Just How Bad is Jimmy Carter’s New Book?

Anti-Semitism, Israel, Middle East

Enough to cause an adviser of 23 years to the Carter Center to sever ties with the institution. Here’s the New York Times’ somewhat tilted report:

By BRENDA GOODMAN and JULIE BOSMAN
ATLANTA, Ga., Dec. 6 — An adviser to former President Jimmy Carter and onetime executive director of the Carter Center has publicly parted ways with his former boss, citing concerns with the accuracy and integrity of Mr. Carter’s latest book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.”
The adviser, Kenneth W. Stein, a professor of Middle Eastern history and political science at Emory University, resigned his position as a fellow with the Carter Center on Tuesday, ending a 23-year association with the institution.
In a two-page letter explaining his action, Mr. Stein called the book “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.” Mr. Stein said he had used similar language in a private letter he sent to Mr. Carter, but received no reply.
“In the letter to him, I told him, ‘It’s your prerogative to write anything you want when you want,’ ” Mr. Stein said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “That’s not why I’m resigning.”
Mr. Stein said that he admired the former president’s accomplishments but that felt he had to distance himself from the Carter Center and the book, which was published by Simon & Schuster.
“It’s an issue of how history should be written,” Mr. Stein said. “I had to distance myself from something that was coming close to me professionally.”
Deanna Congelio, spokeswoman for Mr. Carter, released a statement with his response: “Although Professor Kenneth Stein has not been actively involved with the Carter Center for more than 12 years, I regret his resignation from the titular position as a fellow.” It did not address Mr. Stein’s criticism of the book.
That criticism is the latest in a growing chorus of academics who have taken issue with the book, including Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, who called the book “ahistorical,” and David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“I was just very saddened by it,” Mr. Makovsky said. “I just found so many errors.”
Mr. Carter’s use of “apartheid” in the title has attracted much of the controversy. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles released a statement on Monday saying the former president harbors bias against Israel. “There is no Israeli apartheid policy, and President Carter knows it,” the statement read.
But Mr. Stein’s criticism of the book has been perhaps the sharpest cut.
Mr. Stein was executive director of the Carter Center from 1983 to 1986 and had continued to serve as a Middle East fellow until Tuesday. In 1985, he wrote a book with Mr. Carter, “The Blood of Abraham: Insights in the Middle East,” which was published by Houghton-Mifflin.
Mr. Stein said the former president had come to speak to his class as recently as last month. Mr. Stein declined to detail all the inaccuracies he found, saying he was still documenting them for a planned review of the book; but he did offer a few examples.
Mr. Carter, he said, remembers White House staff members in 1990 being preoccupied by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait when the former president tried to describe to them talks he had had with Middle Eastern leaders. But the White House briefings occurred in the spring, Mr. Stein said, and the invasion of Kuwait was not until August.
“You can’t write history simply off the top of your head and expect it to be credible,” he said.
Mr. Stein also said he had been struck by parts of Mr. Carter’s book that seemed strikingly similar to a work by a different author, but he would not disclose the details.
“There are elements in the book that were lifted from another source,” Mr. Stein said. “That other source is now acting on his or her own advice about what to do because of this.”
David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, dismissed Mr. Stein’s claims. “We’re confident in his work,” Mr. Rosenthal said of Mr. Carter. “Do we check every line in every book? No, but that’s not the issue here. I have no reason to doubt President Carter’s research.”
Still other observers familiar with the sometimes contentious relationship between Mr. Carter and Mr. Stein said Mr. Stein might have been motivated by more than preserving academic integrity.
“He feels snubbed he wasn’t given any kind of acknowledgment for the work he’s done with Carter,” said Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Tulane University in New Orleans. “It’s a bit of bruised ego and philosophical difference being displayed in public here.”

Updated Again: Animals Gone Wild

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Pseudoscience

“While Western man works to rid himself of the most basic ethical instincts, like defending his kinfolk, animals remain true to their nature. Wild beasts intuit that their teeth and talons are meant for tearing flesh–any flesh, the easier the better. It makes perfect animal sense to attack a thing that is docile, slow, and passive, like the not-so sapient Homo sapiens…

The handful of honest experts left admits that attacks are up because politically correct policies have bred fearless critters. The Pavlovian response to aversive treatment has been bred out of the wild animal population. Mary Zeiss Stange, author of Woman the Hunter, says that hunting ultimately has less to do with killing than with instilling fear in animals that have placed us on their menu. If animal rights activists possessed a dog’s smarts, they’d understand the perils of such a program, for an unafraid animal is a dangerous animal; an unafraid human an endangered fool…”

Read the rest of my new column, “Animals Gone Wild,” on The American Spectator. Comments are, as always, welcome.

Update: There are some very amusing and poignant letters-to-the-editor on The American Spectator about “Animals Gone Wild.” The section is titled “Wolves and Alligators,” and everyone is pretty pissed off.

I like R. Trotter’s missive: “A big paws up to Ilana Mercer’s fine article. Watch just about any nature documentary and much of it is dedicated to telling us simpletons that though many of us are afraid of snakes, sharks, bears, etc., in reality humans pose a greater threat to the critters than they do to us. While that is, at best, arguable, and only so on a statistical and species-by-species basis, it is based upon the flawed premise that the life of a human and, say, a black widow spider, are equivalent…”

Sam Karnick has an interesting comment at Karnick On Culture. Here’s my reply.

Updated Again: Animals Gone Wild has really struck a chord. Writing for the British Spiked Online, Josie Appleton has referenced my essay. As I told her, it’s refreshing to meet a writer who is both professional and ethical as to reference a quote. I do it, but most here don’t:

Hi,
A friend sent your piece on wild animals to me as I was just about to publish a piece on the same subject (hooked off the wild boar rampage in Germany), so I included a couple of your examples. Thanks for a good article.
‘BEWARE OF THE BOARS: From Bavaria to South Africa, rampaging animals are bringing towns to a standstill. Why don’t we just shoot them?’
All the best
Josie Appleton
Convenor, Manifesto Club ((www.manifestoclub.com)

Media War-Profiteers

Media, The Zeitgeist, War

The elections have certainly brought a change in the tone of “debate” conducted on the networks. One sees less of those Republican, media “Madame Defarges,” their faces twisted in orgiastic war frenzy, accusing any and all of treason if opposed to the carnage and wanton waste in Iraq. It’s nice to see less of these clones of the French revolutionaries.

I even felt sufficiently buoyed to write, “At Least Saddam Kept Order.” And duly, hate mail—the kind I was knee-deep in from 2002 until late 2004—was almost non-existent.

This makes a nice change.

Groupies of the media “Madame Defarges,” assorted Robespierres, and their knock-offs, should remind themselves that their media heroes are part of the media elite. I know; you’ve been brainwashed to think only in terms of liberal media elites. But all those moneyed populist poseurs—they’ve all benefited financially from firing up poor sods with untruths about the war. Many then enlisted; some came back in body bags or bereft of body parts.

In the financial benefits they derived from whooping it up for war, a great many media types were as good as Halliburton war profiteers.

'Iraq and the Christian Conscience'

Christianity, Iraq, Islam

A regular reader recently asked me if I know of other writers “like yourself,” as he put it, “who get the Islamic threat, but are also principled Old Rightists, who’ve been against the war on Iraq all along.” He explained that the Arabist American Conservative and like-minded libertarians were just too whacky for his liking.

I replied: only Paul Sperry.

And so it came as no surprise when on the day my column, “At Least Saddam Kept Order,” came out, I received a note from Paul, “Great minds think alike…” (Someone has to pat us on the collective shoulder occasionally.) Paul’s column, “Iraq and the Christian Conscience” echoes my sentiments exactly:

“Bush turned Iraq into the most violent place on the planet—3,700 civilians killed last month alone—and he removed from power and put on death row the only person who can restore order there, the guy who after all the prewar demonizing turned out to be a toothless tinhorn, more a threat to his dentist than anyone else.

Did you know that more innocent Iraqi civilians—mostly children—have been killed and maimed under President Bush than under Saddam Hussein? It’s true. As a Christian, I am absolutely repulsed by this statistic. You don’t hear that one on talk radio, for good reason….

I also cringe every time I hear a minister preach or pray about us ‘fighting for freedom’ in Iraq, or fighting to ‘liberate the Iraqi people.’ Please, the Iraqi people never invited us to invade and occupy their country, and they don’t even want our form of freedom (they enshrined Islamic law in their ‘new and improved’ constitution). Here’s another statistic you won’t hear on Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, and it’s from the State Department’s own recent survey in Iraq: 91 percent of Sunnis in Iraq want us to leave, and 74 percent of Shi’ites also want us out.

Another poll found that more than 3/5 of Iraqis say they back attacks on U.S. troops!

The inconvenient truth is, there is nothing noble or heroic about the war Bush and Cheney started in Iraq. It was political, not strategic. It had nothing to do with 9/11. We were sold a bill of goods. As a Christian, I cannot support a lie, especially one that continues to grind up other people’s kids for no good reason (while still not protecting us from the true threat from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda Central, as opposed to the backbenchers and second-string wannabes in Iraq).

Did Bush, a supposed ‘born-again Christian,’ lie us into war? I’ve read the prewar intelligence estimates. I don’t believe as some do that Bush knew Saddam didn’t have WMD and attacked him anyway. No, Bush didn’t know Saddam didn’t have WMD, but he knew better than to say he had ‘proof’ that he did. The intelligence community had no such proof—the NIE dossier was full of caveats regarding WMD. Yet Bush and Cheney told us they had solid proof. They misled us…

But in the case of the alleged prewar al-Qaeda connections, they did know better—and they just plain lied to us. They said Saddam and Osama were collaborating and implied that Saddam was behind 9/11. The prewar Iraq dossier, the NIE, said exactly the opposite—no collaboration, no ties to 9/11 or any anti-American terror anywhere in the world, ever. Bush and Cheney knew that and deliberately lied to the public. (And Cheney’s still lying.)…”

Read the entire column. Being an impressive “shoe-leather investigative journalist,” as I called him in my review of his recent book, Sperry always packs his work with facts.