Jews owe Jimmy Carter a debt of gratitude. He has made it that much more difficult to hide one’s anti-Semitism behind a fixation with Israel. He has exposed this pastime for the ploy that it is, whether one uses the ploy wittingly or unwittingly. “Criticism” of Israel is no longer the effective shroud for what amounts to double standards for the lone Jewish state — especially when it comes from people whose other pastime is defending Cuba.

As former Carter aide Ken Stein recently said, Carter’s new book is “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.” If Israel is the scourge that it is, why the need to make anything up?

Just to review, this best-selling criticism of Israel comes from a man who:

has hailed the UAE as an “almost completely open and free society”…where the government handpicks a select group of citizens to vote and strictly controls the editorial content of the newspapers and where Islamic Shari’a courts judge “sodomy” punishable by death…Now that Arafat’s Fatah has been replaced with Hamas, Carter has again proven himself a reliable ally…. Scarcely had the terrorist group ascended to power last January than Carter launched a media blitz urging the United States to circumvent its own laws against financing terrorism in order to fund Hamas.

And Melanie Morgan, of CensureCarter.com, offers a further reminder of what this leftist icon is:

No other prominent American has so often pursued appeasement and kinder treatment of the agents of evil: the communist Soviet bloc, the crack-pot communist regime in North Korea, the murderous communist regime in Cuba, Islamic radicals in Iran, Palestinian suicide sponsors, Islamic terrorist groups in the Middle East and Hugo Chavez’s Marxist regime in Venezuela to name a few…[Venezuelans writing to me] were desperate to secure freedom and democracy for their nation, having lived under Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez’s iron fist of fear…Chavez had come to power in an illegitimate election, sanctioned by Jimmy Carter.

Add this love of tyranny to Carter’s early vow as president to emasculate the CIA and other American intelligence organs (as Martin Andersen wrote in Revolution: The Reagan Legacy), and it’s safe to apply George W. Bush’s quote to Jimmy Carter:

He hates us for our freedom.
He hates our way of life.
He fears our open society.