ONCE AGAIN PALESTINIANS GET TAKEN FOR A RIDE:
"...wealthy and grateful Arabs have channeled
substantial contributions to the Carter Center."
MER - Washington - 27 March:
The history of the
Middle East is convoluted and tortuous indeed. It is also full of
well-meaning folk, like Jimmy Carter who only made things worse; as well
as so much dastardly conspiracy and hypocrisy.
As for Carter, he
is the well-meaning born-again rather miserably failed "liberal" American
President who brought on the era of Ronald Reagan and reduced the democratic
party to Bill Clinton.
True enough, Carter
may be a nice fellow, and he certainly is a good born-again Christian,
but when it comes to the Middle East Carter always was a simpleton and
in the end he and his friends brought only more suffering and misery to
the peoples of the Middle East -- especially to the Lebanese and Palestinians
whom Carter so badly mislead.
It was at Camp David, as
his policies and Presidency werefloundering, that Carter begged and promised
Anwar Sadat to trust him. Tragically Sadat did, though nobody else
would, and indeed Sadat's friend of 40-years, and Foreign Minister, wisely
resigned rather than go along with what was to result.
Within a short
time Carter's promise to halt Israeli settlements vanished gutting the
heart of the Camp David deal; Anwar Sadat was isolated, demoralized, and
then assassinated; and the Iranian revolution soon erupted. The Israeli
invasion and destruction of Lebanon, the Iraq-Iran bloodbath, the Palestinian
intifada, the Gulf War, "dual-containment", and the the "peace process"
-- these were all resultant from ill -conceived and even more ill-implimented
policies of the Carter years.
And now we learn
how direct a hand Jimmy Carter had in misleading and corrupting the once
proud PLO, turning Arafat into but a stooge and puppet in the years to
come. And while doing so, it just so happens we now learn that Carter
was reaping in the bucks, "convincing" some of the wealthy Palestinians
and Arabs -- always easy marks to squander their money if invited to the
White House -- to provide large amounts of funding for his "Carter Center"
in Atlanta.
Indeed, Hasib
Sabbagh, the Shuman family of the Arab Bank, and others have squandered
so much and achieved so little. Their legacy, in fact, is today's double
occupation of their people and the Apartheid-like conditions under which
Palestinians are more disenfranchised, more repressed, and more hopeless
today then ever before.
So much for
Jimmy Carter's well-meaning "help"; the only real beneficiary turning out
to be the Carter Center which has flourished on the huge subsidies from
Jimmy's Arab "friends".
The following
article is from the front page of today's Boston Globe. It's a self-serving
Carter- glorifying article in many ways; largely because the book
in question should be considered more like a subsidized propaganda work
than anything else. So make sure to read and digest this latest about
Carter,
and Arafat, in the context of Carter's
failures and self- serving
activities, rather than his "successes".
CARTER COACHED ARAFAT ON WORLD ROLE
By Curtis Wilkie, Globe Staff
NEW ORLEANS - 03/27/98 - At a time when Yasser Arafat was regarded as a diplomatic pariah by the US government, former President Jimmy Carter secretly coached the Palestinian leader to improve his image, drafted passages for Arafat's public speeches, and counseled other leaders of the Palestinian uprising in Israeli-occupied territories, according to a forthcoming book.
''There was no world leader Jimmy
Carter was more eager to know than Yasser
Arafat,'' the historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in ''The Unfinished
Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House''
to be published in May by Viking. ''Carter
felt certain affinities with the
Palestinian: a tendency toward hyperactivity and a workaholic
disposition. ... Both men were like
modern Bedouins with airplanes
instead of camels,'' always moving.
The book draws a portrait of Carter as a messianic character, infused with righteousness, working Arab back channels to change Middle East equations.
From their first meeting in 1990,
Carter and Arafat ''stayed in constant communication,''
Brinkley writes. While Arafat agreed to ''distance himself''
from radical elements in the Palestine Liberation Organization,
Carter encouraged the PLO chairman
to describe the Palestinian plight to the
''world community'' in speeches designed ''to secure maximum
sympathy.''
In one letter, written in May 1990,
Carter suggested that Arafat begin an
address by describing the ''abusive policies'' of the Likud
government in
Israel during the early stages of the intifadah. Carter recommended
that Arafat say:
Carter urged Arafat to use a rhetorical litany after each mention of a deprivation: ''What would you do if these were your children and grandchildren?''
It could not be determined if Arafat
ever used Carter's precise language,
but the PLO leader did adopt a less belligerent way of talking
about Palestinian distress. At the
time of the Carter letter, Arafat was still
struggling to overcome the pariah status he acquired during his
organization's years of violent resistance.
The PLO would eventually win full
recognition from the United States when Arafat appeared with the
late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin at a White House peace ceremony
in 1993.
Brinkley, who interrupted plans
for a three-volume biography of the 39th president
to concentrate on Carter's career after leaving the White
House, said he was given ''full access
to Carter's postpresidential
papers and trip reports.''
The historian conducted numerous interviews with Carter and accompanied him on trips to the Middle East and Haiti to gather material. Although the 73-year-old former president has reviewed the manuscript, Brinkley said it was agreed that the book ''would be unauthorized so I would be free to draw my own conclusions.''
Brinkley, a professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, made page proofs of the 500-page book available to The Boston Globe.
In the book, Brinkley characterizes Carter as a ''self-styled peace outlaw'' who repeatedly defied conventions and raised the hackles of the State Department with his freelance diplomacy.
Carter's penchant for using CNN,
controlled by his friend Ted Turner, as a
mouthpiece led to clashes with President Clinton over policies
involving North Korea and Haiti. After
Clinton learned of telephone
calls between Carter and Fidel
Castro, Clinton ordered his foreign policy
apparatus to ''keep Jimmy Carter out of Cuban policy,'' Brinkley
wrote.
Carter, preparing for an overseas trip, was not available for comment.
Before his quarrels with Clinton,
Carter was often in conflict with President
Reagan. He regained favor with President Bush, but according
to Brinkley, Bush and his defense secretary,
Richard Cheney, were
''outraged'' after learning of
Carter's private attempts to persuade American
allies to abandon the war buildup against Iraq in 1991.
When other Arab states withheld
financial support after the PLO sided with
Iraq in the Gulf War, Brinkley writes, Arafat prevailed upon Carter
to undertake ''a fund-raising mission
for the PLO'' by flying to Saudi
Arabia. ''By obtaining King Fahd's
pledge of support, Carter had rendered
the PLO an invaluable service,'' Brinkley writes.
Although ''The Unfinished Presidency''
follows the former president's efforts
- operating out of the Carter Center in Atlanta - to resolve
crises, monitor elections, and combat
illness from Bosnia to Somalia
over the past two decades, the
most fascinating chapters deal with Carter's
alliance with the Palestinians.
''The intifadah exposed the injustice Palestinians suffered just like Bull Connor's mad dogs in Birmingham,'' Carter told Brinkley in a reference to a 1960s incident in the civil rights struggle in the South.
While Carter has championed the Palestinian cause, Brinkley noted, wealthy and grateful Arabs have channeled substantial contributions to the Carter Center.
Although Carter has long identified with underdogs, it took years for his Palestinian position to evolve. Early in the first year of his presidency, Carter created a diplomatic flap by referring to a Palestinian ''homeland'' at a town meeting in Clinton, Mass. He backed away from the controversy and excluded Palestinian representatives from his Camp David summit meeting with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978. It was a decision Carter later came to regret.
After losing the White House, Brinkley writes, Carter struck up a relationship in the mid-1980s with Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian-American who operated a center for the study of civil disobedience in Jerusalem. ''Carter helped Awad rewrite passages of his pamphlets before they were distributed throughout the occupied territories,'' Brinkley says. Awad was later deported by the Israelis for advocating nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The Carter connection encouraged the Palestinian leadership in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip to challenge the Israeli occupation. Hanan Ashrawi, one of the most prominent of the West Bank Palestinians, told Brinkley: ''We knew Carter was working with us. That knowledge gave us strength.''
The intifadah broke out in late 1987. More than two years later, Carter called upon Mary King, a friend and his former deputy director of the agency overseeing the Peace Corps, to arrange a meeting with Arafat in Paris. In the 1960s, King had been a civil rights crusader linked to New Left causes embracing the Palestinians.
As president, Carter had been constrained
from meeting with Arafat by a policy
developed by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and
written into a law forbidding contact
with the PLO. Carter called it
''an unwarranted restraint'' in
an interview with The Boston Globe in 1990,
shortly after his meeting with Arafat, who was then moving toward
winning recognition from the United
States. ''It would have been easier for
us to bring about more progress toward peace if the Kissinger
commitment had not been made,'' Carter
said, but he felt honor-bound not to
violate the policy.
Carter felt no such restraint as
a private citizen. In one of his own books,
''Living Faith,'' he described his renegade philosophy: ''Jesus
went to his death and Paul spent his
final years in prison rather than conform
to religious and secular laws which they could not accept,''
Carter wrote in 1996. ''We are not
required to submit to the domination of
authority without assessing whether it was contrary to our faith or
beliefs.''