Jimmy Carter Blames Israel for Paris Terror

January 14, 2015

2 min read

Former US President Jimmy Carter weighed in this week on recent events in Paris, telling interviewers perhaps the “Palestinian problem” is partly to blame. Speaking to television personality Jon Stewart Monday night, he said the situation in the West Bank and Gaza “aggravates people” with any connections there. he also told Huffington Post Live host and college professor Marc Lamont Hill these events could be seen as “a positive turning point in some respects”.

Speaking to Stewart on The Daily Show, Carter speculated, “Well, one of the origins for [this extremism] is the Palestinian problem and, you know, 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.”

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Carter spoke of a “new evolutionary development in terrorism.”

Sympathizers with European passports travel to Syria, “stay there for a few months and learn how to be a terrorist and then they come back through Turkey and you know they have been there and you know who they are. And I think this event in Paris is going to waken up the people in charge of security to watch those people more closely than they have in the past – and not single out all of the Muslims in the country,” he said.

The 34th President of the US regaled Stewart with stories from the Camp David Accords, where he negotiated a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978. Stewart asked Carter to compare the mood then and now. Carter acknowledged that he is “disheartened” with the current tension between Israel and the Palestinians, but while he called it “distant”, he said he still has hope.

For peace to happen, though, “Israelis have to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem as well,” Carter said, adding, “The Palestinians have to make sure that they commit themselves without equivocation to the freedom of Israel to live in peace alongside of them.”

Speaking to Hill Tuesday, Carter responded to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invitation to French Jewry to make aliyah (move to Israel). “My guess is that the Jews who live in France will maybe not take this as a positive step, and say the only way you can be safe is to go to Israel,” Carter said. “I would guess that you may be, on the average, maybe safer in France than some places in Israel, but I’m not trying to make a judgment.” His comments were seen as referring to areas targeted by Hamas rockets from Gaza, though Jerusalem also witnessed an upsurge in terror in the closing months of 2014.

Trying to find the silver lining in the tragic string of terror attacks which left 17 dead, Carter called the world reaction “a positive turning point”.

“I think this is going to give a lot of people incentive to look into Islam and what is it about this religion that makes it great, that makes it appeal to really billions of people and to understand that Islamic leaders condemn this kind of terrorism just like the rest of the world,” he said.

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