[Dean's World] Ron Coleman: America's most moral president

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Posted by Ron Coleman:
America's most moral president
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1165423392.shtml


   Southern fried chickens [1]coming home to roost:

     This note is to inform you that yesterday, I sent letters to
     President Jimmy Carter, Emory University President Jim Wagner, and
     Dr. John Hardman, Executive Director of the Carter Center resigning
     my position, effectively immediately, as Middle East Fellow of the
     Carter Center of Emory University. This ends my 23 year association
     with an institution that in some small way I helped shape and
     develop. . . .

     Many still believe that I have an active association with the
     Center and, act as an adviser to President Carter, neither is the
     case. . . . For the record, I had nothing to do with the research,
     preparation, writing, or review of President Carter's recent
     publication. Any material which he used from the book we did
     together in 1984, The Blood of Abraham, he used unilaterally.

     President Carter's book on the Middle East, a title too
     [2]inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished
     analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not
     cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented
     segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to
     provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was
     the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show
     little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former
     President does not give one a unique privilege to invent
     information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a
     particular outlook. Having little access to Arabic and Hebrew
     sources, I believe, clearly handicapped his understanding and
     analyses of how history has unfolded over the last decade.
     Falsehoods, if repeated often enough become meta-truths, and they
     then can become the erroneous baseline for shaping and reinforcing
     attitudes and for policy-making. The history and interpretation of
     the Arab-Israeli conflict is already drowning in half-truths,
     suppositions, and self-serving myths; more are not necessary. In
     due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their
     origins.

   That's from an email Professor Kenneth Stein of Emory University and
   formerly of the Carter Center, sent along to [3]Power Line. (Hat tip
   to [4]Instapundit.)

   There are a lot of reasons not to like Jimmy Carter, but I didn't
   realize how bad he was on Israel until a while after he was gone. One
   of my first, and among my rather few, political gigs was as the "Youth
   Coordinator" (meaning I tried to raise volunteers) for what was once
   called the New Jersey Jewish Coalition, when I was in college. This
   was during the 1984 presidential campaign. I got this exalted post
   because I was president of the College Republicans at Princeton then,
   and I could read right to left.

   ([5]show)

   (It was a very intimate group.) This was in fact the New Jersey
   Republican Jewish Coalition, a name it adopted for what we shall call
   enhanced clarity later on.

   This was a somewhat controversial effort. We gave out phone scripts,
   just as everyone else who does this sort of work, as well as a list
   of, well, Jewish-sounding names, and were told to try convince some
   Jews that they should vote Republican in the upcoming election. (At
   one juncture, while manning the phones myself, I had to call Neil
   Rudenstine's house. The future Harvard President was then a dean at
   Princeton. Let's just say Mrs. Rudenstine was . . . polite.) In some
   states -- not ours -- the callers, who were not all Jewish, were told
   to introduce themselves as Mr. or Ms. "Goodman." Which was not so
   good, man.

   All this is by way of explaining to you a sea change in my thinking
   about Jimmy Carter. I could not vote in the 1980 election -- I would
   not turn 18 until the next March -- but I remember my father, one of
   those people whose name was on the list four years later, probably,
   saying he wanted to vote for this Ronald Reagan, but did not know if
   he could do so. "I can't vote for a Republican because of Israel," he
   said. Well, the Gipper managed without Dad, and by all accounts was
   the most Israel-friendly president until that time, and then some.

   What I had not realized until my volunteer turn for the Reagan-Bush
   '84 campaign was how bad Carter had been. We were given research
   material for these phone calls, and a lot of it was excerpts from the
   memoirs of [6]Moshe Dayan. Dayan excoriated Carter's and Mondale's
   modus operandi at Camp David, zeroing in, in particular, on the
   latter, whom he considered to be grossly [7]biased in favor of the
   Arabs:

     Dayan was particularly scathing, describing one meeting at the
     White House with senior American officials, Carter and Mondale
     included, that amounted to a non-stop scolding of Israel. Carter
     berated Dayan and his fellow Israeli diplomats for being "more
     stubborn than the Arabs" and putting "obstacles on the path to
     peace."

     If anything, wrote Dayan, Mondale was worse than Carter: "Our talk
     lasted more than an hour and was most unpleasant. President
     Carter...and even more so Mondale, launched charge after charge
     against Israel."

     In fact, Dayan added, Mondale could barely restrain himself:
     "Whenever the president showed signs of calming down and holding an
     even-tempered dialogue, Mondale jumped in with fresh complaints
     which disrupted the talk."

   This gave us something to talk about, all right. But I realized that
   the mere fact that Carter had gotten Sadat to shake Begin's hands and
   pose for a picture did not mean he was doing the Israelis such a huge
   favor, whatever benefits as the Camp David accord did afford to
   Israel.

   So much for Mondale. As to Carter, after his time in office, he begin
   to distinguish himself as a bitter loser, and to intensify both his
   self-righteous posture and his antipathy for those who disagreed with
   him. And in time, unlike the Jerry Colemans of the 1980 election,
   American Jews voting with Israel in mind came to realize that the GOP
   could be trusted, and could even be better than the old party of FDR
   -- at least until G.H.W. Bush and James Baker, who set back the clock
   in Jewish-Republican relations and made the Ron Colemans of 1992 vote
   for a Democrat for the first time ever. Bill Clinton probably did
   Israel few favors with his constant dog and pony shows emphasizing
   "process" over results, banking on PLO promises and urging constant
   "restraint" on Israel. But the U.S.-Israel atmospherics, at least,
   were friendlier than they had been under either of his predecessors.

   More importantly, because of changes in the Jewish community liberal
   Jews would vote Democratic regardless of Israel. Indeed, many viewed
   Israel with growing contempt, as it moved from underdog status (good)
   to a military power (bad). Unaffiliated Jews increasingly voted less
   and less "Jewish." This made pandering to Jews less important for
   Democratic politicians. The result of this, along with the shift in
   the Democratic Party to pandering to urban blacks, caused a pronounced
   decrease of support for Israel and toleration of antisemitic strains
   in that party. In other words, the perfect atmosphere for Jimmy
   Carter, his incompetence and unpleasantness dimmed with time, to be
   [8]unleashed.

   Kenneth Stein--by all indications, a big Jimmy Carter fan until some
   point--had about as much of that as he could take, evidently. Here's
   hoping he doesn't rain on Jim Baker's [9]parade.

   ([10]hide)

References

   1. http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016123.php
   2. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4984885
   3. http://powerlineblog.com/
   4. http://instapundit.com/archives2/2006/12/post_821.php
   5. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/1165423392.html
   6. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Dayan.html
   7. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10372
   8. http://www.amazon.com/Real-Jimmy-Carter-Ex-President-Undermines/dp/0895260905
   9. http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061206/NEWS99/61206008
  10. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/1165423392.html