Now that Jimmy Carter is lying in state at the Capitol rotunda, having made the trip from Plains, to Atlanta, to Washington, Mitchell Bard provides one last unfond farewell to former President James Earl Carter, Jr. Bard reminds us of Carter’s display of anti-Israel animus during his presidency, and his display of antisemitism in the decades following his four years in office, here: “Jimmy Carter Was No Saint for Jews,” by Mitchell Bard, JNS, January 5, 2025:
Forgive me if I don’t join in the rush to canonize Jimmy Carter. He deserves respect for serving as president and for some meritorious accomplishments, but he was also one of, if not the most, anti-Israel president in history. Though hailed as a peacemaker, his actions and statements, particularly after leaving office, show a much darker side steeped in antisemitism….
The Israel-Egypt peace treaty is rightly lauded as Carter’s greatest foreign-policy accomplishment. What is less remembered is how much he did to impede the negotiations. Carter wasn’t interested in a bilateral agreement; he had a misguided vision of a comprehensive Middle East peace that he believed could be reached at an international conference in Geneva. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin came to the White House, Carter told him US support for Israel would be damaged if he refused to accept the Palestine Liberation Organization’s participation and was the first president to call Israeli settlements illegal. Carter insisted that the Jewish states accept only “minor adjustments” to the 1967 borders, causing an uproar because it was inconsistent with Israel’s determination to maintain “defensible borders.” Carter pressured Israel to “accept the situation that we think is fair.” (emphasis added)…
Carter later used Israel to sell America’s most sophisticated fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Israel objected because it threatened its qualitative military edge. Carter packaged the sale with jet transfers to Israel and Egypt to win approval, and said it was all or nothing. AIPAC objected: “By placing Israel in the same category as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the administration is obviously trying to make the Arab sales more acceptable to Congress, but the administration is also abandoning America’s traditional special relations with Israel.” As would happen in subsequent arms fights, AIPAC lost. The fight added to the Jewish perception of Carter as an unreliable ally.
As the election approached, Carter was embarrassed by his U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, who was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had arranged secret meetings with representatives of the PLO. It was the last straw….
Carter’s disdain for Israel’s leaders is a recurring theme in his diary, referring to them as “obstinate and difficult,” “recalcitrant” and “intransigent.” For example, Yitzhak Rabin was “ineffective,” “timid, stubborn and also somewhat ill at ease.” Begin, who he initially believed was “congenial, dedicated, sincere and deeply religious,” became “a small man with a limited vision.” Carter wrote after one meeting at Begin’s home that he had “rarely been so disgusted in all my life.” By contrast, he found Sadat “charming,” “strong and courageous.” After the three men received the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter wrote: “Sadat deserved it; Begin did not.”…
Of course, it was Begin who was giving up something — the entire Sinai — that had been won by Israel in the Six-Day War, and it was Sadat who was getting back that same territory. Surely the party that was sacrificing “for the sake of peace” is the one who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. But that’s not how Carter saw it.
While he is rightly lauded for his humanitarian work, his antisemitism tarnished his legacy. His book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, was filled with falsehoods and the misrepresentation of history. He even contradicts the calumny in the title when he says, “The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa.”
Even though he helped facilitate Israel’s peace with Egypt, which included the evacuation of Sinai, Carter repeatedly asserts that Israel does not want peace, is stealing Palestinian land, and refuses to trade land for peace.
When Carter kept complaining in his post-presidential writings about Israel’s supposed “refusal to trade land for peace,” he ignored completely Israel’s agreement to yield the entire Sinai to Egypt, an agreement that he had helped bring about. When ever before in history has a nation victorious in war been made to sue for peace with its vanquished foe? But that’s what Israel was forced to do by Jimmy Carter at Camp David. Begin gave up land “for peace,” while Sadat took it. But Jimmy Carter revered Sadat and despised Begin.
Carter’s book damning Israel — “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” — became a bestseller. Carter was on all the radio programs and television shows, flogging his book. But he claimed, preposterously, that the Jews exercised “tremendous intimidation in our country that has silenced” Israel’s critics — the old antisemitic claim about powerful Jews supposedly controlling the media. They didn’t, after all, manage in the slightest to silence him.
He’s gone but not forgotten. May he be remembered accurately, as a sanctimonious fraud and a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite.
Donald Breyer says
Carter’s anti-Semitism was almost benign compared to Obama’s, who is committed to the destruction of Israel
࿗Infidel࿘ says
His policies during his presidency were mild compared to either Obama’s or Biden’s – or even Clinton’s (Carter never tried to topple Menachem Begin in an election). But his post-presidency activism both in Latin America as well as the Middle East have made him a villain very comparable to them
Bexarkat says
Carter’s sell-by date has long past. His view of Menachem Begin, who notably stood up to threats by Joe Biden by reminding Biden that he was not talking to a “Jew on trembling knees” was only matched by Obama’s dismissal of Netanyahu’s, keeping him waiting while Obama ate dinner.
somehistory says
carter was a liar, and a hater of the people of a nation which had produced the One carter claimed to follow. In that way, he was anti-Christ, because Jesus said, “If you do it to these, my brothers, you, do it to me.” ” Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 46 And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Rep Mike Johnson and Sen. Thune spoke as the liar’s casket was carried into the Capitol. Some “fans” of the late, never great, ‘president,’ had a meltdown, calling their speech ‘an abomination’ because Johnson said carter had been in the Army.
Christiana says
“He’s gone but not forgotten. May he be remembered accurately, as a sanctimonious fraud and a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite.” Words on marble.
Wellington says
Good riddance.
Christiana says
To bad rubbish…
somehistory says
biden says Jan 9 will be a national holiday….to remember the antisemite, anti-Christ., liar and troublemaker
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/national-holiday-confirmed-on-january-9/ar-AA1xbtN2?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=ecfe786497ff4055868d860ffbf32c27&ei=35
gravenimage says
One Last Unfond Farewell to Jimmy Carter
………………………….
Yes–ugly stuff. And it is the “Palestinian territories”, not Israel, that practices apartheid–Israel is in fact the *only* nation in the Middle East with equal rights for all its citizens.
Kepha says
I have very mixed views of Carter the man and Christian, although I believe his presidency was a disaster illustrative of Bismarck’s famous remark that God looks after drunkards, fools, small children, and the USA.
The OP and most comments so far focus on Carter’s difficult relationship with Israel. However, in the wider area of international politics, Carter inherited a bad hand, but his policies in dealing with a world in which the USA had clearly lost the Cold War were disastrous–apart from upsetting the string of Soviet advances by bringing about the Israel-Egypt accord.
Carter was not alone among people of his generation–the one that recalled and served in World War II–in thinking that the Soviet Union, our gallant World War II ally, was not an evil empire. Along with many of the New Dealers, he thought that Communist policies ultimately aimed at everyone having enough, if not over abundance, and that they might be persuaded to abandon their policy of revolutionizing the world. He was also ridden by guilt feelings over segregation in the USA and Western imperialism. This is probably the crux of his his hatred of Israel, along with his undercutting of South Africa (although I cannot say I hold a candle for the late, unlamented Apartheid regime). These guilt feelings–helped along by the poisonous legacy of Kissinger– probably informed his betrayal of Taiwan and recognizing the Communist regime essentially on the Communists’ own terms; in an essentially vain hope that Beijing would prove a trustworthy ally against the Soviet advance.
Carter’s strategy was to show the world that the USA was a good citizen of a UN-led world, sincere in its championship of human rights and democratization, even if it led to results inimical to US interests. Hence the willingness to undercut the Pahlavi regime in Iran, acquiescence in Communist gains in Latin America, and acceptance of Africa’s one-man-one-vote-one-time “democracy”. This, of course, led to a rapid advance of pro-Soviet regimes worldwide, including pro-Soviet regimes straddling the American isthmus and turning the Panama Canal over to a less than trustworthy Panamanian state.
Further, lying down with the dog Deng Xiaoping had us rising up with the fleas of Saloth Sar (Pol Pot). While it is sheer lying Vietnamese propaganda that the USA aided Democratic Kampuchea (US diplomats were forbidden to have any direct contact with that crew, and dealt with them only through UN mediation in getting food and medical aid to displaced persons camps in Thailand where DK had internal administration). But the international–and even domestic–perception was that the US had actually gone into alliance with Democratic Kampuchea (in fact, we gave arms and dealt directly only with the Sihanoukists and Son San factions).
Carter’s naivete came out when he thought Rohollah Khomeini would be compassionate and reasonable because her was a religious leader. That, friends, is where ecumenical wishful thinking leads. Carter had no clue that Khomeini’s clerical allies were not deep down inside the good-hearted nebbishes that the liberal Christian clergy of the 1940’s-70’s were. Hence, we were toyed with every step of the way by the Iranian mullahocracy. But in fairness, the best minds in Washington at the time when the Pahlavi regime was tottering thought that the Communist Tudeh would emerge victorious, and some sort of deal with the Soviets to keep Gulf oil flowing would have to be reached. Yet Khomeini pulled his end run around the Left in the rough-and-tumble of revolutionary Iranian politics. .
Then, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter ruefully admitted that he’d learned more about the Soviets in three weeks than he had in three years. This was inexcusable, in that his generation had seen how the European war began in 1939, and Soviet behavior after the German defeat. But an awakened Carter was probably handicapped by his National Security Adviser Brzezinski, who seemed to think that the problem with the Soviet Union was not that it was Communist, but that it was Russian.
And, of course, we have a string of bad domestic policies giving us an energy crisis and dreadful inflation.
As a Christian, Uncle Kepha leaves the final judgment on Jimmy Carter to God. On the one hand, I refused then and still refuse now to find any hypocrisy in Carter’s admission that he had “committed adultery in the heart”. Rather, this was an example of commendable honesty about Christian living. The Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus declares that one who looks on a woman lustfully has committed adultery in the heart, is not “simple, practical ethics” as too many biblically illiterate commentators say, but a spiritual kick in the stomach which tells us that our sin problem is deeper and more radical than we can possibly imagine. As Martin Luther so pithily put it, it shows that the Christian is simul justus (in Christ) et paccator (in himself). In that statement about adultery in the heart, Carter showed himself far more astute in his reading of Jesus’ words than most of the posturing and Pharisaical commentators who pounced on him over this.
I also admire Carter’s work with habitat for humanity.
But, Carter stated that the theologian he admired most was Paul Tillich, who seemed to flit between being a pantheist and an incognito Mahayana Buddhist rather than a Christian thinker in any meaningful historical sense. Post-President Carter also stated that the Jesus he believed in would countenance same-sex marriage (and, presumably, the rest of the sexual revoltion); when any honest reader of Scripture will note that Jesus plainly declared marriage as between male and female, and that it had been so since the beginning (Matthew 19). Carter thus revealed himself to be, at best, one more victim of a shallow 20th century theological liberalism that did all the running it could to remain a respectful five paces behind its culture despisers, all while claiming it was offering a “prophetic” critique.
James E. Carter has passed. The verdict on his presidency was passed in 1980. As a man, he was one more sinner in need of grace. Hopefully, his own confession of such negates the bad theology he professed.
gravenimage says
Thanks for your analysis, Kepha.
Kepha says
You’re welcome.
James Lincoln says
Former Pres. Jimmy Carter was very intelligent – a pioneer in Navy nuclear propulsion.
It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that a high IQ does not necessarily translate into practical common sense and understanding.
As a former POTUS, he was “mostly” a disaster…
Joshua says
Yes, this is a real mystery – how common sense is not common. I mean Obama I thought was the nastiest to Israel ever known but Carter was way back in the 1970’s. No the country has changed so much that college hate protesting sessions of Israel are common place it seems.
Jihadi Jew says
What meritorious accomplishments, the Egypt-Israel peace agreement. The one in which Sadat who Carter says deserved the Nobel Prize, got the Sinai and the Abu Rodeis oil fields for signing a peace of paper. The one in which Egypt allowed rockets to be smuggled into Gaza in tunnels under it’s wall with Gaza, that rained down on Jewish communities. The one in which Egypt allowed in the weapons that were probably used in the massacres of October 7? The one in which Egypt threatens to go to war with Israel if Israel doesn’t withdraw from the other side of the Egyptian wall with Gaza and let the smuggling continue. Israel would have been much better off if it had retained control of the Sinai and the Abu Rodeis oil fields. There would have been peace because Egypt would have been afraid to lose even more land.
Ralph says
I remember well that during the administration of this fraud our mortgage rates were 18%. He threw away our ownership of the Panama Canal.
krauser robert says
La beaute du diable incarnee
Joshua says
After reading this entire article, it is Stunning that Carter was portrayed as such a Bible believing (Southern Baptist) Christian but yet displayed such animosity towards Israel ? Did the man not ever read the Old Testament ? I am sure he did. Who influenced him so anti-Israel is a mystery.