Customer Reviews

The Personal Beliefs of Jimmy Carter: Winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize

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It really is awful to see ideological conservatives give a critique of a book they haven't even read here at Amazon.

One went as far as to claim that the only thing Carter did that was worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize was the progress he made at Camp David.

Have they been so blinded by war and hate that they can't even look toward Carter's admirable work in Habitat for Humanity as a basis for him winning this prestigious award?

They obviously must be. They certainly are dedicated to crushing the image of someone who represents solving problems with great love and effort, rather than with destruction and arrogant minsunderstanding.

But I recommend this book for someone with an open enough mind to see how wonderful a human being Jimmy Carter is. Regardless of your partisan bias.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and humanitarian President Carter explains how certain events have influenced his life in this excellent autobiography. Although the book contains the words of a man that is not afraid to speak the truth, he does not go into details of the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. He micromanaged the rescue team from the White House, instead of empowering his men in the field to make any decisions. Unlike other presidents, he has not been bought off by corporate America.

During the Carter Administration, President Carter had to deal with the deaths of his mother, sister, and brother, and that was near the start of his four years of Presidency. Then there was the Hostage Crises in Iran. President Carter had to try anything, and everything to get the hostages. It cost the lives of several soldiers when thier helicopter crashed in the desert. Essentially, President Carter got a raw deal. He was not reckognized by those who came home from Iran, or anybody else in the United States, as the saviour. President Reagan got that glory. And, at president Reagan's Inaugural Ball/Dinner, he did not even mention President Carter. This may sound like a put down of both administrations, but it is not. Both men had their faults, as does today's President Bush. I have the ultimate respect for President Carter. For somebody who will be 80 October 1, it does not surprise me that he is still constructing houses, taking care of the other persons, etc.

The book is very interesting, I think not many people in the world put there faith in to action, thats what the book is about. And I get chance to meet with President Carter personally and he is really very interesting person, read the book and you will know better...

I have read most of his books and find them all to be well written and this one is stands up to the test.

JIMMY CARTER: HISTORY'S BUFFOON
By Mike Evans

Ayatollah Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint.
' Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter's choice for America's UN ambassador

With the United States and Iran moving toward a showdown over Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, it is sobering to consider how relations between the two countries deteriorated so far ' and which American president was largely responsible.

The United States once looked to the shah of Iran to support Western economic stability, and the shah relied on the US to help implement his vision for Iran's future. But when Jimmy Carter became president, the shah's confidant, Asadollah Alam, wrote in his diary about Shah Pahlavi's concerns over Carter's election: 'Who knows what sort of calamity he [Carter] may unleash on the world?'

The answer was evident just a few years later, when the shah was overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Carter, it became clear, was the answer to the ayatollah's prayers. Khomeini could never have carried out the Islamic Revolution without him.

With characteristic naivete, Carter pressured the shah to allow more political freedom. While some 300 political prisoners were released, censorship was relaxed, and judicial reforms initiated, the youth of Iran were swarming to radical Islam. University students gathered at Islamic study centers, the young women clothed in the chadors outlawed by the shah. This new, radical Islam exploded on the campus of Teheran University in October 1977.

Before the ensuing 1979 Islamic Revolution, Carter sent Gen. Robert Huyser, deputy chief of the US European Command and involved with Iran for over a decade, to advise the shah. Huyser said of his boss: 'The administration obviously did not understand the Iranian culture.'

Carter viewed Khomeini as a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution, rather than a founding father of modern terrorism who introduced the Islamofascist ideology we are fighting today in the world war on terrorism.

As Henry Kissinger said: '[Carter] has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.'

In his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter equates Israel's battle against Palestinian terrorism to the hateful former South African practice of apartheid, as if there were any logical connection between them. Worse, he condemns Israel for exercising the basic human right of self-defense by building a security fence to keep out suicide bombers, or responding to missile attacks from the very land that was given away 'for peace.'

Carter also deliberately misrepresents Israel as the aggressor in the 1967 war; fails to note the threat that precipitated its destruction of Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981; and exonerates Arafat for walking out of the peace talks with Ehud Barak and turning down a settlement that would have given the Palestinians 96 percent of the land they seek.

Dr. Kenneth Stein, who resigned as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center of Emory University, wrote in a letter to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 'President Carter's book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analysis; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.'

With Arafat gone, Carter has continued to court terrorists, madmen, and extreme leftists, all the while lambasting the Bush administration. He has constantly praised such heinous dictators as the former Yugoslavia's Tito, Romania's Ceausescu, Panama's Ortega, and Kim il-Sung of North Korea. Sent as an emissary to North Korea by president Bill Clinton, Carter made a deal that allowed it to develop as many as half a dozen nuclear weapons.

Carter's naive belief that every crisis can be resolved with diplomacy ' and nothing but diplomacy ' now permeates the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, he is dead wrong. There are times when evil must be openly confronted and defeated.