Mere Rhetoric: Is Jimmy Carter Just An Old-Fashioned Christian Fundamentalist, Anti-Semitic Bigot?

Brutal:

This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The "imprisonment wall" is an early symptom of Israel's descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that "the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land." In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state.

There's some decent stuff in there about the success of the Defensive Fence in stopping suicide bombers, although he doesn't pass on any of the dramatic numbers - which show successful suicide bombings dropping by orders of magnitude. The really interesting part of the book review is the motive that he ascribes to Carter: undermining evangelical support for Israel. If that's what Carter's up to then his book - which at first blush seems to appeal to the same kind of people who quote out of the Chomsky Reader - might actually be the start of something significant. We've long thought that if there's going to be a break between evangelicals and Israel, it's going to be over Israel's relative progressivism. On the other hand, if Aristotle taught us anything it's that the credibility of a speaker matters, and Carter isn't polling high among evangelicals.

The point the book review makes is that Carter's view of Israel is one that is grounded in the Bible, but in different parts than what evangelical supporters of Israel read. Carter's reading of the Bible is more old-fashioned, and draws a direct line between the Jewish state to the Jewish rulers who killed Christ:

Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based. On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter... met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit... "With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."...

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." There are, of course, no references to "Israeli authorities" in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence.

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.

A final note: we would've actually made this article a little shorter. The title is "What Would Jimmy Do?", and we think you could sum the entire thing up with "lose another Middle Eastern state to Muslim extremists, just like he lost Iran".

Previously: In Just Seven Short Paragraphs, Jimmy Carter Tells 2 Lies, Makes 2 Incoherent Arguments, Takes an Anti-Israel Stance that the State Department Mocks, and Just Generally Annoys the Hell Out of Us, Carter is Blindingly Clueless, Jimmy Carter: Hamas Made Up of "So-Called Terrorists"