations of bias and anti-Semitism, another Jimmy Carter work published last year, three sets of audio CD’s of Bible classes he delivered in his hometown church in Georgia, has largely passed under the radar.
And yet these CD’s, published by Simon and Schuster in 2007 based on lessons Carter delivered in 1998, 2001 and 2003, feature a disturbing number of subtle and not so subtle anti-Jewish and anti-Israel statements – plus a fair dose of falsehood and ignorance.
In a typical example, Carter says, “Korban was a prayer that could be performed by usually a man in an endorsed ceremony by the Pharisees that you could say in effect, ‘God, everything that I own – all these sheep, all these goats, this nice house and the money that I have – I dedicate to You, to God.’ And from then on according to the Pharisees’ law, those riches didn’t belong to that person anymore….
“So with impunity, and approved by the Pharisaic law, they could avoid taking care of their needy parents by a trick that had been evolved by the incorrect and improper interpretation of the law primarily designed by religious leaders to benefit whom? The rich folks. The powerful people.”
During another Bible lesson Carter (with a responsive audience) discussed the Jewish attitude toward non-Jews. “[‘Uncircumcised’] was an epithet, a highly discriminatory phrase… How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised? Non-believer. And what? Unclean. What? They called them dogs, that’s true.”
Carter sounded a similar tone in an earlier lesson: “It’s hard for us to even visualize the prejudice against gentiles when Christ came on earth. If a Jew married a gentile, that person was considered to be dead. If a Jew went into the home of a gentile, that Jew was considered to be what? Unclean, and had to go through a religious ceremony to become cleansed again so that they could even worship in the Temple.”
When The Jewish Press showed these and other passages to Rabbi Garry Greenebaum, U.S. Director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, he said, “This material just shows a vast – I don’t know what other word to use – but a tremendous amount of ignorance and misapprehension of Jewish ideas and Jewish values and Jewish morality over the centuries.
“There are so many statements in the Torah that he should about which instruct us to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and to treat the stranger with respect ‘because you were a stranger in a strange land’…. The Bible teaches that every person is created in the divine image of God. I mean these are pretty basic Jewish principles and values…. And responsibility to provide for parents is part of the fifth commandment, ‘Honor thy father and mother,’…. so what’s he talking about?”
Michael Miller, a former activist for the Anti Missionary Institute, echoed the sentiment. “Jimmy Carter is ignorant…, and he really should not be teaching Bible classes.”
You can actually hear audio of peanut boy denigrating Judaism at this site.
