Ex-President For Sale, by Alan M. Dershowitz
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 handwritten 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 Middle East.
Though I disagreed with some of his points, I continued to believe that
he 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 Sheik 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 ... 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 Divinity School
--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 Center for Coordination and Follow-up - a think-tank funded by the
Sheik 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 unredeemabl e anti-Semite
and all-around bigot.
In reading Carter's statements, I was reminded of the bad old Harvard
of the1930s, 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, Sheik Zayed. Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the bank, gave Carter "$500,000 to help the former
president establish his center...[a nd] 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 L aden family, as well as a personal $500,000 environmental award named for Sheik Zayed,
and paid for by the 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, Iran, 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 oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia.
Does this mean that Carter has necessarily been influenced in his thinking
about the Middle East b y 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 I -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.
It is Carter, not I, 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.
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, ha ving 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.
