A Comprehensive Collection of Jimmy Carter's Errors

http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1273

January 22, 2007

A Comprehensive Collection of Jimmy Carter's Errors

On Nov. 27, 2006, Jimmy Carter appeared on Larry King Live to discuss his book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. During the interview, Carter repeated an assertion that he has made in various venues: "Everything in the book, I might say, is completely accurate."

In line with this defense, the former president repeatedly has argued that his critics, who supposedly have no grounds to criticize the factual accuracy of the book, have resorted to name-calling and ad hominem attacks.

He told Wolf Blitzer that "Most of the criticisms of the book have been the one word in the title, ‘apartheid,’ and the other one is personal attacks on me.

To an audience at a University of Georgia conference, he said:

I have been called a liar. I've been called an anti-Semite. I've been called a bigot. I've been called a plagiarist. I've been called a coward. Those accusations, they concern me, but they don't detract from the fact that the book is accurate, and that it's needed.

In the Boston Globe, he asserted:

Not surprisingly, an examination of the book reviews and published comments reveals that these points have rarely if ever been mentioned by detractors of the book, much less denied or refuted. Instead, there has been a pattern of ad hominem statements, alleging that I am a liar, plagiarist, anti-Semite, racist, bigot, ignorant, etc. There are frequent denunciations of fabricated "straw man" accusations: that I have claimed that apartheid exists within Israel; that the system of apartheid in Palestine is based on racism; and that Jews control and manipulate the news media of America.

In the Washington Post, he repeated that "most critics have not seriously disputed or even mentioned the facts ..."

The truth is, much of the criticism of the book has pointed to the misrepresentations of fact in the book, and a number of specific errors have been cited.

CAMERA ran full page ads in the New York Times and New York Sun specifically itemizing factual errors and refuting them (and calling on Carter's publisher, Simon and Schuster, to correct the false claims). But because of space limitations and the sheer number of errors in Carter's book, those ads could only highlight and correct a fraction of Carter's falsehoods.

Here, we have compiled a more detailed and inclusive list of factual errors from Carter’s book (page numbers are in italics) and media appearances. The list will be updated as we come across any further errors of fact made by the former president.

http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1273

Some of those are a matter of opinion or wording rather than an attempt to outright lie.

Is there any doubt that that damned wall doesn't follow the green line? Does it matter if it does follow the green line in places of little importance if the end result is the large areas of Palestinians land that ended up on the wrong side?

And the length of that same damned wall is 2 times Israel rather than 3?

Seems to me they are trying to pad that list so it looks worse than it is.

find some tiny error and have a hundred people screech about it, it happens here all the time.

Did you actually read the list of errors?

like Carter claiming that Israel made up the line about "driving the Jews into the sea"...

Ah well, why should we let FACTS get in the way of perfectly good Israel bashing?

And you are so right breakaleg, why should we hold a former President who has repeatedly stated that his book is 100% factually accurate to the same standards we hold everyone else to?

I have seen better fact checking in 3rd Grade book reports.

Probably he rushed to get it published, concerned about the Lebanon situation or the state of the Middle East.

I doubt if there's anybody in the world who could write a comprehensive book about the Israeli-Palestinian situation and not get the facts slightly wrong in a hundred different places and some of these facts are under dispute anyway and depend on how certain language is understood by different parties to the discussion.

I think Carter's general propositions are accurate despite the many (and nearly all slight) misstatements and innacuracies.

Like his constant insistence throughout the book that UN resolution 242 and the 79 camp david accords calls for Israel to pull out entirely to the 67 border. Untrue. And he SIGNED the 79 accord with Begin and Sadat! He fucking BROKERED it! If he can't get that right they should put him in a nursing home. Unless... he knew it wasn't right?! Hmmmm.

Or that he said that Barak never accepted Clinton's peace proposal at camp David 2000, falsely implying that it wasn't Arafat alone who rejected the proposal and (most importantly) refused to make any counterproposal. Carter's version actually has both Barak and Arafat rejecting it. BIG mistake. Barak totally accepted it.

How about when he said that the Palestinians accepted the Road Map without any reservations and it was Israel alone who had changes to propose? Is that a big enough error to qualify? Because Abbas was bragging about how he would never implement some of the requirements of the very first step. True to his word, he hasn't. (By the way, Israel has. Isn't it weird how that didn't make it into the book? No, I guess it isn't.)

I liked Carter and had a great deal of respect for him before reading this book. Now all of that's gone. But I don't think he's an anti-semite. He doesn't have a mean bone in his body. (Remember when that duck beat the shit out of him?) No, he's just a shmendrick. 100%. Oh God is he a shmendrick.

and unless youre drinking buddies with barak id hold off on the "barak totally accepted it" commentary.

The "1949 armistice" lines did not become the "accepted" borders of Israel. Nor did Camp David and Oslo specify a withdrawal to these alleged borders. Moreover, both the language of 242 and its intent, as described by the resolution's drafters, are clear. Britain's Lord Caradon, who introduced the resolution on November 22, 1967, after months of discussion in the wake of the Six Day War, has explicitly emphasized the very opposite of Carter's claims.

In an interview in February 1973 on Israel Radio he said: "We knew that the boundaries of '67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers; they were a cease-fire line of a couple decades earlier. We did not say the '67 boundaries must be forever."

IN THE Beirut Daily Star on June 12, 1974, Caradon reiterated: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them."

It's noteworthy that other publications have made the same error, suggesting 242 calls for Israel's return to the pre-1967 armistice lines, and corrected it. The New York Times, during the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations at Camp David in the summer of 2000, did so three times, published three corrections, and has not repeated the error. Likewise other wire services and newspapers have corrected this serious inaccuracy.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1167467747675&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

As for CD 79, it stated that Israel had to withdraw from the Sinai. Nothing about the 48 borders.

This is all in the CAMERA link.

so my question to you is what do you make of 242, more specifically where do you and carter part.

Is that they generally ignore half of the core text.

(i) Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.

(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty,
territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.

The one element of the Security Council's directive has no more been wholly complied with than has the other. Any number of states and leaders of armed bodies who denounce Israel for not complying with the resolution have been, or even still are, in violation of it themselves, by maintaining legal states of belligerency and refusing to acknowledge the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Israel, and by ignoring or even disparraging the right of that state and its people to live in peace within secure borders and free from threats or acts of force.

:rofl:

It is very disappointing that you are unable or unwilling to acknowledge criticism on a very serious subject,
and instead laugh at it, most likely because it comes from an organization that has a pro-Israel but factual bias.

Your response reminds me of news clips of Palestinians dancing in the streets of Gaza rejoicing over the 9/11 terror attacks.

that people with small minds would turn to an organization of people with smaller minds to give them idiotic talking points because individual critical thought is a lost art to some.

In addition, every pathetic bleat from these small-minded critics is greeted with a loud !$KA-CHING$! as Carters book gets more publicity.

Your segue into dancing over 9/11 attacks is somewhat mystifying though, and not as funny.

His response while childish is genuine, whereas the clips of "Palestinians dancing in the streets" on 9/11 (beamed out within minutes of the collapses) were fakes.

. . overpower any sense of objectivity.

From Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cnn.htm

Origins: No, CNN did not air decade-old footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets. Eason Jordan, CNN's Chief News Executive, confirmed that the video used on CNN was in fact shot on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, in East Jerusalem by a Reuters TV crew, not during the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91 — a fact proved by its inclusion of comments from a Palestinian praising Osama Bin Laden (whose name was unlikely to have come up ten years earlier in connection with the invasion and liberation of Kuwait) as well as the appearance in the video of post-1991 automobiles. The person who made the claim quoted above has since recanted.

(The argument that the footage CNN used could not possibly be real because it showed Palestinians in broad daylight not long after the attack — even though Palestinian territory is several time zones ahead of New York — is not valid. Eastern Daylight Time in the United States is six hours behind the area of the Middle East referred to as Palestine. Thus, when the first attack occurred in New York just before 9:00 A.M., Palestine time would have been 3:00 P.M., and the area would still have been bathed in plenty of mid-afternoon sunlight.)

Reuters, the international news agency whose camera crew shot the footage, issued the following statement:

Reuters rejects as utterly baseless an allegation being circulated by e-mail and the Internet claiming that it circulated 10-year-old videotape to illustrate Palestinians celebrating in the wake of the September 11 tragedies in the United States.

Reuters welcomes a statement by the Universidad Estatal de Campinas-Brasil (UNICAMP), one of whose students was the author of the original e-mail, setting the record straight.

The videotape in question was shot in East Jerusalem by a Reuters camera crew on September 11 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the United States. The footage was broadcast by CNN and other subscribers to the Reuters video news service.

statement:

There is absolutely no truth to the information that is now distributed on the Internet that CNN used 10-year-old video when showing the celebrating of some Palestinians in East Jerusalem after the terror attacks in the U.S. The video was shot that day by a Reuters camera crew. CNN is a client of Reuters and like other clients, received the video and broadcast it. Reuters officials have publicly made the facts clear as well.

The allegation is false. The source of the allegation has withdrawn it and apologized. It was started by a Brazilian student who now says he immediately posted a correction once he knew the information was not true. This is the statement by his university — UNICAMP — Universidad Estatal de Campinas-Brasil.

Did I say Reuters used 10-year-old footage on 9/11? No. I didn't even remember this matter of the fake claim from the Brazilian student - thanks for the refresher - and back then, when I saw it, I didn't believe it, because modern media do not need to resort to such crude means of manipulation.

(It's amazing how hysterical ideologues can sniff out the emotions and motivations supposedly motivating responses they disagree with.)

The footage of the yelping Palestinian grandma partying in the street was fake because Reuters specifically went out trolling for celebration footage. There is no before or after, to know why exactly the woman is celebrating. Has she been told that "America was struck"? Has she seen the actual footage of the towers? Bystanders mill about, focusing on the woman (i.e., not simply celebrating) and smiling, not necessarily knowing why she is yelping either. The yelping grandma is then broadcast near-simultaneously to the WTC footage. Who cares about the yelping grandma? Who cares if she is perversely happy at the idea of the WTC attack? The constant repetition during the first hours (before they switched to their stock Osama footage) in juxtaposition with the WTC footage serves a propaganda functio - to reinforce the corporate media image of Palestinians as animals, Arabs as enemies to America. That is why it is a fake.

Imagine: if the media had turned the "dancing Israelis" who were arrested in New Jersey into the icon of perverse happiness at 9/11. It would have been equally fair - meaning fake.

Compare to the amount of footage shown of millions of people around the world marching, holding candles, expressing solidarity and condolences for the victims - including in Iran. In Berlin (where I was) 250,000 people came out for the Thursday vigil, there was a universal moment of silence on Thursday and then again Europe-wide on Friday.

And on the American media, the yelping grandma was still on auto-repeat for the rest of the week, taking up more time than the public expressions of millions of others.

And you're still hawking it as a non-sequitir in a completely unrelated discussion about Jimmy Carter, five years later.

Who is displaying their conditioned, emotional responses here?

You made the false and inflammatory comment, " . . whereas the clips of "Palestinians dancing in the streets" on 9/11 (beamed out within minutes of the collapses) were fakes."

You didn't qualify that as to "some" clips. As to the non-sequiter - I wasn't responding to the main thread. I was responding to your statement in that one post - which I made abundantly clear in my response.

However, the thread is about false and misleading characterizations of the I/P conflict - specifically, Jimmy Carter's. As such, your statement is a great example of just what Carter does - he makes false statements that absolves the Palestinians of responsibility in the conflict and then refuses to admit that he's wrong when irrefutable evidence is provided.

Thanks for such a clear illustration of the tactics that one side here so consistently uses - and that the OP was attempting to illustrate.

(This is my last post on this topic.)

It's true, it wasn't you but furman who brought in the non-sequitir of the Palestinian beasts cheering on 9/11 (because they hate our freedoms, no doubt, which is why they locked themselves into bantustans patrolled with US weapons). You are the one who then assumed I was talking about the Brazilian student's claim.

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