CARTER CRITICIZES SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER

When last we heard from Jimmy Carter, he was trying to limit the damage from his one-sided book. According to this article, he’s criticizing the Simon Wiesenthal Center, saying that they’ve slandered him. Here’s Carter’s shot:

“I don’t believe Simon Wiesenthal would have resorted to falsehood and slander to raise funds,” Carter wrote last month in a handwritten letter to the head of the human rights center that bears the name of the late Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter. The petition does not require payment to be sent, though Carter’s letter suggests it is being used as a fundraising tool.

Rabbi Marvin Hier replied:

“I believe that Simon Wiesenthal would have been as outraged by your book, ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,’ as I was,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote in a Feb. 2 response to Carter.

Considering all the controversy surrounding the petition, let’s look at the petition itself and determine if it has merit.

Here are some of President Carter’s key allegations in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid:Israel’s “occupation and colonialization” of the West Bank and Gaza is the reason there is no peace.

FACT: President Carter deliberately overlooks that in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak went to Camp David and offered Yassir Arafat 95% of the West Bank, 100% of Gaza and part of the Old City of Jerusalem for a Palestinian State, along with $30 billion in compensation for Palestinian refugees. Arafat’s response: launching the bloody Intifada which targeted innocent civilians in restaurants, malls, schools, and religious services with suicide terror attacks. Had Arafat accepted Israel’s offer at Camp David there would have long been a Palestinian State alongside Israel.

The only thing that’s controversial about that section is President Carter’s characterization of Israel’s act. Here’s the next point of the petition:

• Israel’s ‘Wall’ has virtually choked-off the Palestinian economy and in many ways is worse than South Africa’s former Apartheid system.

FACT: Israel’s temporary security fence has been an effective deterrent in thwarting unending Palestinian suicide terror attacks which have dropped over 90% since its construction. Israel has said that the fence will come down when the Palestinian terror stops. Israel is entitled to protect her citizens from outside threats in the same way as with any sovereign country. It is interesting to note that during his presidency President Carter correctly chose to continue the U.S. embargo of its Soviet-allied neighbor, Cuba because he perceived it as a continuing potential national security threat.

After people criticized Carter for using the word apartheid, Carter immediately backtracked, saying that he merely wanted to provoke a dialogue on the Palestinian-Israeli situation. It’s fair to say that the fence is perfectly justifiable from Israel’s standpoint because Palestinian terrorists were flocking into Israel like college students flock to South Beach this time of year. Nations have the right to defend themselves. It’s even in the U.N. Charter.

I strongly recommend you read the entire petition. I’ll guarantee that you’ll agree with me that the Simon Wiesenthal Center didn’t cheapshot President Carter. Rather, it’s the other way around. President Carter has perverted the truth of what’s happened during the Israeli-Palestinian war. That’s why he’s received so much criticism from so many different directions. There’s a reason why Alan Dershowitz challenged him to a debate. There’s a reason why his advisers at the Carter Center quit.

These things happened because Jimmy Carter took liberties with the truth. That’s why the Simon Wiesenthal Center took issue with his book.