Jimmy Carter turned 100 years old this month. As is customary, the press showered our longest-living ex-president with hosannas to mark the occasion.
Since October also happens to mark the anniversary of one of the most savage attacks on Jews in history, I was reminded that our genteel one-term president did more than teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church. He spent most of his career befriending, legitimizing, and championing the worst people on the planet.
Who can forget Carter imploring the United States to “give Hamas a chance”? That was back in 2006. It wasn’t the first or last time Carter vouched for the theocratic death cult. He is a longtime fan.
Forgotten in the deluge of anti-Israel propaganda is the fact that Hamas was given a chance. In 2005, as a test run for a new state, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon evicted thousands of Jews from the Gaza Strip and handed the Palestinians autonomy for the first time in their history. When mobs of Palestinians in Gaza found no Israelis to murder, they destroyed millions of dollars in farming equipment left to them by American Jewish donors.
In any event, within a year, Hamas won a significant majority in the “Palestinian Parliament,” and Carter began imploring the U.S. to treat the group with the legitimacy it might the Swiss or Japanese governments. Soon enough, Hamas was defenestrating rival Fatah officials and smuggling weapons from the Islamic terrorism regime in Iran, ensuring war and destabilizing the region.
Carter likely first met with Hamas leaders in January 1996. In March and February of that year, Hamas participated in a string of suicide bombings, murdering 65 people, including three U.S. citizens. Dead Americans did not move Carter to admonish his friends in Gaza.
Carter again met with Hamas in April 2008 as it was launching hundreds of missiles every month at civilian targets within Israel, promising that the group wouldn’t undermine peace. After Hamas first attempted to launch an Oct. 7-style attack in 2014, Carter called on Israel and the U.S. to recognize the offshoot of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood as the “legitimate political actor” that represents the “Palestinian population.” If our former president were sentient today, it is almost surely the case he would call for the U.S. to make peace with Hamas and castigate the Jewish state.
It should be said that Carter’s admiration of antisemitic terrorists did not begin with Hamas. The former president harbored a deep “fondness” for Yasser Arafat, the godfather of all modern terrorism, a relationship that “transcended politics” and was “based on their emotional connection and the shared belief that they were both ordained to be peacemakers by God,” according to historian Douglas Brinkley. (Carter tried to cram Arafat into the Camp David peace talks after Israel and Egypt had already cut a deal, which the president had very little to do with.)
To understand his motivations, one could read Carter’s demented book The Blood of Abraham or Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which historian Kenneth W. Stein, a former longtime Carter adviser, noted was “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments” and Michael Kinsley called “moronic.” Carter is a religious zealot with a messianic complex and a distorted understanding of history.
To be fair, the only people Carter is inclined to extol more than Palestinian terrorists are communists. And I don’t mean “communist” in an ambiguous or pejorative sense. I mean the real thing. The esteemed Georgian never met an Eastern European strongman he didn’t admire. Soviet flunky Edward Gierek of Poland was among the most “enlightened leaders” of the world. Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia was “a man who believes in human rights.” Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu was dedicated to “enhancing human rights.” And so on. Even as the world was running out of communist dictatorships for intellectuals in America to whitewash, Carter was seeking them out and lifting them up.
There was, of course, Fidel Castro. Carter famously became the first ex-president to visit the Cuban dictatorship, praising its “superb systems of healthcare and universal education.” A smiling Carter participated in gross propaganda events with Castro as political prisoners rotted in cells and families were held in a captive state.
And was there any bigger fan of Hugo Chavez in the U.S.? Carter didn’t merely back Chavismo, as so many other progressives did. He legitimized one bogus election after the next to keep the man in power. When Venezuelans were finally able to get a recall election on the ballot in 2012, Carter parachuted in to meet with the dictator. By this time, Chavez had already taken over the council charged with running elections, stacked the Supreme Court with his lackeys, grabbed control of virtually the entire media, appropriated oil profits for his political purposes, and sent his henchman out to intimidate voters. Yet, after it was over, Carter claimed that “of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” The U.S., on the other hand, had “one of the worst election processes in the world,” according to Carter. Though the former president spent decades legitimizing corrupt Third World leaders, he refused to accept the results of the 2000 and 2016 presidential contests at home, so at least he was consistently a fraud.
When Chavez died of cancer in 2013, Carter lamented the loss of a man who “expressed a vision to bring profound changes to his country to benefit especially those people who had felt neglected and marginalized.” A few years later, Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, was lopping zeros off the country’s currency, and citizens were foraging for food.
Like Hamas, Carter implored Americans to give communist Daniel Ortega a “chance.” As president, Carter helped facilitate Ortega’s rise in Nicaragua, welcoming him to the White House in 1979. The murderous Sandinistas became a cause célèbre for Democrats in the 1980s. When Ortega finally allowed a national election in 1990, he lost by a huge margin. Carter got on a plane and brokered an agreement to keep the army under Sandinista control. When Ortega was losing again in 1996, Carter went back to Nicaragua to delegitimize the election. Today, Carter’s good friend is back repressing the church, imprisoning and massacring political opponents.
These are just some of the lowlights. Let’s remember that Carter wasn’t appointed by anyone for these tasks. Though the drubbing Carter took in 1980 was well-earned, his post-presidency was dedicated to undermining the will of U.S. voters. Journalist Lance Morrow best described him as the “anti-president.”
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Carter famously “brokered” a treaty with North Korea in 1994, deliberately undercutting the Clinton administration’s efforts to stop the communist state from obtaining nuclear weapons. Carter was not empowered to enter into agreements on behalf of the U.S. or anyone else, for that matter. Yet he struck one with Kim Il Sung and then publicly released it to pressure the administration into capitulation. “I hoped that it would consummate a resolution of what I considered to be a very serious crisis,” Carter admitted. A Clinton aide called his actions “near traitorous.” Indeed, if anyone deserved to be prosecuted under the Logan Act, it was Carter.
Carter’s defenders whitewash his long, unsightly history by treating the former leader of the most powerful nation on the planet as some well-meaning naif whose only goal was merely to broker peace. Have you heard he builds houses? In truth, Carter, a middling political talent who lucked into the presidency after Watergate, took it upon himself to spend his life legitimizing some of the most nefarious people and regimes on the planet.