Schadenfreude is a German word meaning “pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune.” So, when 14 more members of the Carter Center resign in protest over his new book, well, I’m delighted. No figure in American public life bothers me more than Jimmy Carter.
The Washington Post
14 quit Carter Center panel as fuss over book grows
January 12, 2007
Fourteen members of an advisory board to the Carter Center in Atlanta resigned Thursday in protest over former President Jimmy Carter’s best-selling new book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying they could “no longer in good conscience continue to serve.”
The resignations were the latest episode in an escalating controversy over the book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” published in November. It has been criticized within the U.S. Jewish community as tilting sharply toward the Palestinians. Scholars have found fault with his fact-checking. At least one former Mideast negotiator has expressed outrage over what he called “misrepresented” history.
The straw that broke board member Steve Berman’s back, he said Thursday, appeared on Page 213, in a passage he quoted from memory: It was imperative, Carter wrote, that Arabs and Palestinians “make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals” of an internationally proposed peace accord “are accepted by Israel.”
“What does that say to you?” asked Berman, a commercial real estate developer in Atlanta. “It says they can stop when they get their state. He’s condoning terror as a means of obtaining the objective of a Palestinian state.”
For more Jimmy bashing, don’t miss Allen Dershowitz’s column, Ex-President for Sale