Faith Based?

Jeffrey Goldberg writes a review of Jimmy Carter's latest screed and finds the book lacking in just about everything except hubris and smug self-righteousness.

Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based.

On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made.

"With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."

Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins — and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew — he is on a mission from God.

That is an interesting insight. Despite his execrable record as president he still feels he needs to inject himself into American foreign policy. Despite the fact that he knows full well he no longer has the right or the authority to do so since the voters turned him out. Yet he persists. Does he believe he is on acting directly on God's orders? I have no idea. But if you look at it in those terms, it does, indeed, explain an awful lot of what he has done, doesn't it?