Former President Jimmy Carter says terrorists like the ones in Paris last week are motivated in large part by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, but Middle East expert Dr. Mike Evans not only says Carter is wrong but that Carter himself bears a great deal of responsibility for the rise in Islamic radicalism that played out in the French capital last week.
On Monday, Carter appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” After Stewart contended that terrorists only use Islam as a cloak, Carter suggested Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was a highly motivating factor for terrorists.
“One of the origins for it is the Palestinian problem, you know, and this aggravates people who are affiliated any way with the Arab people who live in the West Bank and Gaza, what they’re doing now (and) what’s being done to them,” said Carter.
Evans is having none of that explanation.
“It’s not about the Palestinians. It’s about terror and Carter’s weak liberal left policies that accommodates terror,” he said.
If Carter is looking to assign blame to influences beyond the terrorists who murdered people in France, Evans says Carter needs to take a long look in the mirror.
“I blame Jimmy Carter for what happened in Paris, France. I blame Jimmy Carter, because he began it all with his liberal left policies in Iran,” said Evans, who is also author of “Jimmy Carter, the Liberal Left and World Chaos.
“He needs to take responsibility because the terror we’re experiencing today,” said Evans. “This man was the chief architect of everything that fueled and fed terror and he still is.”
Evans says Carter’s diplomatic activism paved the way for a regime change in Iran that ushered in radicals more responsible for terrorism than any other government.
“It was Jimmy Carter himself, who used (then-Secretary of State) Cyrus Vance to negotiate what’s called the Algerian Accords. He told Iran, ‘If you do what I want you to do, I will give you $7.9 billion,’ which he did by the way. He transferred it to the Bank of England from the Federal Reserve and signed the Algerian Accords. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the overthrow of the Shah of Iran,” said Evans.
The Algerian Accords were signed on Carter’s last full day in office as part of his last-ditch attempt to free the 52 Americans held hostage at the U.S. embassy in Iran.
Evans says personal conversations with two key figures also shed light on Carter’s role in the rise of radicals in Iran and his unwillingness to see and hear the warnings.
He says Farah Pahlavi, the widow of the deposed Shah, expressed her husband’s grave concerns about Carter’s foreign policy.
“When Jimmy Carter met with them, her husband said to her, ‘He wants the political prisoners released. He wants freedom of the press. He wants a terrorist by the name of Khomeini to be the head of this country. If Carter succeeds, Iran will be overthrown, the Russians will invade Afghanistan, Iraq will invade Iran and who knows what hell will come upon the earth?'” said Evans.
According to Evans, Carter was also strong urged by then-French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to end his desire to see Khomeini rule Iran, but he says Carter would not listen and ultimately played a leading role in the erosion of support for the Shah in the West.
“[Giscard d’Estraing] said, ‘At the Guadalupe Summit, Mr. Carter came. I told him Khomeini’s a terrorist. He said, ‘No, no, no. He’s going to be a Gandhi-like figure. We’re going to bring him into Iran and we’re going to get the Shah out,'” said Evans.
Evans says the former French president also referred to Carter as “a bastard of conscience.” The Guadalupe Summit was in January 1979. Two weeks later the Shah left Iran. Two weeks after that, Khomeini returned triumphantly to Iran. In early November, the hostage crisis began at the U.S. embassy and for decades the State Department has declared Iran to be the number one state sponsor of terrorism.
The way Evans sees it, President Obama is cut from the same ideological cloth as Jimmy Carter.
“Unfortunately, Obama is Carter on steroids. He buys into the Carter ideology that these people are victims and that the perpetrators are us. He won’t say it, but that’s what he believes,” said Evans.
Obama is taking a great deal of heat for failing to appear at the unity rally in Paris on Sunday.
“He was simply saying to the Muslim world, ‘I feel your pain. I understand the hurt and the injustices done to you.’ That’s what he was fundamentally saying. He was giving a liberal left excuse for what happened. Shame on him,” said Evans.
