From a purely theological standpoint, one might attribute it to the that which is expressed in the well-known Talmudic teaching: "It is a maxim that Esau hates Jacob." In other words, anti-Semitism is often its own reason, and needs no other motivation.

As they say, just follow the money.

Robert,
With all due respect, I think you're being too easy on Carter. He is not like he is because of these contributions from the interesting "rogues gallery" of admirers you mention. Rather, he gets these contributions because he is like he is. So, the "Esau hates Jacob"-maxim mentioned by Kishke is spot on.

That said, there's another maxim worth mentioning that is applicable here: Tell me who your friends (or contributors) are, and I'll tell you who you are!"

Regarding Brian De Palma's maxim: I disagree that these are the main or only things that motivate people in "real life." However, I sense that De Palma's point is that they help to provide focus and tension to a screenplay when they become the central forces animating make-believe characters.

Also, it's been years since I've seen "Body Double." But when I think back to the main character, I think more of somebody who is endeavoring to solve a mystery while on a quest for justice. THIS is what I remember more than his odd quest for romance and sex (having broken up with his girlfriend) and money (due to amusing career problems).

But who am I to argue with the author?

Returning to Jimmy Carter: I hope that the next time an ex-Democrat calls C-Span and tells him off that the issue of his financing comes up. (Check out the clip if you haven't see it.)

Kishke:

I do not disagree with you. My take on Carter is this: He's a classic Jew-hater. The Arabs recognize a kindred spirit when they see one, and they funnel their petro-dollars into his, ahem, "peace foundation."

--isn't it funny how many "peace foundations" are fronts for Jew hatred?

Anyway, take a Jew-hater, give him a few million dollars, and voila, he's off and running with even more vehemence than ever before.

Tamara:

"Follow the money" is the mantra for all Wall Street Journal reporters. It makes for a better paper than the wretched NY Times whose mantra is: "Follow the kvetch."

David:

Actually, Brian and I were discussing the pluses and minuses of characters who are motivated by "higher ideals." Brian hated, no, loathed such motivation. He felt that sex and money are "elemental" and that ideals melted away -- very quickly when confronted with piles of cash or a beautiful naked women.

Our story sessions were, um, interesting and instructive.

He felt that sex and money are "elemental" and that ideals melted away -- very quickly when confronted with piles of cash or a beautiful naked women.

I'd put it this way: When confronted with these temptations, one either flees, or one's ideals will.

I think I have mentioned here once or twice before that Carter is one of only two persons I have publicly described using a scatological term. I have a few acquaintances who insist he was a lousy President but is a good man, based on his Habitat for Humanity work and the like. I vehemently disagree.

Carter is that rare breed of man who, like Woodrow Wilson, have developed an assurance of their own moral uprightness bordering on mental illness. I wish I could remember which historian I'm paraphrasing.

I'm interested in this Talmudic quote "It is a maxim that Esau hates Jacob." and the comments following regarding Carter and anti-Semitism/Jew-hating. If the interpretation of this text is to be helpful, or maxims in general -- is that people are born with the hatred of Jacob or is it learned? Can people love Jacob and then hate him? Is it possible for Jacob to hate himself?

I'm very fascinated by the fact that we choose to attack Carter's person and not his arguments. In fact, listening to the CSPAN interviews, I've been disappointed that no one is actually engaging what he has to say. Isn't that the strongest place to answer his arguments? I mean, it can easily be said that politics is politics...there are some pretty sketchy funders on both sides, if you ask me. This leads to simply a wash on the funding argument and Carter is left standing as the ex-President, something most people tend to see as legitimate.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

David

Kent:

Naturally, you are right in your evaluation of Carter's character. Your friends have been duped. Hammering some nails and droning on self-righteously does not make for a good man. This is a man who only last night claimed on the national news that Israel was guilty of "some of the worst human rights abuses the world has ever seen."

This is the language employed by Hamas and Hizbullah. Clearly, petrodollars flow into a Carter Cayman Island bank account -- fatter than ever before.

I have no problem labeling Jimmy Carter a jihadist, an enemy of Israel, an enemy of the Jewish people, and ultimately an enemy of America.

I predict that our former president will demand that America make peace with the Iranian nuclear bomb, for afterall Israel has nuclear capabilities and Israel, this peanut brain will claim, is a direct threat to Iran. Such is the depraved logic of Jimmy Carter and those who yearn to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth.

I also predict that before too long our former president will make common cause with Holocaust deniers. It is a logical extension of his current shrill, and unrelenting anti-Jewish discourse.

Let it never be forgotten that it was Carter, easily the worst president this country has ever had, who abandoned the Shah of Iran in favor of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and ever since then Iran has been at war with America.

David:

I did not use the quote.

As for refuting Al Carter's "arguments" well, let me just say this: it has come to the point where refutation is no longer on the table. I consider Jimmy Carter in the same category as a Hamas or Hizbullah leader. And as you know, I do not advocate talking with these people.

I think that response is sort of extreme. When I'm in the US I get very confused by the pro-Israel strategy/rhetoric here. In Israel it is often a bit different. People can offer a criticism of things going down and they're not labeled as allied with Hamas and Hizbollah. I also think the paranoia, and I call it that because it seems to not be tempered in any sense, allowing you to think someone would go from criticism of the situation in Samaria & Judea to denying the Holocaust is a little logically weak, if not holistically flawed -- I mean, are Israeli critics of the situation bound to deny the holocaust as well? Furthermore, would we want to label Shalom Akshav "Jihadists" -- does that even make sense under the definition of the term? Are Israelis who offer criticisms the enemies of the United States? Does that even make sense!

Shouldn't we put on the breaks on a bit with this talk -- it's embarrassing that next to Carter, talk like this makes us look like the shrill and unrelenting ones with depraved logic.

Seriously, is it necessary to act insane in the face of insanity? Aren't you legitimizing that if not wholesale embracing it?

David

David:

With all due respect, you are missing the central thesis of Jimmy Carter's latest offensive agianst Israel and the Jews.

Follow me here.

His book uses the term "apartheid" to describe Israel. You and I both know that this is a lie.

THere has been only one true apartheid state in the modern world, South Africa. That state was shunned and ultimately dismantled.

By using the term apartheid, Carter and all, are ipso facto calling for the end, for the dismantling of the Jewish state.

I hardly think that I am "acting insane in the face of insanity."

I beg of you step back and study some recent history. Specifically European history, the years 1931-1938 for you sound remarkably like the appeasers (Baldwin, Chamberlin, etc.) in the British governemnt who used almost the exact same language against Winston Churchill as, for years and years he warned of the gathering storm in Germany. Again and again, Churchill was accused of being a "mad war monger."

The truth is looking at evil is much like staring at the sun. It's incredibly painful and one cannot bear it for very long. Hence most turn away, and focus on other, lesser evils -- say the people who oppose the evil, people like, well, me.

Dear Robert,

What is the exact link for the list of 1 million dollar donors? I couldn't find it on the Carter Center site.

Sincerely,
Dan

Dan:

Funny thing, the link has mysteriously disappeared. How did that happen?

I know, those sneaky Jooz did it.

To get donor lists, go to Carter Center annual reports at link below, and see index (for example, for year 2004-2005 see page 33 to 51.)

http://www.cartercenter.org/news/publications/annual_reports.html

Re: money and sex. Years ago I heard a slightly modified version. The question was: What makes the world go around? Answer: Money, POWER and sex.

From Magic City Morning Star

Michael Devolin
Jimmy Carter and Democratic Anti-Jewish Hatred
By Michael Devolin
May 5, 2008 - 2:31:54 PM

It's no surprise to me that former president Jimmy Carter has met with the Muslim terrorists of Hamas. I could list the obscurantisms that come to light immediately one looks into to the views this man has recently disseminated to the world, but may it suffice here for me to say that these same views are merely indicative of a widespread phenomenon that has existed for years within Western culture. I recognize this phenomenon as anti-Jewish hatred, although some yet insist this egregious passion is merely anti-Israel political debate - without explaining why such political debate has always obdurately excluded the glaring transgressions of those Islamic regimes and Muslim terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbullah who, because of their religious assent to violence against Israel and her Jewish citizens, somehow subsist beyond the pale of culpability.

Jimmy Carter's disdain for the Jews and their Israel is altogether an old and ancient anti-Semitism now streamlined and sophisticated into what I define as "democratic anti-Jewish hatred"- a sort of populistic, politically correct anti-Jewish hatred. This politically correct version is become fashionable and subsequently adopted by Western clergy and academia. The Jimmy Carter version condemns Judaism as being responsible for Zionism, as though Zionism for religious reasons is contemptible; as though such condemnation is perfectly judicious. And subsequently, by force of the propellant inspiration that comes with publicly condemning Judaism and Zionism, these politically correct, democratic anti-Semites feel empowered enough to condemn Israel's Jews for also wanting to return to a land that was once theirs but was long ago ravaged from them by Islam's Arab Muslims. But of course, Islam's pilfering of Jewish property is not an issue with these avant-garde idealists.

Sam Harris writes that "while consensus among like minds may be the final arbiter of truth, it cannot constitute it. It is quite conceivable that everyone might agree and yet be wrong about the way the world is." The present democratic anti-Semites are not the minority, rather they are the majority. The populistic standard contending that Israel-bashing is not anti-Jewish hatred but simply nothing more than political critique is considered the norm by Western academia. This odious method of "politicking" is used today by "moderate" Muslims and their noetic friends as a medium for harassing Jewish students in the halls of our universities, both in Canada and the United States. Anyone harbouring ill feelings toward the Jews need only publicly excoriate the state of Israel and, presto, one is forever immune from being labelled a Jew-baiter. It's become as simple as that for today's pro-Islamist arbiters of truth.

Way back in 1975 Henry Kissinger, then the US Secretary of State, privately promised Iraq's foreign minister, "We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel, but we can reduce its size to historical proportions." Today a minority Jewish Diaspora are being constricted by an anti-Jewish majority world where calumniating Jews for their historical connection to Israel is acceptable but "profiling" Arab Muslims for murdering Jewish children in Israel is deserving of reproach from our Western elites.

Kissinger's remarks today would not require the secrecy they were given in 1975. Today it's considered avant-garde diplomacy to demand of Israel's leadership that they withdraw their borders to those of pre-1976, boundaries Abba Eban once aptly described as "the Auschwitz lines." Today it's perfectly normal for Condoleezza Rice to insouciantly demand that a Palestinian state be created contiguous to Israel as a homeland for a Muslim people whose majority vote in Gaza endued the terrorist group Hamas with the elective right to rule over them- providing the Western world with its first glimpse of Islam's peculiar version of democracy.

Jimmy Carter's asinine perceptions of the conflicts in the Middle East are symptomatic of the world's majority anti-Jewish sentiments. These are not only the feelings of Jimmy Carter; these are the cognizances of countless non-Jews in the Western world. As Sam Harris points out, such majority sentiments do not necessarily qualify them as being true reflections of "the way the world is." But all the same, as conveyed by Myles Kantor, "… a people's true character emerges as a majority."

© Copyright 2002-2008 by Magic City Morning Star