The lowest ratio of real to apparent integrity

Alan Dershowitz on Jimmy Carter:

If money determines political and public views as Carter insists "Jewish money" does, Carter's views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter's off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low. He is no better than so many former American politicians who, after leaving public life, sell themselves to the highest bidder and become lobbyists for despicable causes. That is now Jimmy Carter's sad legacy.

In 1976 I voted for Jimmy Carter and saw his inauguration as a long-overdue cleansing of the Nixonian stench hanging over Washington and the country. But over the years I have come to see Carter as a failed president, albeit a moral man who worked hard for worthy causes such as his Habitat for Humanity.

More recently, I have been troubled by his tendency to focus on Israel's occupation of the West Bank as though it were the only obstacle to middle East peace, with his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid being the most egregious example. It is sad enough to think that Carter is merely so shallow as to uncritically drink the Israel-as-South-Africa kool-aid retailed the world over as thoughtful analysis, but that he is a bought-and-paid-for shill, working as a tool of the Saudis even as denounces the influence of the "Zionist lobby" on US policy-making.

Is Carter sincere? I believe that at this point he is, but in the mold of Dershowitz' example of the tobacco lobbyist, he has thoroughly convinced himself that a genocidal Hamas-led government in Palestine is less of an obstacle to peace than an Israeli polity that builds a wall to protect itself from that genocide. And that human rights abuses in the Arab world (or China, North Korea, Sudan or Iran for that matter) don't merit the condemnation that Carter seems to think is due uniquely to Israel.