The anti-Israeli bias in Jimmy Carter’s op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post could not have been more evident if he had concluded, “Allahu akhbar!” Unlike Mel Gibson, Carter presumably wrote while sober, but his analysis and demonology barely differed for it. The moral equivalence that led the worst president of the 20th century to decry our “inordinate fear of Communism” was on display from his first sentence, in which he took aim at “key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies.” The genocidal intent of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran is well known; he failed to indicate their opposite number in the Jewish State of Israel.
Carter indicates the cause of the most recent “cycle” of terrorism: the fact that Israel jails terrorists. “One of the special vulnerabilities of Israel, and a repetitive cause of violence, is the holding of prisoners,” he writes. Noting Hezbollah generously “offered to exchange the soldier” – the one they didn’t kill – “for the release of 95 women and 313 children…in Israeli prisons,” he huffs, “this time Israel rejected a swap and attacked Gaza in an attempt to free the soldier and stop rocket fire into Israel.”