I found this while reading a current piece on Huffpo. Jimmy Carter is deluded, and manages to lie and expose himself as a liar in the next breath. Also, the ego on the man is unbelievable, and now we see another reason why he hates Israel so much: Because Israel failed him.
Was there a role for faith when you were brokering peace with Egypt and Israel?
There was. When I was elected President nobody asked me to negotiate between Israel and Egypt. It was not even a question raised in my campaign. But I felt that one of the reasons that I was elected President was to try to bring peace to the Holy Land. And I was blessed with two other deeply religious persons, in fact Menachem Begin was the first religious Prime Minister of Israel. The rest of them were quite secular in their attitudes, particularly Golda Meier, who laughed when I brought that up when I met with her when I was governor.
Anyway, Anwar Sadat was a deeply religious Muslim and Begin was a religious Jew and the first thing we did was to provide a common prayer to the world that we would have peace there. And Sadat brought it up quite often and wanted to build a shrine on Mount Sinai that would be used by all three faiths. We would have done that, but he was assassinated soon after I left office, and the idea was dropped. But we talked about our common worship of God quite frequently while we were negotiating the peace agreement.
Did you actually pray together?
No, we didn’t have a chapel at Camp David but we used a little room and the Muslims used it on Friday, the Jews on Saturday and the Christians on Sunday. We were very assiduous in our worship.
So he says they found a common prayer, but then he says that each of them prayed on his own Sabbath, thus proving that Carter lied utterly about that common prayer. It’s like he’s not living in the same world he’s describing. In psychology, they call that a fabulist. But let’s face it: The real reason Carter hates Israel is because Israel didn’t do what he wanted. The peace failed, and since he can’t blame the terrorists, he blames the victims. (Of course, there’s always the possibility that he simply hates Jews, which I count as a strong one.) He is, and always was, an Israel-hating tool. We just didn’t know it back then.
Sadat’s funeral was on a Saturday. As head of state, Begin went to Egypt. But despite the security people telling him that for security reasons he should ride in a motorcade, Begin (along with Education Minister Josef Burg) walked to the funeral.
Jimmy sees us all as “stiff-necked.” Were we not we would not have survived. But he has this Southern Baptist view of the universe combined with a feeling of self-importance that make him insufferable.
His mother spins in her grave over his giant ego.
“there’s always the possibility that he simply hates Jews”
Certainly, he has always been antisemitic. But I think it got worse after he lost to Reagan, which he blames on Jews. Of course there were 1000 other reasons he lost, mostly having to do with his own poor performance in office. That is the classic antisemite, a loser who can’t own up to his own failures so he blames them on da Joooos.
I doubt he sees himself as anti-Semitic, Meryl, and in a certain way he isn’t. He loves the Jewish people and hates to see us sink to a level below the high moral standards he thinks we should hold. Failure to do so casts us into sin.
He relates having visited Golda Meir not long after the War of Atonement and lecturing her on how Israel throughout history has been punished when it deviated from the world of God. Israel had very recently suffered a bloody war during which its very existence3 teetered on the knife edge. I don’t imagine she was eager to hear his admonitions.
I saw Carter once being interviewed by Bill Moyers. It was bad enough when he started piously berating American Jews – people of our parents’ generation, who had lived through the Holocaust – for not being sympathetic enough towards the Palestinians (this in the era of Munich and Achille Lauro, well actually it has never stopped). But then he started sarcastically referring to Jews as the “Chosen People”, his voice and expression just dripping with contempt, hatred and venom. My jaw just dropped to the floor – I could not believe that a former President was spouting off like David Duke. It is to my everlasting shame and regret that I voted for this unrepentant antisemite *twice* for POTUS.
My brother and some friends were part of the Carter White House staff, so I have a bit of insight.
President Carter saw things as he wanted to see them and not as they were. He still cannot understand why successive Israeli governmental leaders won’t do what he tells them to do. Like many of his Southern Baptist friends he may or may not believe as Rev Bailey Smith said, “G-d does not hear the prayers of Jews.” His mom, Lillian, did not believe that. Others in his family do not believe that. But he has this self-centered and self-important view that if he thinks someone ought to do what he thinks they ought to do (particularly if G-d or attack rabbits tell him so) then no matter what is the reality, they are wrong.
He is disappointing because even if the Israeli governmental leaders had done everything he demanded “for their own good” nothing beneficial would have come of it. After all, look at the “democratic republic of Venezuela”.