1.06.2007 | "most abhorrent"?

First, let me say that, although I think he is an idiot of the first water, I pray for Jimmy Carter. Pray that he will read the Scriptures he seems to have forgotten in his very public persona of piety.

Nice alliteration, there, John Luke, now get to the point. The point is that I love Jimmy Carter as a fellow human being and as a lost sheep. For some reason, our worst ex-president (we just lost our best; Gerry Ford, R.I.P.) hates Israel. And, apparently, does not believe that a Jewish state has any place in the ancestral home of the Jewish people: Palestine.

Fresh evidence of Carter's blindness appears in an excerpt from "On Faith" in today's Washington Post. The excerpt in question touches only in the most marginal way "on faith." Unless one's faith is secular liberalism. Carter does mention that his Carter Center

has promoted programs that fall under the broad umbrella of peace and human rights. I see these as compatible with my Christian faith.

That's as close as it gets. His real cri du coeur is the "plight of the Palestinian people." Which, according to Carter,

represents one of the most abhorrent cases of human rights oppression on Earth. Forced from their homes and land and surrounded by walls, they live under a system of mandatory segregation, with passes required to reach their jobs, schools, pastures and fields. A unique system of military justice deprives them of any legal ability to alleviate their suffering.

One should feel pity for the Palestinian Arabs, but not for the pro-terrorist reasons Carter writes of. What is absent, asides from a sense of wretched excess (more on this below), is any notion that the Palestinian Arabs, and their Arab cousins in the Middle East, have the greatest responsibility for the current "plight."

By not recognizing the state of Israel, by making war on Israel, and by supporting terrorism, unceasing terrorism against Israel, they have, as the saying goes, made their own bed. And must now lie in it. Contra Carter, it isn't the even-handed seeming "inability of Israel and its neighbors to live in peace" that is the root cause. It is the total denial of the right of Jews to live in peace in the Middle East, except under conditions of dhimmitude, that is the self-inflicted wound of the Arabs.

As for the notion that, even though self-inflicted, the Palestinian Arabs live under "one of the most most abhorrent cases of human rights oppression on Earth", this is nonsense on stilts. The "oppression" is necessary to protect innocent civilians from state-sponsored terror. The "state" in question being the fiction that is the Palestinian Authority, led now by Hamas, who is opposed by Fatah and several other terrorist factions.

The salient difference between Hamas and Fatah? Hamas is more honest about its stated intent to destroy Israel. Fatah lies in public, at least in the English media.

As for "most abhorrent," there are quite a few situations that are much, much worse. Darfur, for starters. Women under any place where sharia is in effect, for another. How about Saudi Arabia itself, where one is not even allowed to bring in a Bible? Then there's the problem of those pesky Jews who used to live in fairly large numbers in majority Muslim nations. Virtually all of the Jews had to leave places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and, of course, any place under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

When public moralists like Jimmy Carter libel the Jews and don't say very much at all about terrorists and the Arab mistreatment of Jews, there is truly only one plausible explanation for such a gaping double standard: anti-Semitism.