Surprise!! Jimmy Carter's book has fact problems

As the nation says goodbye to Gerald Ford, Simon & Schuster is defending a book written by his successor, Jimmy Carter. Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has earned him flak for his anti-Israel editorial stance. But PW reports that a spokeswoman for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) is critical of Carter's treatment of the facts:

“We have nothing to argue with about his opinions,” she said. “What we’re talking about are issues of fact.” According to Levin, the main misstep in Carter’s book is the author’s description of UN Resolution 242. “He changes it,” Levin said. “It’s a bedrock fact and from [his erroneous description of it] other of his assertions flow that are distorted.”

I think that there is usually much to argue with Carter about his opinions. But unfortunately the PW article makes it unclear exactly what Carter allegedly erred in describing with regard to UN Resolution 242. Joseph Puder over at Chron Watch does a better job of clarifying the matter:

Carter’s deep and irrational bias against Israel is illuminated by his charges that the Palestinians-Arabs have always been ready to settle for a two-state solution and that U.N. Resolution 242 called upon Israel to return to the 1949 ceasefire lines. Israel in fact...called for the implementation of Resolution 242 in 1967. [They were] rejected by the Arab states then, and Arafat rejected the far-reaching concessions Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered at Camp David II in July 2000. In each case the Arabs and Palestinians responded with terrorism.

As to why anyone cares what Jimmy Carter thinks, I'll never know. Confessing this on my blog might earn me a midnight visit from the Secret Service, but sometimes I wish that in 1969 that UFO had beamed him up (for good), or that ten years later that killer rabbit had managed to swim just a little faster...