Jimmy Carter dishonesty

My article about media dishonesty was based upon this report and it contains an example about my "favourite" ex-US President Jimmy Carter. This story concerns Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" which traces the ups and downs of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, beginning with Jimmy Carter's 1977-1981 presidency and the historic peace accord he negotiated between Israel and Egypt and continuing to the time the book was published in 2006. According to the American Thinker "His book was so full of errors, including doctored maps, that his chief collaborator, Kenneth Stein of Emory University, resigned his position with the Carter Center. Carter's book was condemned by Alan Dershowitz and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others." According to The Washington Post "A veteran Middle East scholar affiliated with the Carter Center in Atlanta resigned his position there Monday in an escalating controversy over former president Jimmy Carter's bestselling book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...Kenneth W. Stein, a professor at Emory University, accused Carter of factual errors, omissions and plagiarism in the book. "Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information," Stein wrote in a harshly worded e-mail to friends and colleagues explaining his resignation as the center's Middle East fellow...In a telephone interview yesterday, Stein said that Carter had "taken [material] directly" from a published work written by a third party but that legal action was being contemplated and he was not yet at liberty to make the details public. He said accounts in the book about meetings he had attended with Carter between 1980 and 1990 had left out key facts in order to "make the Israelis look like they're the only ones responsible" for the failure of peace efforts."

The list of news outlets that have criticised this book is longer than I care to repeat on this blog, you can find them easily enough on the web if you want, one example is this article which lists many examples of the books, and Jimmy Carter's subsequent interviews, factual errors - here are just five examples:

1) "CARTER:

Pages 51-52: ...[I]mportant provisions of our [1978/79] agreement have not been honored since I left office. The Israelis have never granted any appreciable autonomy to the Palestinians ...

FACT:

Obviously, after 1993 the Palestinians gained "appreciable autonomy." The Oslo process created the Palestinian Authority and gave Palestinians control of political, civic, security, medical, educational and media institutions. Israel ceded 40 percent of the West Bank and eventually the entire Gaza Strip. About 98 percent of the Palestinian population lived in the areas of Palestinian self-rule.

Any subsequent Israeli military incursions into these areas have been in response to their use by Palestinians as bases for terrorism.

Moreover, Carter omits that Palestinian autonomy as envisioned in the agreements was bitterly opposed by the very PLO he defends. Yasir Arafat and his lieutenants publicly denounced autonomy efforts, and Palestinians who supported them were killed. The New York Times reported on one such murder on Dec. 21, 1977, recounting the gangland style execution of a Christian Arab whose only crime was supporting reconciliation with Israel."


2) "CARTER:

Page 62: When I met with Yasir Arafat in 1990, he stated, "The PLO has never advocated the annihilation of Israel. The Zionists started the 'drive the Jews into the sea' slogan and attributed it to the PLO."

FACT:

The original PLO founding charter speaks almost exclusively of "the liberation of Palestine," and calls on Palestinians to "move forward on the path of jihad until complete and final victory has been attained." (Note that this was written in 1964, before Israel's entrance into the West Bank and Gaza Strip.) It adds: "The partitioning of Palestine, which took place in 1947, and the establishment of Israel are illegal and null and void ..."

Likewise, the 1968 version of the charter describes "Palestine" as the area encompassing the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel, then states: "Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase."

Arafat himself frequently called for destroying that nation, as in: "The goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromise" (Washington Post, March 29, 1970) and "[p]eace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations" (El Mundo [Venezuela], Feb. 11, 1980).

And Israel’s enemies have indeed referred to driving Jews into the sea. For example, the New York Times quoted speakers at a July 13, 1947 meeting held by the Palestine Arab High Committee and "attended by leading sheikhs, mukhtars and other persons of consequence in the Palestine Arab world" calling for Jews to be "thrown into the sea" ("Young Arabs Defy U.S., Britain, Jews," July 14, 1947). And in a 1948 interview with the New York Times, Muslim Brotherhood head Sheikh Hassan el-Bana said: "If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea" ("Aim to oust Jews pledged by sheikh," Aug. 2, 1948).

More recently, Lieutenant-Colonel Munir Maqdah, who had commanded Arafat's Fatah army in Lebanon before being suspended, said his forces would continue fighting "the Jews and their agents" despite any peace talks, promising that "[s]ooner or later we will throw the Zionists into the sea." (Reuters, Oct. 8, 1993)"


3) "CARTER:

Page 179: Hamas was now [January 2006] holding many local posts, and their incumbent officials had been free of any allegations of corruption and, for sixteen months, had meticulously observed a cease-fire commitment, which they called hudna.

page 184: When I questioned him about the necessity for Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel, [Hamas member Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi] responded that they had not committed an act of violence since a cease-fire was declared in August 2004 ..."

CNN, Larry King Live, Nov. 27, 2006:

... since August of 2004 ... Hamas has not been guilty of an act of terrorism that cost an Israeli life."

PBS, NewsHour, Nov. 28, 2006:

Carter: "... since August of 2004, has not committed a single act of terrorism that cost an Israeli life, not a single one."

Judy Woodruff: "I think many Americans would be surprised to hear that."

Carter: "I know. They would be surprised, but it's an actual fact."

FACT:

On Aug. 31, 2004, Sixteen people were killed and 100 wounded in two nearly simultaneous suicide bombings aboard two city buses in Beer Sheva. Hamas claimed responsibility.

On Sept. 29, 2004, two preschool children were killed by a Qassam rocket fired from Gaza. Hamas claimed responsibility.

On Jan 13, 2005, Palestinians terrorists attacked the Karni crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, killing 6 civilians. Hamas claimed joint responsibility.

On July 14, 2005, a woman was killed by a Qassam rocket fired from Gaza. Hamas claimed responsibility."


4) "CARTER:

Page 147: Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996, a few weeks after the Palestinian election. Thirty-two Israeli citizens were killed, an act that probably gave the Likud’s hawkish candidate, Binyamin Netanyahu, a victory over Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

FACT:

This, too, is an error of omission, as Carter fails to mention significant Palestinian attacks that immediately preceded the March attacks. On February 25, 1996, a Hamas bomber killed 26 at the central bus station in Jerusalem, and a separate bombing claimed the life of another Israeli. "


5) "CARTER:

Page 168: Living among 1.3 million Palestinians, the 8,000 Israeli settlers [in the Gaza Strip] were controlling 40 percent of the arable land and more than one-half the water resources ..."

FACT:

Settlers lived on roughly 15-20 percent of Gaza land, and controlled little of its water. In fact, Israel has supplied, and continues to supply, large amounts of water to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The American Journalism Review in August/September 2004 published the following correction after similarly misstating Gaza statistics:

In "Caught in the Crossfire" (June/July), Barbara Matusow wrote that Israeli settlers occupy 25 percent of the land in the Gaza Strip and control most of the water resources. According to the Institute of Applied Research in Jerusalem, the Palestinians control 95 percent of the water resources in Gaza. Estimates vary widely when it comes to control of the land, however. A June 2004 report on Gaza by the World Bank states that 15 to 20 percent of the land is occupied by settlements."


You can find more links to articles regarding the anti-Israel bias in this book here



Wikipedia has a carefully worded article on the book and the reaction to the book.


You might care to read this article on Jimmy Carter's position on the Arab-Israeli conflict and his part in the rise of Iranian fundamentalism.

You might also care to read this article from Philowiki includes the following "Fact is, Carter has long since joined the Israel-hating left — where true anti-Semitism resides today. In so doing, Carter has joined a long line of those who, like ex-Attorney General Ramsey Clark, linguist Noam Chomsky and faux-documentarian Michael Moore, see Israel as the root of all evil. Any ill found in the Mideast — poverty, inequality, corruption, human rights abuses — can somehow be traced to Israel’s supposed mistreatment of Palestinians, they say... "
It also includes the full statement from Kenneth Stein which includes this passage which I think says a lot "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."