Another Academic Shuns Carter

From National Review Online, 10/1/07, by Carol Iannone ....

Melvin Konner, physician and professor at Emory University, declined an invitation to be part of a group advising President Carter and The Carter Center on Carter's recent book on the Mideast.

Konner notes especially that "President Carter has proved capable of distorting the truth about such meetings and consultations in public remarks following them. In particular, he mischaracterized the meeting he had with the executive committee of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Phoenix, saying he and they had positive interactions and prayed together, when in fact others present stated that the meeting was highly confrontational and that the prayer was merely a pro forma closing invocation."

Konner says also that "in television interviews I have seen over the past week, President Carter has revealed himself to be so rigid and inflexible in his views that he seems to me no longer capable of dialogue." ....

".... In addition, his repeated public insinuations that the Jews control the media and the Congress - well-worn anti-Semitic slurs that, especially coming from President Carter, present a clear and present danger to American Jews - are offensive to me beyond what I can politely say....."

"...I am now carefully rereading parts of this very puzzling and problematic book, having read it through once quickly. I am not going to point out again here all the mistakes and misrepresentations pointed out by others (to take just one example, his flat contradiction of the accounts by President Clinton and Dennis Ross of events at Camp David at which they were present and he was not)˜none of which he has answered—nor explain the grotesque distortion caused by his almost completely ignoring Jewish history between ancient times and 1947 (he devotes five lines on page 64 to that millennial tragic story and mentions the Holocaust twice; his "Historical Chronology" at the outset contains nothing˜nothing˜between 1939 and 1947).

"However, I will call your attention to a sentence on p. 213 that had not stood out for me the first time I read it: 'It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.' As someone who has lived his life as a professional reader and writer, I cannot find any way to read this sentence that does not condone the murder of Jews until such time as Israel unilaterally follows President Carter's prescription for peace. This sentence, simply put, makes President Carter an apologist for terrorists and places my children, along with all Jews everywhere, in greater danger..."

"...I will share this advice to you: If you want The Carter Center to survive and thrive independently in the future, you must take prompt and decisive steps to separate the Center from President Carter's now irrevocably tarnished legacy. ... If you do not do this, then President Carter's damage to his own effectiveness as a mediator, not to mention to his reputation and legacy will extend, far more tragically in my view, to The Carter Center and all its activities."

"Meanwhile, in my own private and modest public capacity as a university professor and writer, I will work very hard in the foreseeable future to help discredit President Carter's biased, intemperate and inflexible mischaracterizations of the reality of Israel, Palestine, terrorism, and the American Jewish community...."