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Jeffrey Goldberg on Jimmy Carter

Jewcy editorial advisor Jeffrey Goldberg, whose lecture at Natan will be broadcast from our site this Thursday in our first Moving Pictures feature, eviscerates Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in a WaPo review:

Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. 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. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it "ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians." He goes on, "In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples." One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis — in their deviousness — somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry.

Goldberg deftly shows how Carter's book was precision-timed for coaxing evangelicals out of the deadly GOP-AIPAC embrace by showing them how (wait for it) secular the Jewish state is. (Golda Meir's Menshevism can't have played well in Georgia.)

That Carter is still consulted or read on any matter of foreign policy is almost as funny as the Nobel Peace Prize he recently won. The left's favorite ex-president is actually a scripture-drunk nitwit who encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1979 and who lost the White House to a candidate whose IQ was only a biscuit higher than his own.

It's not the first time les bien-pensant have been duped by a closet reactionary, and it won't be the last.

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