Of course he does.  Because Carter is, and always has been, an Arab fluffer.  And his underlying leftism — which he camouflages in ostentatious “compassion” — can and will only and always lead him to gravitate toward despotism, tyranny, centralized rule, and, most importantly, the very antifoundationalism that gives power to the entire deflective trope of creating demons and scapegoats.

The Jews, bless them, have been highly successful in attracting the venom of the left, save for the brief period of Kibbutzes and communal living the predated Israel’s evolution to a more vibrant market driven economy.  Once they deviated from the path, they became the enemy; and that’s because economic freedom and liberty is always the enemy of those who seek to centralize power and control.

Ironically, I read a number of comments today on a so-called “conservative” site where, like the left, a certain faction of constitutional “patriots” urged readers to look behind the power curtain to unveil the Zionist domination of the world, and then, armed with Truth, figure out a way to eradicate it.

— Which, last I recall, involved giant, human-sized pizza ovens and work camps.

The point being that when things go pear-shaped, even so-called conservatives are prepared to attach their problems to a religious group and cast it out into the wild, or sacrifice it to appease their own sense of false righteousness.

One of the missions of this site over the years — and believe me, this never started out as my intention — has been to unmask the progressive tropes and kernel assumptions that have become institutionalized in the very fabric of contemporary epistemology, largely by way of the abuse of language, that not only leads the left inevitably and inexorably toward tyranny and the attempted deconstruction of the Constitution, but creates of certain avowed conservatives and Republicans co-conspirators at worst, or useful idiots at best.

To allow the left to control the way language is said to function is to allow them to control everything.  And it really is as simple as that.

But digressions aside, here’s Carter, by way of Commentary (h/t Leigh):

Former President Jimmy Carter is back in the news this week publicizing a new book about women’s rights. But, as is often the case with Carter, he drew more interest for comments he made about Israel and its supporters. When asked on NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday by Andrea Mitchell why it was that Barack Obama never called upon him for advice, he made it clear that the Jewish state was the reason he has been treated like a pariah:

I—that’s a hard question– for me to answer—you know, with complete candor. I think the problem was that– that in dealing with the issue of peace in– between Israel and Egypt– the Carter Center has taken a very strong and public position of equal treatment between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And I think this was a sensitive area in which the president didn’t want to be involved.

When he first came out with his speech in Cairo calling for the end of all settlements and when he later said that the ’67 borders would prevail, he and I were looking at it from the same perspective. But I can understand those sensitivities. And I don’t have any criticism of him.

Lest anyone think this was a slip of the tongue, he repeated the assertion in more stark terms this morning during a fawning interview with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough on the same network’s Morning Joe program:

I think that sometimes an incumbent president doesn’t want to be very friendly with me because it might looked upon as more friendly toward the Palestinians instead of the Israelis. So we try to be balanced. That’s the only issue that separates me from Obama anyway. And I was very proud of him when he made a speech in Cairo and said no more settlements when he said the 67 borders would prevail except for minor modifications. Those things are very compatible with what I believe.

Carter might consider that the reason a successor wouldn’t wish to be burdened with a relationship with him was, at least in part, due to the Georgian’s insufferable personality and chronic self-righteousness. But there may be some truth to his assertion that his stands on the Middle East are at the root of the problem. Far from being an innocent victim of political influence for being “even-handed,” however, his lack of influence is due to the fact that his bias and slanders against the Jewish state have effectively marginalized him.

Carter’s grudge against the pro-Israel community goes back to his defeat for reelection at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Carter thought he would reap the applause of supporters of the Jewish state because of his role in the Camp David Accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt. But Reagan gained a record percentage of the Jewish vote for a Republican due in no small measure to the contrast between his support for Israel and Carter’s open antagonism toward the Israeli government led by Menachem Begin. Once out of office, Carter has spent the years since nursing this grudge and becoming an increasingly bitter opponent of Israel and those who support it. This reached a crescendo in 2007 with the publication of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book, a compendium of vicious slurs hurled against the Jewish state, lent the imprimatur of the former president and the Carter Center for Peace to the canard that Israel was imposing apartheid on the Arabs. In Carter’s world, Israelis have always been the obstacles to peace while Palestinian terrorism and refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn is always ignored.

Carter can always count on a sympathetic hearing in the mainstream media (and especially on the show where the daughter of his former National Security Advisor is the co-host) and has carefully cultivated a low-key do-gooder image because of charity projects with which he has associated himself. But his animus against Israel puts him outside the American political mainstream. That is not because supporters of Israel don’t believe in fairness but due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans in both major political parties want no part of Carter’s hostility to the Jewish state. If he has become politically toxic even during the administration of the president whose foreign policy and predilection for picking fights with Israel most resembles his own, it is due to his own intemperate and indefensible views on the Middle East and his not-so-subtle echoes of the anti-Semitic Walt-Mearsheimer “Israel Lobby” thesis.

There’s nothing new in what Carter has said — his treatment of Israel as an apartheid state in the face of human slaughterhouses for Christians and non-sufficiently radicalized Muslims in Syria being part and parcel of why he is looked upon as either a complete buffoon or an open anti-Semite (which he would naturally couch as “anti-Zionism”); but one of the things I want to point out here, and it circles back to my experience in the comments section at a conservative site earlier today, is that people like Joe Scarborough, an invitee to the National Review’s symposium on the future of conservatism and a potential candidate for the GOP Presidential nomination, fawn over men such as Carter, rather than look him directly in the face and confront the evil he has, and continues, to spew — a combination of toxic lies and infuriating Rousseauivian, self-important championing of the Other as noble savage (of the kind that brought the radical chic movement to a head in the 70s and early 80s).

There is a difference between showing respect to an ex-President and treating him like an infallible sage.  Particularly in the case of Carter, who should wake each day thanking his lucky stars that Obama’s ascension may force him out of the historical position as America’s most disastrous prior President.

The left has used linguistic tricks, sophistry, repetition of the big lie, whispered conspiracy theories, and the polished-for-a-21st-century memes of anti-semitism that have always been with us, in order to maintain its external foreign policy demon and shield itself from criticism.

Other notorious instances of governments supporting such a stance, either explicitly or through its silence, are smeared in blood along history’s time line.

And yet as the left succeeds in dragging the GOP ever more leftward, putative “conservatives” join its ranks as those who would scapegoat Israel.

Too many Americans — particularly those with political aspirations or who wish to pander to celebrity — simply lack the necessary balls to end the mirage of postmodernism that has erected a veneer of false reality over the world as it is.  Because all it takes sometimes is the willingness to look a “well-respected” “senior statesman” (or even your garden variety “activist”) in the eye, should the chance ever arrive, and tell him he’s a a toxic twit who, were it not for his having been elected as an antidote to the liberal media’s creation of the Republican scourge, would be nothing more than a bitter old bigot with ideas that fit right at home in both Arab countries and even, to some extent, Nazi Germany.

Spitting on his shoes immediately after would be optional, and a matter of one’s style.