Soccer Dad

Jimmy Carter, Useful Idiot

I saw an article in the Baltimore Sun yesterday "Carter, OAS call Chavez victory legitimate". Indeed, there was Nobel "Peace" Laureate, Jimmy Carter, giving his imprimatur to the thug of Venezuela:

"There is a clear difference in favor of the government of President Chavez," said former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose Atlanta-based Carter Center monitored the election with the Organization of American States.

In a packed news conference, shown on national television, Carter and OAS's secretary-general, Cesar Gaviria, said the highly accurate "quick counts" their organizations conducted at various polling stations coincided with the outcome released by the Electoral Council.

Though a few paragraphs of the article note the claims of fraud by the opposition, the bulk of the article explains how Chavez champions the poor over the wealthy.
In order to find out anything fishy, I had to read "The Price of Dissent in Venezuela" in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal. THOR L. HALVORSSEN points out that there was a serious conflict of interest in the purchase of the voting machines used in this election. But that conflict of interest was of no interest to the wire services the Baltimore Sun used or to Jimmy Carter. Instead, to get facts, I had to go to an opinion page of a conservative newspaper. Makes you wonder what is *worth* reporting in the mainstream media.
But Carter's approval of an almost certainly fraudulent election brings back memories. Memories of 1996 when Carter endorsed the election of Yasser Arafat. Dan Polisar whose group monitored those elections took a much different view of Arafat's legitimate election:

The reason for all of this emphasizing and re-emphasizing of Arafat's status as the legitimately chosen leader of the Palestinians is that without it, one might easily reach the conclusion that everyone-Jews, Arabs, Americans, and Europeans-would be better off with him gone. Indeed, for many in the West, the claim that Arafat is the Palestinians' legitimate, democratically elected leader is his last line of defense.

But is it true? To take statements such as Jimmy Carter's seriously is to argue that while some national rulers are best viewed as illegitimate usurpers, Yasser Arafat is more like the leaders of democratic countries, who come to power through a fair expression of the popular will-and that as such, he cannot reasonably be replaced. Such a conclusion, however, would have to stand on more than the observation that an election was held in the West Bank and Gaza in January 1996 in which Arafat received nearly 90 percent of the votes. After all, plenty of dictators do that well in elections aimed principally at reinforcing their rule, and this phenomenon is particularly widespread in the Middle East.

A real look at the question of Arafat's legitimacy, therefore, has to involve a more serious examination of the origins of his rule in the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords-and particularly the crucial two-year period in which he established the Palestinian Authority and paved the way for himself and his loyalists to win a landslide victory at the polls. Such an accounting reveals a disturbing picture, of a PLO leadership that-after having been brought in from Tunis amid widespread jubilation-used every means at its disposal to ensure that the Palestinian voter would have only one viable option as to which political party would represent him, and only one real candidate to vote for as president. Under these conditions, Arafat's landslide victory was not an expression of democratic will, but rather a testament to the success of the measures he employed.

Funny, again it wasn't the mainstream media that pointed out Carter's hankering to endorsing thuggish dictators, I had to go to a "conservative" website, Newsmax to find an article that remembers what I do.

Jimmy Carter is in Venezuela as an “observer” to the recall election that will prove critical in determing whether President Hugo Chavez can create another Castro-style dictatorship in Latin America.

History could be prologue.

In 1996, the Georgia Democrat and his Carter Center endorsed Yasser Arafat’s election, describing it as a “democratic” one, “well organized, open and fair.” But former CIA director James Woolsey concluded differently: “Arafat was essentially ‘elected’ the same way Stalin was, but not nearly as democratically as Hitler, who at least had actual opponents.”

In 1996 Carter of course knew who was really attempting to subvert democracy: the Israeli government of Shimon Peres. The government, expecting nationalists to disrupt the PA elections in Jerusalem set up cameras in polling places. Carter who doesn't miss a trick noted that Arab voters might be intimidated by the cameras made a big show of standing up to Israel and insisting that the cameras be removed. Or more generally from a Knight Ridder report:

``I don't think there is any doubt the police are doing everything they can to intimidate the voters,'' said former President Jimmy Carter, who led one team of election observers.

Carter huddled with police at the main east Jerusalem post office. Thirty minutes later, police reduced their numbers by half and authorities decided to extend voting hours. Still, fewer than 1,400 of nearly 4,400 eligible voters cast ballots in east Jerusalem, said Herzl Bar-Mag, vice director general of the Israel Postal Authority.

With this sort of record, I wonder how Carter has any credibility.

Posted by SoccerDad at August 19, 2004 02:20 PM | TrackBack