My friend Steve Hayward is the author of The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order and of The Real Jimmy Carter. I have looked forward to Steve's essay/review of Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The new issue of Azure gives it to us in "The other J.C." The whole review is mandatory reading. In one particularly interesting passage, Steve considers Carter's self-confessed "poorly worded" statement that the Palestenians should "make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel" (emphasis added). Steve considers whether Carter's plea of verbal imprecision is credible:

Carter has a long habit of engaging in what was once described as “blurt and retreat,” whereby he backs away from egregious statements when called on them. Yet circumstantial evidence suggests that this language was not mere verbal sloppiness, as Carter now wishes us to think. At the end of one of Carter’s freelance Middle East peace conferences a few years ago, he let slip a comment that ranks up there with many racially tinged remarks from his various Georgia political campaigns: “Had I been elected to a second term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.” It is strange that an experienced politician would use that particular expression. Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, incautiously wrote years after leaving office that Carter’s Middle East plan in a prospective second term was simple: Sell out Israel.

In another instance of “blurt and retreat,” Carter has said he didn’t mean to use the term “apartheid” in its South African, racial sense. But in the book, Carter says the Israelis are “imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories.” He has also compared Israel’s security fence to the Berlin Wall, glossing over the fact that the latter was intended to fence people in, while Israel’s wall is intended to keep murderers out. The fence is necessary precisely because of the Palestinian intransigence that rejected the Clinton-brokered offer to settle once and for all the borders of the West Bank on terms advantageous to the Palestinians. Carter contradicts both Clinton and Dennis Ross (who were, after all, in the room where the negotiations took place) in accepting Arafat’s revisionist view of the terms of the deal, writing, “There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive.” Ironically, Carter is in a sense correct: Having nurtured the hatred of Israel for two generations, no Palestinian leader could make a serious peace deal with Israel, no matter the terms, without incurring the wrath of Palestinian militants. But this is Israel’s fault?

Steve is something of a Renaissance man among conservative writers. He has educated himself on, and frequently written about, environmental issues from a conservative perspective. Most recently he produced the film "An Inconvenient Truth...Or Convenient Fiction?" (video and related materials accesssible here) to take issue with Al Gore's Academy Award-winning mockumentary. In light of the Live Earth festivities over the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph covered Steve's answer to Gore in Philip Sherwell's admiring article "Film challenge to Al Gore's 'Truth.'" Sherwell writes:

With a budget of just £12,000, Dr Hayward deliberately modelled his film on the style of Mr Gore's original. He addresses claims made by Mr Gore - and facts that the former vice-president omits. For example, while ice is melting in parts of Antarctica and Greenland, it is growing in others. And while, as Mr Gore observes, Mt Kilimanjaro is indeed in danger of losing its snow-capped peak, this is probably due to slash and burn farming techniques and deforestation rather than global warming.

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