Biden/Obama Not First anti-Jewish President—Add Carter to the List, how did he gain that title

A lot of nice things have been said about Jimmie Carter.  The best?  Thanks to Joe Biden, Jimmie is no longer the worst President in history.  But how did he gain that title?  Like Roosevelt who openly hated Jews, as did Barack, Carter was clear.  He did not want Israel to exist.  Jimmie preferred Hams.

“10. Embracing Antisemitism

As Carter faced criticisms about his slanderous, fact-free book, he doubled down and dismissed critiques of his work with antisemitic language. Emory History Prof. Deborah Lipstadt (and current United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism) noted at the time that “Carter has repeatedly fallen back…on traditional antisemitic canards.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times about his book, Carter claimed he was being victimized by powerful Jews for having the guts to criticize Israel: he called it “politically suicide” for anyone to put forward a “balanced position” about Israel. On CNN, Carter complained about “tremendous intimidation in our country that has silenced” the media – by Jews, was his clear implication. Speaking on Al Jazeera television, Carter airily dismissed real critiques of his book as being the unimportant whining of duplicitous Jews, declaring: “Most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish-American organizations.”

“Perhaps unused to being criticized,” Prof. Lipstadt wrote, “Carter reflexively fell back on this kind of innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government.”

As we mourn Carter let us remember his philosophy and policies brought us to where we are today.

Jimmy Carter and the Jews: 10 Facts

by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller, Aish, 12/30/24    https://aish.com/jimmy-carter-and-the-jews-10-facts/?src=ac

President Carter had a complex and contentious relationship with Israel and Jews.

Former US President Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, had a complex, highly contentious relationship with Jews. Though he pursued some policies that helped Jews while he was in office, Pres. Carter also engaged in breathtaking antisemitism and reflexive anti-Israel rhetoric throughout much of his life.

Here are 10 facts about Pres. Carter and Jews.

1. Brokering Peace Between Israel and Egypt

Carter, who became President in 1977, is often remembered for his failures: a one-term president, he was unable to free American hostages being held by Islamic radicals in Iran, and oversaw a nation hobbled by high inflation, in part caused by the oil boycott of the predominantly Arab states in OPEC. Voters gave Carter near-record low approval ratings.

Yet Carter’s tenure contained one foreign policy triumph: negotiating the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that still governs relations between these two nations today.

The foundations of the peace treaty were laid soon after Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973. The ensuing Yom Kippur War ended after weeks of intense fighting, in part thanks to the intense diplomacy of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who shuttled back and forth between Israel’s and Egypt’s capitals.

In 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat announced he was ready to make an unprecedented visit to Israel for further negotiations. The following year, from September 5-17, 1978, Carter defied many of his closest advisors and invited both Egyptian President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the United States to negotiate a peace agreement.

Carter, Begin, and Sadat retired to Camp David in Catoctin Mountain Park, Maryland. Over the course of 17 days, Carter engaged in intense negotiations, personally contributing to 23 different versions of the resulting treaty.

“Carter was the hero of Camp David,” recalled Begin’s former Chief Advisor and former Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak. “We ate, we did a prayer, we thought of problems, and would sit and sit until late, late at night (negotiating). Which other president of the United States would be willing to do this?”

Carter wanted to forbid Jews from living outside of Israel’s pre-1967 borders, which earned him the ire of many Jewish leaders. He also – successfully – insisted that the agreement contain provisions for a future Palestinian state. (The PLO turned down Carter’s plans a decade later, during the Oslo Accord negotiations.) On September 17, 1978, Pres. Carter, Prime Minister Begin, and Pres. Sadat signed a seminal provisional Israel-Egypt peace treaty; the formal peace treaty was implemented the following year. Begin and Sadat won the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. Carter was granted a Nobel Peace Prize in part for his role in that agreement in 2002.

2. Planning the US Holocaust Museum – Then Complaining “too many Jews” were Involved

In 1978, Carter established the US’s Holocaust Memorial Council to discuss ways to remember the Holocaust and educate future generations. Monroe Freedman, a prominent law professor, chaired the Council, which eventually recommended the establishment of today’s US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Years later, Prof. Freedman recalled that Carter complained that “too many Jews” were involved. Freedman suggested a long list of Council Members; about 80% of them were Holocaust survivors. His memo was sent back with a notice scrawled in Carter’s handwriting and with his initials saying “too many Jews” were included. Carter even rejected one Christian scholar’s proposed membership because his name “sounded too Jewish.”

3. Stopping – then Urging – Boycotts of the Jewish State

In 1979, with Carter’s encouragement, the United States passed the Israeli Anti-Boycott Act, which allows individual US states to make it against the law to boycott Israel or companies that do business with Israel and makes it a federal crime to boycott Israel.

The background to this groundbreaking act was the Arab League’s widespread use of boycotts to isolate Israel. Under “primary boycotts,” no Arab state, citizen, or business can do business with Israel or Israeli companies; “secondary boycotts” prohibit Arab countries, citizens, and businesses from doing business with a company that does business with Israel; “tertiary boycotts” prohibit Arab nations, citizens, and businesses from engaging with companies that do business with companies which do business with companies which trade with Israel.

When he signed the 1979 Israeli Anti-Boycott Act, Carter spoke out forcefully against anti-Israel boycotts: “For many months I have spoken strongly on the need for legislation to outlaw secondary and tertiary boycotts against American businessmen on religious or national grounds. During the campaign I called this a profound moral issue from which we should not shrink. My concern about foreign boycotts stemmed…from our special relationship with Israel…. The new law…seeks…to end the divisive effects on American life of foreign boycott aimed at Jewish members of our society.”

In later life, however, Carter radically changed his views. After the US Senate passed the Combating BDS bill in 2019, making it hard for state and local government entities to do business with companies which boycott Israel, former Pres. Carter spoke out against it. He called the BDS movement, which seeks to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel and render it a pariah state, a legitimate goal. Carter went to the trouble to issue a formal statement asserting that: “U.S. courts have protected the rights of individuals to participate in boycotts as a form of political protest. The same protection applies to the right to advocate or oppose BDS.”

4. Offering a Lifeline to Iranian Jews

During the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9, Carter froze Iranian government assets held in the USA, expelled thousands of Iranian citizens living in the US, and closed the Iranian embassy in Washington DC. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s Chief Domestic Policy Advisor, recalls his role in convincing the president to help thousands of Iranian Jews and others flee Iran as it came under theocratic government.

I learned from Mark Talisman, the head of the Washington office of the Council of Jewish Federations, that the head of the Iranian Jewish community, Habib Elghanian, had been executed on the false charge that he was a spy for Israel. Shortly thereafter, I arranged a White House meeting with a number of federal agencies with a delegation of Iranian Jews….

(One Iranian Jewish delegate said) ‘Upon the results of the meeting in the White House with Mr. Eizenstat rests the fate of tens of thousands of our fellow Iranian Jews.’ They told us emotionally that expulsion to Iran amounted to a death sentence. Moreover, Iranian Jews fleeing Iran were being denied access to the US by our embassies in Europe. President CArter and I recognized the parallels to hundreds of thousands of European Jews denied entry to the US by the Roosevelt administration during World War II.

Carter created a special visa allowing Iranian Jews, as well as Christians and Baha’is, to remain in the US and gain political asylum. Approximately 50,000 fleeing Iranians – primarily Jews – were granted American citizenship as a result of Pres. Carter’s scheme.

5. Aiding Soviet Jews

Carter pressured the Soviet Union to allow more “refuseniks” – Jews who wished to leave the USSR – to emigrate. As a result of his pressure, it’s possible that an extra 25,000 Jews were allowed to move to Israel or the US annually.
When the famed Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky was arrested in Russia in 1977 on charges of being an American spy, Sharansky’s wife Avital begged Carter to repudiate the charges. Carter agreed, publicly stating that Sharansky was not an American spy, and helping pave the way for his eventual emigration (nearly a decade later) to Israel.

6. Asking for Israeli Advice

On November 4, 1979, thousands of Iranian students supporting the revolution seized the American Embassy in Tehran, and held over 50 staff members there hostage for 444 days. On April 24, 1980, Carter gave the go-ahead for an ambitious rescue operation involving eight US Navy helicopters which were to fly to Iran. Tragically, the helicopters encountered a massive storm. Carter called off the rescue mission; one of the rescue helicopters crashed, killing eight servicemembers on board.

In the midst of this failed rescue, Carter welcomed Israeli politician (later Israeli Prime Minister) Shimon Peres to a visit at the White House. Peres later recalled that Carter asked for insights into Israel’s successful Entebbe mission, in which a hundred Israeli commandos flew to Uganda and rescued over one hundred Jews and Israelis being held hostage there in a hijacked airplane. (Three hostages and one commando were killed in the raid.) Peres recalled:

I shall never forget my experience at the White House on 24 April 1980, the day that President Carter launched his abortive helicopter-borne attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. At the time, of course, I knew nothing of what was going on….

Carter asked (his advisors and other members of the delegation) to stay outside and ushered me into the Oval Office alone. He asked me two questions: what would I do, in his position, regarding the American Embassy hostages? And what were our considerations when we made our decisions regarding Entebbe?

I told him that if there was any realistic possibility of a military option, I would take it. As for Entebbe, our greatest problem, I said, was the scarcity of information… But in the end, we told ourselves that every military operation involves a gamble – and we decided to risk it. Carter said that my words had helped him. I did not know then that the helicopters were already on their ill-fated way.

Peres later concluded that even though Carter’s rescue attempt failed spectacularly, it had been the right course of action. (Quoted in Battling for Peace by Shimon Peres: 1995)

7. Blaming Jews for Losing the Presidency

Carter lost the Presidency to Ronald Regan in a landslide in 1980, garnering just 49 Electoral College votes against Reagan’s 489. Despite the overwhelming nature of his loss, Carter blamed American Jews. “At times, he would express to me and others that if American Jews had not abandoned him, he would have beaten Reagan,” recalled Prof. Kenneth Stein, Pres. Carter’s primary Middle East advisor until 1994 and a former fellow of the Carter Center, who later broke with Carter (discussed below.)

Carter’s belief that Jews cost him the 1980 election was reaffirmed in 2018 when his former Domestic Affairs Advisor Stuart Eizenstat published his memoir President Carter: The White House Years and blamed Jewish leaders for torpedoing Carter’s chances of reelection because of policy disagreements. In the complex world of American politics, it seems strange to focus single mindedly on the role that Jews play. Yet in the Carter White House, it seems that Jews were given extra scrutiny, and Pres. Carter was often incensed when he felt American Jews were not sufficiently grateful.

8. Seeking to Pardon a Nazi

In his later years, Carter reinvented himself as a global pundit, supporting left-wing candidates and causes in the US and around the world. He was a born-again Christian and taught Sunday School in his church in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where he grew up. Carter’s anti-Jewish feelings, never far from the surface, became more apparent.

One puzzling manifestation of his post-career activism came in 1987, when the US Office of Special Investigations, which investigated Nazi crimes, discovered proof that a Chicago janitor named Martin Bartesch had once worked as an SS officer and murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria. The US swiftly deported Bartesch to Austria. Neal Sher, the head of the US Office of Special Investigations later recalled having “extraordinary evidence” of Bartesch’s sadistic crimes.

After his deportation, Bartesch’s daughters launched a petition to various US politicians asking them to lend their support to their father and readmit Bartesch to the United States. They claimed it was “un-American” to hold him accountable for crimes he’d committed as a young soldier. Sher remembers being floored when he received a letter from Bartesch’s daughters that contained a handwritten and signed note from former Pres. Carter asking for “special consideration” for Bartesch on humanitarian grounds.

Despite Carter’s intervention, the US never readmitted Bartesch; Austria declined to prosecute him, saying that the statute of limitations had passed.

9. Turning Against Israel

In 2006, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, a bizarre book smearing Israel as uniquely evil and warmongering. It endorsed terrorism against the Jewish state and called Israel the root of all problems in the Middle East. From the inaccurate slur that Israel is practicing Apartheid in its title to the disdain for Israel throughout the book, Carter’s tome cemented his position as a foe of the Jewish state. (Ironically, Carter himself admits in his book that Israel doesn’t practice Apartheid, yet he refused to alter the work’s offensive title.)

The New York Times, hardly a proponent of Israel, slammed the work, calling it simplistic, “tone deaf,” “distorted” and filled with “misrepresentations.” It critiqued Carter’s writing for blaming Israel alone for all the ills of the Middle East. (The name Al Qaeda doesn’t once appear in the book, the New York Times notes.) “Across the land,” the newspaper declared,” Jewish leaders and their friends are asking each other what exactly Carter’s problem is with the Jews.”

Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both criticized the book as inaccurate and offensive. Prof. Kenneth Stein, professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History at Emory University, helped build the Carter Center at Emory and worked with Carter for 23 years. He – along with over a dozen others – tendered his resignation from the Center. Carter’s book, Prof. Stein wrote, “is replete with factual errors…superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.” He accused Pres. Carter of making up “falsehoods” and of creating material and referring to conversation that never happened.

Most dangerously, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid calls for the continuation of Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israel until a Palestinian state is established. (No mention is made of the fact that the PLO twice turned down a two-state solution during Carter’s post-presidential tenure.) After being criticized for encouraging violence, Carter apologized and claimed he would revise future editions of his book to omit calls for killing Jews and Israelis. Yet despite Carter’s promise, future editions contained no such adjustments.

10. Embracing Antisemitism

As Carter faced criticisms about his slanderous, fact-free book, he doubled down and dismissed critiques of his work with antisemitic language. Emory History Prof. Deborah Lipstadt (and current United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism) noted at the time that “Carter has repeatedly fallen back…on traditional antisemitic canards.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times about his book, Carter claimed he was being victimized by powerful Jews for having the guts to criticize Israel: he called it “politically suicide” for anyone to put forward a “balanced position” about Israel. On CNN, Carter complained about “tremendous intimidation in our country that has silenced” the media – by Jews, was his clear implication. Speaking on Al Jazeera television, Carter airily dismissed real critiques of his book as being the unimportant whining of duplicitous Jews, declaring: “Most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish-American organizations.”

“Perhaps unused to being criticized,” Prof. Lipstadt wrote, “Carter reflexively fell back on this kind of innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government.”

As the world mourns President Carter, the longest living President in American history, American Jews face a difficult challenge. We can acknowledge the good that he did in aiding Iranian and Russian Jews and helping to bring peace to Israel and Egypt. Yet we can’t forget his demonization of Israel and use of casual antisemitism. By using his bully pulpit to smear Israel and its supporters as uniquely evil and malevolent, Carter has made us all much less safe.