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Home Front: WoT
Is Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite? Or just dumb?
2006-12-27
James Taranto, "Best of the Web," Wall Street Journal

Is Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite? Shmuley Boteach, who styles himself "America's rabbi," argues in the Jerusalem Post that the answer is no:

Jimmy Carter is not so much anti-Semite as anti-intellectual, not so much a Jew-hater as a boor. The real explanation behind his limitless hostility to Israel is a total lack of any moral understanding.

Carter wants to do what's just. His heart's in the right place. He just can't figure out what the right is. He is, and always has been, a man of good intentions bereft of good judgment. He invariably finds himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their oppressed peoples. Not because he is a bad man, but because he is a confused man.

Carter subscribes to what I call the Always Root for the Underdog school of morality. Rather than develop any real understanding of a conflict, immediately he sides with the weaker party, however wicked or immoral.

Israel has tanks and F-16's. The Palestinians don't. Therefore the Palestinians are being oppressed. Never mind that the Palestinians have rejected every offer to live side by side with Israel in peace and elected a government pledged to Israel's annihilation. Their poverty dictates the righteousness of their cause even if their actions speak otherwise.

Boteach likens this attitude to that of marriage counselors "who always take the side of the wife in an ugly dispute in the belief that a woman, inherently weaker than her husband, is always the innocent and aggrieved party. Even where the evidence points to the wife as being violent and unreasonable, such arbitrators cannot conceive of the husband as anything but the oppressor."

But the "Always Root for the Underdog school" is even more perverse when applied to international relations. It's not just that to side with Yasser Arafat--or Fidel Castro or Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe--is to choose the wrong side vis-à-vis Israel, America or some other Western power. It is that to side with these dictators is to side against their own people, who are the actual underdogs in the situation.
Posted by:Mike

#9  MAXWELL SMART > just not NICE-NESS and GOODNESS, Chief.
Posted by: JosephMendiola   2006-12-27 23:53  

#8  The Left does NOT want to be held responsible for anything and everything negative that was Vietnam - starting US involvement + inducing/preventing the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos boatlifts and killing fields, the domino theory, ignoring Amer's "silent majority" that supported the US anti-Commie effort in SVN-Asia in favor a handful of hippies and the chaos of CounterCulture Revolution, Stagflation STaggression + looming Hyper-inflation, Inflatgression, etal. SOCIALISM + UTOPIANISM > about UPWARD-MOVING NATIONAL = UNIVERSAL SUCCESS, PROSPERITY, + PAN-IDEALISMS, NOT DEFECT, NOT ERROR, NOT DEFEAT, FAILURE, REGRESSIONISM, WAFFL-ISM + TREASONCRATISM + POWERCRATISM, NOT BACKWARD + DOWNWARD. The Weak are NOT supposed to STAY WEAK = WEAKER, let alone PRETEND TO WORLD + SELVES THEY ARE WHAT THEY ARE NOT.
Posted by: JosephMendiola   2006-12-27 23:51  

#7  Both and a big loser too
Posted by: Captain America   2006-12-27 20:10  

#6  Boteach's thesis doesn't hold up.

Carter was a fan of Dictators, in Romania, in Venezuala, in other places. This put him on the side of the powerful.

His hatred of Israel probably comes from more than one cause; hatred of some Jews for not supporting him in 80; hatred of Begin for establishing settlements behind the green line, hatred of himself for not being more popular. Who knows what other devils lurk in that deranged psyche.

Posted by: mhw   2006-12-27 19:41  

#5  Yes.
Posted by: Zenster   2006-12-27 17:34  

#4  Carter takes that idea to its stupid extreme: America is the strongest and best country in the world, therefore everybody who opposes America are the good guys.

This is why Carter always allowed our allies to be undermined and destroyed, and sought to humble America on the world stage, and admit that it is flawed and weak to itself.

His emphasis on "Human Rights" was always done with a big mea culpa for all the human rights violations he assumed America had done, to make everybody so angry at America.

In a way, Carter is like the character Pap Finn (Huckleberry's father), writ large. Pap believed that any man with $50 in his pocket got it by stealing, and should have it taken away from him. Pap never had $50 to his name, so he didn't think that anyone else should, either.

He seems to think that once a week, everybody should humbly go to church and ask forgiveness for being successful the rest of the week. They should use prayer as self-criticism, and lament that they have good food while somebody somewhere does not, etc. America is too confident of its goodness, too self-righteous and smug. It needs to be taken down and people convinced that they aren't happy.

Ecch. The philosophy of the peanut farmer preacher.
Posted by: Anonymoose   2006-12-27 17:09  

#3  Neither.

He's just a petty asshole, plain and simple.
Posted by: OldSpook   2006-12-27 16:34  

#2  Read the whole thing. He sums it up.
Posted by: Penguin   2006-12-27 16:33  

#1  Both.
Posted by: Unoluper Thromonter9028   2006-12-27 14:11  

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