Ex-President For Sale, by Alan M. Dershowitz

The sordid tale of former President Carter’s former integrity and present hypocrisy.

“Jimmy Carter is making more money  selling integrity than peanuts. I have known Jimmy Carter for more  than 30 years. I first met him in the spring of 1976 when, as a  relatively unknown candidate for president,he sent me a hand written  letter asking for my help in his campaign on issues of crime and  justice.

I had just published an article in The New York Times  Magazine on sentencing reform, and he expressed interest in my ideas  and asked me to come up with additional ones for his  campaign.

Shortly thereafter, my former student Stuart  Eisenstadt, brought Carter to Harvard to meet with some faculty  members, me among them. I immediately liked Jimmy Carter and saw him  as a man of integrity and principle. I signed on to his campaign and  worked very hard for his election.

When Newsweek magazine asked  his campaign for the names of people on whom Carter relied for advice,  my name was among those given out. I continued to work for Carter over  the years, most recently I met him in Jerusalem a year ago, and  we briefly discussed the Mid-East.

Though I disagreed with some  of his points, I continued to believe that the was making them out of  a deep commitment to principle and to human rights..

Recent  disclosures of Carter’s extensive financial connections to Arab oil  money, particularly from Saudi Arabia , had deeply shaken my  belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a  monetary reward in the name of Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same  source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe  it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with  dirty money from so dirty a source?

And let there be no mistake  about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was  involved, in a small way, in helping to  persuade Harvard University to return more than $2  million that the financially strapped Divinity  School received from this source.

Initially I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for  the Divinity School, but then a student at the DivinitySchool Rachael Lea Fish —  showed me the facts.

They were staggering. I  was amazed that in the 21st century there were still foundations that  espoused these views. The Zayed Centre for Coordination and  Follow-up - a think-tank funded by the Shiekh and run by his son  hosted speakers who called Jews “the enemies of all nations,”  attributed the assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad  and the 9/11 attacks to the United States’ own military, and stated  that the Holocaust was a “fable.” (They also hosted a speech by  Jimmy Carter.) To its credit, Harvard turned the money back. To  his discredit, Carter did not.

Jimmy Carter was, of course,  aware of Harvard’s decision, since it was highly publicized. Yet he  kept the money . Indeed, this is what he said in accepting the  funds: “This award has special significance for me because it is named  for my personal friend,Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan.” Carter’s  personal friend, it turns out, was an unredeemable anti-Semite and  all-around bigot.

In reading Carter’s statements, I was  reminded of the bad old Harvard of the 1930s, which continued to honor  Nazi academics after the anti-Semitic policies of Hitler’s government  became clear. Harvard of the 1930s was complicit in evil. I sadly  concluded that Jimmy Carter of the 21st century has become  complicit in evil. The extent of Carter’s financial support from, and  even dependence on, dirty money is still not fully known.

What  we do know is deeply troubling. Carter and his Center have  accepted millions of dollars from suspect sources, beginning with the  bail-out of the Carter family peanut business in the late 1970s by  BCCI, a now-defunct and virulently anti-Israeli bank indirectly  controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal  investors is Carter’s friend, Sheikh Zayed. Agha Hasan Abedi, the  founder of the bank, gave Carter “$500,000 to help the former  president establish his center…[and] more than $10  million to  Mr. Carter’s different projects.”

Carter gladly accepted the  money, though Abedi had called his bank-ostensibly the source of his  funding-”the best way to fight the evil influence of the  Zionists.”

BCC isn’t the only source: Saudi King Fahd  contributed millions to the Carter Center- “in 1993  alone…$7.6 million” as have other members of the Saudi Royal Family.  Carter also received a million dollar pledge from the Saudi-based bin  Laden family, as well as a personal $500,000 environmental award named  for Sheikh Zayed, and paid for by t he Prime Minister of the United  Arab Emirates.

It’s worth noting that, despite the influx of  Saudi money funding the Carter Center, and despite the Saudi  Arabian government’s myriad human rights abuses, the  Carter Center’s Human Rights program has no activity whatever  in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have apparently bought his silence  for a steep price.

The bought quality of the Center’s  activities becomes even more clear, however, when reviewing the  Center’s human rights activities in other countries: essentially no  human rights activities in China or in North Korea, or in Iran,  Iraq,the Sudan, or Syria, but activity regarding Israel and its  alleged abuses, according to the Center’s  website.

The Carter Center’s mission statement claims  that “The Center is nonpartisan and acts as a neutral party in dispute  resolution activities.” How can that be, given that its coffers are  full of Arab money, and that its focus is away from significant Arab  abuses and on Israel’s far less serious ones?

No reasonable  person can dispute therefore that Jimmy Carter has been and remains  dependent on Arab Saudi Arabia .

Does this mean that  Carter has necessarily been influenced in his thinking about  the Middle East by receipt of such enormous amounts of  money? Ask Carter. The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish  influence on American foreign policy is that money talks.

It is Carter, not me,  who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on  the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money.  So, by Carter’s own standards, it would be almost economically  ”suicidal” for Carter “to espouse a balanced position  between Israel and Palestine.”

It is  Carter-not me-who has made the point that if politicians receive money  from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding  the Middle East for themselves.

By Carter’s own  standards, therefore, his views on the Middle East must be  discounted . It is certainly possible that he now believes  them. Money, particularly large amounts of money, has a way of  persuading people to a particular position.

It would not  surprise me if Carter, having received so much Arab money, is now  honestly committed to their cause. But his failure to disclose the  extent of his financial dependence on Arab money, and the absence of  any self reflection on whether the receipt of this money has unduly  influenced his views, is a form of deception bordering on  corruption.

I have met cigarette lobbyists, who are supported  by the cigarette industry, and who have come to believe honestly that  cigarettes are merely a safe form of adult recreation, that cigarettes  are not addicting and that the cigarette industry is really trying to  persuade children not to smoke. These people are fooling themselves  (or fooling us into believing that they are fooling themselves) just  as Jimmy Carter is fooling himself (or persuading us to believe that  he is fooling himself).

If money determines political and  public views -as Carter insists “Jewish money” does -then 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 [integrity] 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.”

Author Biography: Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix  Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School and  author of The Case for Israel.