Jimmy Carter’s Love for Dictators and Jihadis

On Monday, Jimmy Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, said of his grandfather: “This is a good man who has done remarkable things with his life and has taken the opportunities that he was given and used them to do good.” He will be 100 years old in two months, on Oct. 1, and while he has been in hospice care for sixteen months now, he perseveres. Some find him admirable. Others – you and I, for example – beg to differ.

Not so admirable, in the views of those dissenters, has been Jimmy Carter’s deep animus toward Israel. And his brain has shown a moral malfunctioning in other areas as well. Back in 2016, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach pointed out several of them, including the fact that when the dictator Fidel Castro, the begetter of Cuba’s miseries, died, Carter issued this astonishing statement:

Rosalynn and I share our sympathies with the Castro family and the Cuban people on the death of Fidel Castro. We remember fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of his country. We wish the Cuban citizens peace and prosperity in the years ahead.

Carter had kind words, too, for the crazed and cruel dictator of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. Carter said: “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent…and in charge of the decisions about this country.” This was the dictator who caused the deaths, by starvation, of three million Koreans.

Carter hailed Yugoslavian President-for-life Marshal Josip Tito as ‘a man who believes in human rights,’ and said of the murderous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, “our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics… We believe in enhancing human rights.” Carter told Haitian dictator Raul Cédras that he was “ashamed of what my country has done to your country.”

But fatuous as these remarks are, they pale beside Carter’s statements about Israel. In 2006, he described Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as “worse than apartheid.” And to make sure everyone got his point, he titled his book-length animadversions on the Arab-Israeli conflict Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He has, however, had nice things to say about Hamas, the terror group that kidnaps and kills Israeli soldiers and civilians, fires thousands of rockets into Israeli cities, and for good measure, terrorizes its own people, the Palestinians in Gaza. He appears to believe that peace will be achieved if only Israel is squeezed back within something approaching the pre-1967 armistice lines, the lines that leave Israel only nine miles wide at its waist, from Qalqilya to the sea. These were the same lines that Abba Eban once described as “the lines of Auschwitz.” Carter wants Israel to be pushed back into a condition of tremendous vulnerability, giving up the West Bank and thereby losing control of the Judean heights and the Jordan Valley, both vital to Israel’s defense against a possible invasion from the east.

Some believe that it is filthy lucre that explains Carter’s dislike of Israel. It is certainly true that he has received a great deal of Arab money, not just for his foundation, but personally. Arab money helped rescue his peanut farm in the 1970s. Alan Dershowitz did some investigative work about Carter and the Arabs; here is what he found out:

Recent disclosures of Carter’s extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? … The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up, a think-tank funded by the Sheikh and run by his son, hosted speakers who called Jews “the enemies of all nations,” attributed the assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad and the 9/11 attacks to the United States’ own military, and stated that the Holocaust was a “fable.” (They also hosted a speech by Jimmy Carter.) To its credit, Harvard turned the money back. To his discredit, Carter did not.”

Certainly Carter’s record of taking money from deeply corrupt Arab financiers is breathtaking. A 2006 report from the Washington Times details some of it:

In 1976-1977, the Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). The bank’s biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter’s confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance,” who was forced to resign his government post after charges that he profited from his connection to President Carter.

At that time, Mr. Lance’s mismanagement of the NBG got him and the bank into trouble. Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), known as the bank “which would bribe God,” came to Mr. Lance’s rescue making him a $100,000-a-year consultant. Abedi then declared: “we would never talk about exploiting his relationship with the president.” Next, he introduced Mr. Lance to Saudi billionaire Gaith Pharaon, who fronted for BCCI and the Saudi royal family. In January 1978, Abedi paid off Mr. Lance’s $3.5 million debt to the NBG, and Pharaon secretly gained control over the bank.

There is no evidence that the former president received direct payment from the Saudis. But “according to… the bank files, [it] renegotiated the repayment terms… savings… $60,000 for the Carter family… The President owned 62% of the business and therefore was the largest beneficiary.” Pharaon later contributed generously to the former president’s library and center….

BCCI founders also supported the Islamic fundamentalist opposition to the Shah of Iran, and saw it as an opportunity to undermine Western influence in the Gulf. They assisted the revolution financially, reinforcing their position within the leadership of the Iranian revolution.

BCCI’s money also facilitated the Saudi agenda to force Israel to recognize Palestinians “rights,” convincing Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to sign the Camp David Accords in September 1978. Since then, Mr. Carter repeatedly provided legitimacy to Arafat’s corrupt regime, and now, like the Saudis, he even sides with homicidal Hamas as the “legitimate” representative of the Palestinian people.

Apparently Jimmy Carter was unaware of or indifferent to the fact that Hamas has murdered hundreds of its Fatah rivals in Gaza; that Hamas spokesmen have called for the killing not just of all Israelis, but of all Jews, that two of Hamas’s top leaders stole more than $5 billion from the foreign aid given to Gaza, that Hamas has been recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S., and other countries, that Hamas terrorists have blown up buses, families at Passover services, pizza parlors, that Hamas leaders have honored terrorists by naming streets and squares in Gaza after them, that Hamas leaders have described the Holocaust as a “fable” and insisted that it not be taught in UNRWA schools, and that Hamas has hurled thousands of rockets into civilian areas of Israel. But why should Carter let little things like attempts at mass murder bother him? He’s a peacemaker, and blessed are the peacemakers.