

Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter speaking from Cairo to the New York Times. He says that most Egyptians want to retain the treaty with Israel, but want that treaty’s long-nullified promise of Palestinian freedom to be fulfilled. Then there’s this:

he also acknowledged that in retrospect the Egyptian revolution had cast a new light on the alliance he helped forge with Egypt’s military-backed strongmen, first President Anwar el-Sadat and then his successor, Mr. Mubarak. Many Egyptians, he said, now complain that for three decades the United States supported a dictatorship at odds with its values to preserve peace with Israel. “I think that is true, we were,” he said. “And I can’t say I wasn’t doing that as well.”

So the U.S. helped maintain a dictatorship in the largest country in the Arab world for the sake of peace with Israel– the aforesaid only democracy in the Middle East. This is emblematic of the fact that since Partition we have opposed democratic values in the region, the idea of self-determination. We do not trust the Arab people generally because they do not like the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. I don’t think this opposition to popular will has served Americans. And this is one reason I believe in the Israel lobby theory: for the sake of Israel, we’d toss our values when it comes to 85 million Egyptians. It’s not like Egypt has oil. And yes, Mohammad Atta, one of the leaders of the 9/11 hijackings, was Egyptian. Why did he hate us?