There are similarities and differences with apartheid South Africa. In apartheid South Africa the liberation movement espoused non-racialism and held the higher moral ground.

In Israel cum Palestine the higher moral ground is the side which is more accommodating to other religions.

I read the pious shibboleth of Carter as a 'decent man' all the time. I don't think he is a decent man. In fact I think he is one of the more unpleasant figures to have disfigured US and World politics in the last half-century. His supine position in the face of Soviet expansionism led to the invasion of Afghanistan. His prevarication and cowardice led to the rise of the Iranian mullahs, the hostage crisis, Desert One and the current crop of loonies with nuclear aspirations. His feeble-minded love-thy-neighbour idiocy vis-a-vis the monsters of North Korea led to that country's acquisition of nuclear weapons. The true tragedy of Nixon's fall from grace is it gave Carter a foot in the door. The world would be a substantially safer place had Jimmy Carter never been within sniffing distance of the White House. He surely ranks in the top five list of worst US Presidents ever. Were he merely incompetent, that would be an end on it. But he couples a deep, abiding naivety and moral blindness with a truly emetic brand of sanctimony and cant. He violates the unspoken rule that ex-Presidents do not criticise sitting ones. He is both a knave and a fool.

I've had an exchange of views with Alan Caruba ( www.anxietycenter.com) about Carter. He feels that Carter is an embarrasment to America. I'm sure we both concur.

Crikey David, why not tell us what you *really* think?!

Either the man is utterly naive, or a simpleton. Or both. He's got a hell of a lot to answer for...

Tony, if you want more grist for the mill, then look no further than these two articles, both from FrontPage, which detail Carter's long-time animus against Israel, Zionism and the Jews:

Jimmy Carter's Disingenuous Diplomacy

Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem

His Southern Baptist Convention roots are also suspect and I write as a Christian. There is some severe infiltration in that organization.

Yes, James, while I am not a Carter-basher of the kind we have seen here, there can be no doubt that his use of the Christian - and Bible Belt Christian at that - label was abusive. The fact is that his generation of the Southern Baptist leadership has been comprehensively rejected by the SBC church and faithful. It was a bizarrely faddish and liberal one, which publicly approved of Roe vs.Wade and severely criticized the Catholic Church for opposing abortion. Since Carter's time, there has been a complete revolution among the Baptists and they are now led by the kind of people one imagines at the head of an Evangelical church.

Carter came in as the voice of the American left and performed as they were expecting him to do. The double rude awakening that he got with the Khomeini revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan means that he had to change course half-way through his presidency, being neither intellectually nor morally prepared for it. The result was the disastrously failed attempt to rescue the captured American embassy workers - for which Carter took responsibility, a manful gesture which means that I cannot agree with the more extreme people here - and a violent ratcheting up of military expenditure and pressure on the Soviets. This, in turn, made his own supporters angry at him - I am old enough to remember one American commentator ranting at Carter for being "a born-again hawk" because he had increased conventional and nuclear readiness after Afghanistan. As a result, he ended up having no standing either with the hawks he had started out opposing or with the doves who had voted him in.

His prejudice against Jews, of course, is another and a much worse matter. And it seems to be one of those things in which he has grown worse and more fanatical as the years went by.

Jimmy Carter was as close to the American public picking a random name out of the phone book and making him/her President as you will ever get. He is a constipated old failure.

Stephen Pollard is best known as a British author and journalist, although his principal job is as President of a Brussels-based 'think tank', the Centre for a New Europe, which predominantly lobbies for pharmaceuticals protectionism and is almost entirely funded by Pfizer.[1] He writes columns for several publications including The Times and the Daily Mail and maintains a lively blog. He is an alumnus of John Lyon School.

Pollard has been an enthusiastic advocate of market-based based public service reforms such as university top-up tuition fees.

He is the official biographer for David Blunkett and is an occasional guest on the BBC's flagship Question Time discussion show.

Formerly a journalist and leader-writer on the Daily Express, he left that paper in 2001 soon after it was taken over by Richard Desmond, a publisher of pornographic magazines, who began implementing radical cutbacks. His last leader for the paper is still fondly remembered. Ostensibly addressed to the problems of the British farming industry, it was not until several million copies had gone to print that examination revealed taking the first letter of each sentence spelt out the uncompromising message "Fuck you Desmond".[1]

He was a founding signatory in 2005 of the Henry Jackson Society principles. The Society is widely dubbed 'neoconservative', but claims to advocate a proactive approach to the spread of liberal democracy across the world, often via military intervention.

I find these books about Israel's Apartheidregime better than Carter's:

The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid (Paperback)

Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within (Paperback)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/104-7830893-6936769?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=APARTHEID+ISRAEL&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go

Only a tiny number of Zionist nutters (like Stephen Pollard) think that anti-Zionism per se is anti-semitic. The question is whether anti-Zionism can serve as a cover for anti-semitism , whether certain forms of anti-Zionism are anti-semitic, and whether the obsessive concentration on Zionism (while ignoring other forms of nationalism which are by any objective standard equally pernicious) is anti-semitic.

http://existingactually.blogspot.com/2006/08/cold-in-our-eyes.html

In the wake of a meeting he addressed at Britain’s House of Lords, yesterday's Times launched a libellous attack on writer Israel Shamir. Penned by Stephen Pollard, it was fraught with untruths and is reprinted in part, below, along with this website’s comments in italic.

www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/print.asp?ID=2969

We've seen quite a bit of photographic evidence concerning right-wing hack Stephen Pollard's suitability for this year's Widmerpool Award which celebrates, among other things, pomposity, self-importance and lack of self-awareness. Here's another pic for the dossier. It's Pollard testifying on something or other before the US Senate a few days ago: [Full image gallery here (at least for now), link via the great man himself.]

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2005_02_01_archive.html