As for the too Jewish-sounding name thing, that is just weird / silly / scary. At the same time, a rather dubious news source reporting single source news about someone, we don’t know who and in what context, at Carter’s office saying something weird…. it’s really hard to say what that means about Carter.

I think there are a lot of people who need Carter to be an idiot, stupid, going senile, deluded, or straight-out anti-semitic so that his book carries less weight. These stories are going to keep cropping up until that need dies down.

The other problem is that we are dealing with a radicalized group of individuals who would probably use any moderation to solidify their power base. That is why countries like Egypt and S.A. are so repressive. Many people there don’t want our way of life or democracy or moderation. They want the type of government installed by Khomeni in Iran or the Taliban in Afghanistan, and would foment endlessly to achieve that result. Of course, I don’t defend Saddam or repressive leaders, but what’s in our national interest?

And of course, there’s also the issue that Bush hasn’t been able to go far enough, ie, breaking ties with Saudi Arabia and other Middle East regimes, so there’s little reason for anyone to believe that this practice would really stop.

And then too, without modernization, people in democracies are prone to choosing a govt which will provide for their needs rather than one that guarantees their freedoms.

We love to think that the natural result of democracy in the ME will be a pro-Western government. But those mostly exist in countries that repress their population. Where there have been fair elections, we have seen the rise of elected members of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. My point is that a true democracy will produce the opposite of what would be in our national interest.

Is it any better to laud our present-day worldview which divides the world into good and evil nations and only play nice with those on “our� side? Especially when you consider that many of the countries on our side are guilty of stifling the freedoms we are so intent on spreading to the world’s oppressed.

Kim,
If there really were an equivalency between oppression by the US or other modern liberal democracies and that which occurs at the hand of Ahmadinejhad, Kim Jong-il, etc, then you’d have a point. I’m not in favor of pure black and white, good vs. evil either, but there does come a point when people muddy the paint so much that it’s all solid gray and then they can’t appropriately see that there really is some black in there.

Is it any better to laud our present-day worldview which divides the world into good and evil nations and only play nice with those on “our” side? Especially when you consider that many of the countries on our side are guilty of stifling the freedoms we are so intent on spreading to the world’s oppressed.

I think Carter is just suffering from excessive nuance.

That’s a great way to put it, and as a conservative this is exactly what we dislike about Carter and his brand of liberalism- except we call it moral relativism.

Of course not. But there is a trend amoong Jews to monopolize the Holocaust. It shouldn’t be forgotten that regime critics like unionists, socialists and communists plus gypsys and gays vanished in the concentration camps, too. Much too often those victims aren’t even mentioned in speeches, publications and exhibitions on the Holocaust.