B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission: Jimmy Carter’s comments about Paris massacres are misguided and offensive
January 18, 2015
The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission has severely criticised as wrong and
offensive comments by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter last week that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was one of the contributing reasons for the heinous murders in Paris. In an interview with Jon Stewart, President Carter was asked whether the terrorist attacks in Paris were actually motivated by something else other than Islamic extremism. President Carter’s strange reply was that “…One of the origins for it is the Palestinian problem. And this aggravates people who are affiliated in any way with the Arab people who live in the West Bank and Gaza, what they are doing now — what’s being done to them. So I think that’s part of it”
Dr. Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, issued the following statement:
“To claim that the horrific killings in Paris are somehow linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just offensive and a gross distortion of reality, but is an insult to the families of the victims. The warped suggestion that the Islamist-inspired gunmen were motivated in large part by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians rather than anti-Semitism and fundamentalist anti-Westernism is yet another example of President Carter’s deep prejudice and animus against Jews and Israel. Instead of acknowledging that it was fanatical Islamist ideology that fuelled the Paris attacks, President Carter chose to underplay this root cause and to pin some of the blame on Israel. Such conspiracy theories cannot stand.
I say to President Cater: The genocide, slaughter, rape and pillaging unfolding in Nigeria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria to name just a few, which have claimed the lives hundreds of thousands of innocents, are not Israel’s fault and cannot be traced or ascribed to the Palestinian problem. Blaming the Jewish state and looking for some phantom linkage theory cannot explain the brutal execution of cartoonists, journalists and French Jews buying groceries for the Sabbath. Such false assertions and anti-Semitic fantasies will not stop the merciless barbarity of radical Islamism and are damaging to the efforts by the global community to combat the spread of extremism and terrorism”.