Is there a reason Jimmy Carter is still alive? I won't ever advocate for the death of someone innocent. However, Carter has, by becoming nothing more than a mouthpiece for Islamic terror, been given way too much honor.

In yesterday's Washington Post, the former president lambasted Israel's right to self-defense by shamefully covering up Hamas' objectives and through outright falsehoods. In defending the terror organization's demands, he serves as a true "useful idiot" for Islamofacism.

Aside from the obvious questions of why - after pulling out of Gaza 2 years ago and giving them an obscene amount of aid and money, they have yet to build one factory (aside from weapon creation), one power plant or even one utility - Carter even goes so far as to call the tunnels the Arabs have built to smuggle in these arms, "defensive tunnels!"

Defense against whom, exactly?

The point is, Gaza is not and should not be Israel's responsibility. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, it was part of Egypt. In the 1979 peace treaty (which Jimmy takes so much credit for), Egypt refused to accept it back. So Israel got stuck with it. Now, after having to physically remove the Jews who had made their homes there (because while it is more than ok for an Arab to live in Israel, G-d forbid a Jew should sully any of their lands), suddenly Israel is responsible for these people?

But why is Carter so anti-Israel? Well, the real answer comes from Rachel Ehrenfeld, who is the Director of the American Center for Democracy, and was published in the December 21, 2006 edition of the Washington Times:

Carter's Arab Financiers

To understand what feeds former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Israeli frenzy, look at his early links to Arab business.

Between 1976-1977, the Carter family peanut business received a bailout in the form of a $4.6 million, "poorly managed" and highly irregular loan from the National Bank of Georgia (NBG). According to a July 29, 1980 Jack Anderson expose in The Washington Post, the bank's biggest borrower was Mr. Carter, and its chairman at that time was Mr. Carter's confidant, and later his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance.

At that time, Mr. Lance's mismanagement of the NBG got him and the bank into trouble. Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), known as the bank "which would bribe God," came to Mr. Lance's rescue making him a $100,000-a-year consultant. Abedi then declared: "we would never talk about exploiting his relationship with the president." Next, he introduced Mr. Lance to Saudi billionaire Gaith Pharaon, who fronted for BCCI and the Saudi royal family. In January 1978, Abedi paid off Mr. Lance's $3.5 million debt to the NBG, and Pharaon secretly gained control over the bank.

Mr. Anderson wrote: "Of course, the Saudis remained discretely silent... kept quiet about Carter's irregularities... [and] renegotiated the loan to Carter's advantage."

Continue reading here.

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I really didn't expect it to happen this fast. I mean, sure I've seen the Arab "Street" burning Israeli and American flags in Iran, Afghanistan and in other Muslim countries. But never have I seen such a blatant display of antisemitism here in America.

One such protest, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, even featured a woman shouting that the Jews should "go back to the ovens" and others stating that the "Final Solution isn't over."

As I watched the video of this and other protests, I wondered what what would have happened if these were not protests against Jews, but were against anybody else. While I recognize that we in America value freedom of speech, would the media be outraged (they aren't currently) if this were a Klan march screaming for the death of blacks? How about a Jewish protest calling for the death of Muslims? Do you think that would be ok?

Jeff Jacoby, the wonderful writer from the Boston Globe, has an enlightening take on all of this in a column published Wednesday:

Yes, It's Anti-Semitism

CRITICIZING ISRAEL doesn't make you anti-Semitic: If it's been said once, it's been said a thousand times. Yet somehow that message doesn't seem to have reached the hundreds of anti-Israel demonstrators in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who turned out last week to protest Israel's military operation in Gaza. As their signs and chants made clear, it isn't only the Jewish state's policies they oppose. Their animus goes further.

Demonstrators chanted "Nuke, nuke Israel!" and carried placards accusing Israel of "ethnic cleansing" and bearing such messages as: "Did Israel take notes during the Holocaust? Happy Hanukkah." To the dozen or so supporters of Israel gathered across the street, one demonstrator shouted: "Murderers! Go back to the ovens! You need a big oven."

The Arab-Israeli conflict induces strong passions, and the line that separates legitimate disapproval of Israel from anti-Semitism may not always be obvious. But it's safe to assume the line has been crossed when you hear someone urging Jews "back to the ovens."

The Danish website Snaphanen posted a photo the other day of a pamphlet being distributed in Copenhagen's City Hall Square. On one side it proclaimed: "Never Peace With Israel!" and "Kill Israel's People!" On the other side: "Kill Jewish people evry where in ther world!" The leaflet's spelling left something to be desired, but its message of genocidal anti-Semitism couldn't have been clearer.

Likewise the message in Amsterdam on Saturday, where the crowd at an anti-Israel rally repeatedly chanted, "Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas." And the message in Belgium, where pro-Hamas demonstrators torched Israeli flags, burned a public menorah, and painted swastikas on Jewish-owned shops.

Only marginally less vile is the message that has been trumpeted at demonstrations from Boston to Los Angeles to Vancouver: "Palestine will be free/ From the river to the sea" -- a restatement in rhyme of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to be "wiped from the map."

Let's say it for the thousand-and-first time: Every negative comment about Israel is not an expression of bigotry. Israel is no more immune to criticism than any other country. But it takes willful blindness not to see that anti-Zionism today -- opposition to the existence of Israel, rejection of the idea that the Jewish people are entitled to a state -- is merely the old wine of anti-Semitism in its newest bottle.

The hatred of Jews has always been protean, readily revising itself to reflect the idiom of its age. At times, it targeted Jews for their religion, demonizing them as Christ-killers or enemies of the true faith. At other times, Jews have been damned as disloyal fifth columns to be suppressed or expelled, or as a racial malignancy to be physically exterminated.

In our day, Jew-hatred expresses itself overwhelmingly in national terms: It is the Jewish state that the haters are obsessed with. "What anti-Semitism once did to Jews as people, it now does to Jews as a people," the British commentator Melanie Phillips has written. "First it wanted the Jewish religion, and then the Jews themselves, to disappear; now it wants the Jewish state to disappear."

The claim that anti-Zionism isn't bigotry would be preposterous in any other context. Imagine someone vehemently asserting that Ireland has no right to exist, that Irish nationalism is racism, and that those who murder Irishmen are actually victims deserving the world's sympathy. Who would take his fulminations for anything but anti-Irish bigotry? Or believe him if he said that he harbors no prejudice against the Irish?

By the same token, those who demonize and delegitimize Israel, who say the world would be better off without it, who hold it to standards of perfection no other country is held to, who extol or commiserate with its mortal enemies, who liken it to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, who make it the scapegoat not only for crimes it hasn't committed, but for those of which it is a victim -- yes, such people are anti-Semitic, whether they acknowledge it or not.

Criticize Israel? Certainly. But those who so loudly denounce Israel in its war against Hamas are siding with some of the most virulent Jew-haters on earth. They may tell themselves that that doesn't make them anti-Semites. But it does. "When people criticize Zionists," Martin Luther King said in 1968, "they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism."