Wrong Way Carter

Once again former President Jimmy Carter is siding with despots, dictators, and theocrats against basic human rights. Go figure.

President Carter personally called Secretary of State Rice to try to convince her to reverse her U.N. ambassador's position on changes to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the former president recalled yesterday in a talk in which he also criticized President Bush's Christian bona fides and misstated past American policies on Israel.

Mr. Carter said he made a personal promise to ambassadors from Egypt, Pakistan, and Cuba on the U.N. change issue that was undermined by America's ambassador, John Bolton. "My hope is that when the vote is taken," he told the Council on Foreign Relations, "the other members will outvote the United States."

While other former presidents have tried to refrain from attacking the sitting chief executive, Mr. Carter's attacks on President Bush have increased. The episode he recounted yesterday showed how he tried to undermine officials at lower levels in an effort to influence policy.

The story, as Mr. Carter recalled, began with a recent dinner for 17 he attended in New York, where the guests included the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Jan Eliasson; an unidentified American representative, and other U.N. ambassadors from "powerful" countries at Turtle Bay, of which he mentioned only three: Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan. The topic was the ongoing negotiations on an attempt to replace the widely discredited Geneva-based Human Rights Commission with a more accountable Human Rights Council.

The Human Rights Commission is a cesspool of anti Semitism and a blind eye to gross human rights violations throughout the world, from Darfur to China. The Human Rights Commission's major focus has been to focus its ire on Israel, which is facing an ongoing 40+ year war for its very survival and whose enemies have resorted to suicide bombers, car bombs, and indiscriminately bombing and shelling Israeli settlements. Israel's response of setting up checkpoints, fences, and targeting the terrorist infrastructure is met with complaints of human rights abuses.

No such scrutiny exists for the Palestinians who are behind the attacks. And Carter is hammering away at Israel while turning a blind eye to the terrorists who perpetrate these heinous acts.

Curious. Very curious.

Yet Carter wants to maintain the status quo?