Jimmy Carter: “Too many Jews” on Holocaust Council

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Jimmy Carter has some explaining to do:

Former President Jimmy Carter once complained there were “too many Jews” on the government’s Holocaust Memorial Council, Monroe Freedman, the council’s former executive director, told WND in an exclusive interview.

Freedman, who served on the council during Carter’s term as president, also revealed a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian was rejected from the council’s board by Carter’s office because the scholar’s name “sounded too Jewish.”

Freedman, now a professor of law at Hofstra University, was picked by the council’s chairman, author Elie Weisel, to serve as executive director in 1980. The council, created by the Carter White House, went on to establish the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

This comes in the wake of controversy over Carter’s recent book, which has been criticized for ignoring Jewish suffering and for glossing over Arab violence–even, in one place, appearing to encourage the latter.

Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University which is in partnership with the Carter Centre, wrote this week that the book trivialises the Israeli experience.

“It is hard to criticise an icon,” she says. “Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian work has saved countless lives. Yet his life has also been shaped by the Bible, where the Hebrew prophets taught us to speak truth to power. So I write.

“Carter’s book, while exceptionally sensitive to Palestinian suffering, ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion and murder committed against Jews.

“‘His book, which dwells on the Palestinian refugee experience, makes two fleeting references to the Holocaust. The book contains a detailed chronology of major developments necessary for the reader to understand the current situation in the Middle East. Remarkably, there is nothing listed between 1939 and 1947.”

While Carter has not cited that passage for a change, he did apologise for one extraordinary sentence that appeared to condone terrorism. On page 213 Carter wrote: “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the road map for peace are accepted by Israel.”

Jewish groups seized upon the conditional “when”, sending Carter scrambling back to the editors for a correction in the reprints.

“That was a terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens,” Carter says. “My publishers have been informed about that and the sentence has been changed in all future editions of the book.”

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