Censuring Jimmy Carter

The past few weeks the news media has been fixated on discussions of efforts by Democrats to either impeach or censure President Bush.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., has made the push to censure President Bush for the administration's wiretapping of suspected terrorists. Meanwhile a group of activist liberals has launched ImpeachPAC, which is raising money to support congressional candidates who favor impeachment proceedings against Bush for taking the fight to the terrorists in Iraq.

I have a better idea, how about censuring a president who has increasingly led an effort to undermine American foreign policy and who has embraced terrorist organizations and urged international funding for them. How about censuring former president Jimmy Carter?

While the mainstream news media has portrayed Carter in a saintly light, preoccupied with building homes for the underprivileged, Carter has devoted most of his time to condemning the United States to any audience who will have him.

The man who sat impotent while Iranian radicals stormed the American Embassy in Tehran has been busy appeasing America's enemies since he left the White House.

As WorldNetDaily reported last January, Carter hob-knobbed with an unregistered Iraqi agent, Samir Vincent, inviting him into his home, and giving him a guided tour of the Carter Center in Atlanta, Ga. Samir Vincent was an agent of Saddam Hussein who helped Iraq evade compliance with the U.N.-approved "Oil for Food" program. Billions of dollars were funneled from the "Oil for Food" program into Saddam's military.

While wining and dining the Iraqi agent, Carter blasted U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and the economic sanctions that had been imposed against Saddam Hussein because of his repeated refusals to comply with U.N. sanctions. Not surprisingly, Carter later emerged as one of the leading figures to oppose Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Ironically, one of the reasons Carter cited for his opposition to military action was that it might prompt Saddam Hussein to use chemical or biological weapons, which Carter said he believed Hussein had.

Apparently Carter favors appeasement of those who would seek to bring devastation to American cities, a position not altogether different from the position Carter took in the face of threats of Soviet aggression during his presidency.

There doesn't seem to be a white flag of surrender that Jimmy Carter doesn't enjoy waving.

Besides playing soft with Iranian radicals and working with Iraqi agents and berating President Bush for being mean to Saddam Hussein, Carter recently expressed support for the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas.

Hamas is recognized as the largest and most powerful Palestinian terrorist organization, advocating for the destruction of Israel and responsible for dozens of terrorist attacks, which have maimed or killed thousands of innocent civilians.

A day after the terrorist group emerged victorious in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, Carter urged the international community to support Hamas and provide financial assistance to the new government. But the peanut farmer from Georgia wasn't done meddling with American foreign policy.

This month, Carter announced he had made a personal promise to ambassadors from Egypt, Pakistan and Cuba that he would fight to undermine U.S. opposition to the new U.N. Human Rights Commission. The United States opposed the new panel because it would continue to allow known human-rights abusers to serve on the commission.

It's understandable why the United States, led by the fabulously stalwart and principled Ambassador John Bolton, would oppose such a commission. In May 2001, a bloc of nations led by despots and tyrants voted the United States off the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Nations with known human-rights violations, such as the Sudan, were instead placed on the panel.

So here was Jimmy Carter urging the nations of the world to rebuke the United States once more. "My hope is that when the vote is taken ... the other members will outvote the United States," Carter recently told the Council on Foreign Relations.

In a recent editorial, "Colonization of Palestine Proceeds Peace," Jimmy Carter laments that, "For more than a quarter century, Israeli policy has been in conflict with that of the United States and the international community."

No, Mr. President, for more than a quarter century your politics have been in conflict the interests of the United States.

A growing number of Democrats in Congress believe that President Bush should be censured for wiretapping suspected terrorists and waging a war against terrorism.

The act of censure is an official statement of condemnation or denouncement by Congress. Congress has the authority to censure its own members – or anyone else, for that matter – in the form of a resolution.

If the members of Congress are feeling the itch to issue a resolution of censure, they should start first with a man who has repeatedly sought to undermine this nation's foreign policy – a man who has repeatedly sided with America's enemies and promoted known terrorist groups.

All patriotic Americans should join with me in demanding our elected leaders censure the man from Plains, Ga., for repeatedly working to undermine the interests of the United States of America and its citizens.

Melanie Morgan is chairman of the conservative, pro-troop non-profit organization Move America Forward and is co-host of the "Lee Rodgers & Melanie Morgan Show" on KSFO 560 AM in San Francisco.

Petition to do what should have beeen done long ago...

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The day Jimmy Carter was reduced to silence [must read - the brilliance of Menachem Begin]
Jerusalem Post ^ | Sep. 11, 2003 | Yehuda Avner

Posted on 09/11/2003 6:24:41 PM PDT by yonif

Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer, ran an austere White House. Consonant with his innate Calvinistic intuitions, he cast himself in the role of citizen-president. He banned Hail to the Chief, slashed the entertainment budget, sold the presidential yacht, pruned the limousine fleet, and generally rid his mansion of foppery, artifice, and pretentiousness. He even carried his own bag.

So when he welcomed prime minister Menachem Begin to the White House in July 1977 with a flamboyant ceremony fit for a king - replete with a 19-gun salute, a march-past of all the armed services, and a choreographed parade of the Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps in the white livery of the Revolutionary War - the media rightly conjectured that this was a token of either high esteem or pure flattery.

US ambassador Samuel Lewis confided that it was a bit of both: "The president was persuaded that in dealing with Begin honey would get him a lot further than vinegar," he said.

And, indeed, the talks did get off to a decent start. The two leaders and their advisers exchanged views on such sensitive topics as an Israel-Arab peace parley in Geneva, the Soviet mischief in the Horn of Africa, and the PLO menace from Southern Lebanon. Then came a pause, and when coffee was served the president and the premier sipped in silence, each sizing the other up as if by mutual consent in preparation for what was next to come.

And what came next was an amazingly detailed presentation of the Likud creed on the inalienable rights of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael. This being the first summit between a Likud premier and an American president, Menachem Begin was determined that Jimmy Carter hear firsthand what he stood for.

Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, an unruffled man as a rule, became quite agitated upon hearing that Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip were not to be relinquished. He contended that this would put pay to any plan for a Geneva peace conference.

The president thought so, too. Carter wore a mask of politeness as he peered at his notes, written in his neat penmanship on heavy bond White House stationary, but one could tell by his clenched jaw that irritation lurked beneath. He said in his reedy Georgian accent: "Mr. Prime Minister, my impression is that your insistence on your rights over the West Bank and Gaza would be regarded as an indication of bad faith. It would be a signal of your apparent intention to make the military occupation of these areas permanent.

"It will close off all hopes of negotiations. It would be incompatible with my responsibilities as president of the United States if I did not put this to you as bluntly and as candidly as I possibly can. Mr. Begin," Carter railed, exasperation flaring in his steely, pale-blue eyes, "there can be no permanent military occupation of those conquered territories."

We Israeli officials around the conference table in the Cabinet Room, where the meeting was held, eyed each other with sideways squints. But Begin had readied himself for this encounter with this post-Watergate president of moral renewal - Carter the preacher with a penchant for self-righteousness.

So he leaned back and gazed with deceptively mild eyes above the president's head at the old brass chandelier hanging over the grand oak table. He was not going to be rushed.

He knew that he and the president were on vastly different trajectories, a no-exit confrontation on the settlement of the biblical heartland. Carter was as cast iron as himself. He would not bend. Nevertheless, Begin had somehow to persuade this judgmental man, who wanted to be a healer, this energetic doer with the empirical mind of an engineer, that he honestly and truly wanted peace, and that the territories were not only a matter of historic rights but also of vital security.

SO WHEN he returned Carter's stare he did so with a look that was grave and commanding.

"Mr. President," he said, "I wish to tell you something personal - not about me, but about my generation. What you have just heard about the Jewish people's inherent rights to the Land of Israel may seem academic to you, theoretical, even moot. But not to my generation. To my generation of Jews these eternal bonds are indisputable and incontrovertible truths, as old as recorded time. They touch upon the very core of our national being.

"For we are an ancient homecoming nation. Ours is an almost biblical generation of suffering and courage. Ours is the generation of Destruction and Redemption. Ours is the generation that rose up from the bottomless pit of Hell."

His voice was mesmeric, his tone deeply reflective, as if reaching down into generations of memory. The sheer ardor of his language nudged the table to intense attention.

"We were a helpless people, Mr. President. We were bled white, not once, not twice, but century after century, over and over again. We lost a third of our people in one generation - mine. One-and-a-half million of them were children - ours. No one came to our rescue. We suffered and died alone. We could do nothing about it. But now we can. Now we can defend ourselves."

Suddenly he rose to his feet, his face as tough as steel. "I have a map," he said, intrepidly.

An aide snappily unrolled a 3x5 chart between the two men.

"There is nothing remarkable about this map," Begin went on. "It is quite a standard one of our country, displaying the old armistice line as it existed until the 1967 Six Day War, the so-called Green Line."

He ran his finger along the defunct frontier, which meandered down the center of the country.

"And as you see, our military cartographers have simply marked the infinitesimal mileages of defensive depth we had in that war." He leaned across the table and pointed to the deep brown-colored mountainous area which covered the northern sector of the map.

"The Syrians sat on top of these mountains, Mr. President. We were at the bottom." His finger marked the Golan Heights, and then rested on the green panhandle below. "This is the Hula Valley. It is hardly 10 miles wide. They shelled our towns and villages from the tops of those mountains, day and night." Carter gazed, his hands clamped under his chin.

The prime minister's finger now moved southwards, to Haifa: "The armistice line is hardly 20 miles away from our major port city," he said. And then it rested on Netanya: "Our country here was reduced to a narrow waist nine miles wide." The president nodded. "I understand," he said.

But Begin was not sure that he did. His finger trembled and his voice rumbled: "Nine miles, Mr. President. Inconceivable! Indefensible!" Carter made no comment.

The finger now hovered over Tel Aviv, and then it drummed the map: "Here live a million Jews, 12 miles from that indefensible armistice line. And here, between Haifa in the north and Ashkelon in the south" - his finger ran up and down the coastal plain - "live two-thirds of our total population.

"And this coastal plain is so narrow that a surprise thrust by a column of tanks could cut the country in two in a matter of minutes. For whosoever sits in these mountains" - his fingertips tapped the tops of Judea and Samaria - "holds the jugular vein of Israel in his hands."

His dark, watchful eyes swept the stone-faced features of the powerful men sitting opposite him, and with the conviction of one who had fought for everything he had ever gotten, tersely declared:

"Gentlemen, there is no going back to those lines. No nation in our merciless and unforgiving neighborhood can be rendered so vulnerable and survive."

CARTER BENT his head forward, the better to inspect the map, but still said nothing. His eyes were as indecipherable as water.

"Mr. President," continued Begin in a tone that brooked no indifference, "This is our map of national security, and I use that term in its most unembellished sense. It is our map of survival. And the distinction between the past and the present is just that: survival. Today, our menfolk can defend their women and children. In the past they could not. Indeed, they had to deliver them to their Nazi executioners. We were tertiated, Mr. President."

Carter lifted his head. "What was that word, Mr. Prime Minister?"

"Tertiated, not decimated. The origin of the word 'decimation' is one in 10. When a Roman legion was found guilty of insubordination one in 10 was put to the sword. In our case it was one in three - tertiated!"

And now, with moistening eyes, and in a voice that was deliberate, stubborn, his every word weighed, Begin declared, "Sir, I take an oath before you in the name of the Jewish people - this will never ever happen again."

And then he broke down. He compressed his lips, which began to tremble.

Unseeingly, he stared at the map, struggling to blink back the tears. He clenched his fists and pressed them so tightly against the tabletop, his knuckles went white. He stood there, head bent, heart-broken, dignified.

A hush, as silent as a vault, settled on the room. Seized by his private, infernal Shoah reverie, he peered past Carter with a strange reserve in his eyes, a remote stare. It were as if he was looking through this born-again, Southern Baptist president from way inside himself, from that deep, Jewish intimate place of infinite lament and eternal faith - the place of long, long memory. And hidden down there, in that place, he was standing with Moses and the Maccabees.

Carter bowed his head and remained in an attitude of respectful frozen stillness. Others looked away. The tick of the antique clock on the marble mantelpiece suddenly grew audible. An eternity seemed to hang between each tick. The silence was deafening. It was a thunderbolt of national resolve never to go back to those lines.

By degrees, in slow motion, the prime minister raised himself to his full height and the room came back to life. Carter considerately suggested a recess, but Begin said it wasn't necessary. He had made his point.

The writer, a veteran diplomat, was an adviser to four prime ministers, including Menachem Begin. (avner28@netvision.net.il).

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Thanks to Hildy for access to this.

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