Kenneth Stein, a Carter Center Fellow of 23 years, has resigned from the Center due to Jimmy Carter’s just-published anti-Israel screed, “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid.”
President Carter’s book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook. Having little access to Arabic and Hebrew sources, I believe, clearly handicapped his understanding and analyses of how history has unfolded over the last decade. Falsehoods, if repeated often enough become meta-truths, and they then can become the erroneous baseline for shaping and reinforcing attitudes and for policy-making. The history and interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is already drowning in half-truths, suppositions, and self-serving myths; more are not necessary. In due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their origins.
The decade I spent at the Carter Center (1983-1993) as the first permanent Executive Director and as the first Fellow were intellectually enriching for Emory as an institution, the general public, the interns who learned with us, and for me professionally. Setting standards for rigorous interchange and careful analyses spilled out to the other programs that shaped the Center’s early years. There was mutual respect for all views; we carefully avoided polemics or special pleading. This book does not hold to those standards. My continued association with the Center leaves the impression that I am sanctioning a series of egregious errors and polemical conclusions which appeared in President Carter’s book. I can not allow that impression to stand.
Via Glenn.
While I don’t willy-nilly throw around the descriptive phrase “anti-Semite” – in the case of former President James Earl Carter, Jr., it is appropriate. It is my suspicion that the former President is in the throes of dementia and should be tucked away safely in Plains where he can be restrained from doing further harm to the country he swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” and to his own, already shakey, reputation.
Remember his brother Billy Carter? When Jimmy Carter was president, brother Billy was courted by the Libyans, and he justified himself by saying that, after all, “there’s more Arabians than Jews.”
Jimmy Carter may be just a better-educated, more presentable version of the same mindset.