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Thanks for the freepmail. I added it here.

Carter's Dirty Money by Alan Dershowitz 7 February 2007 NaomiRagen.com

Friends,

Alan Dershowitz, who worked for Carter's presidential
campaign, tells all about how the ex-President has sold his
soul and his integrity, disgracefully accepting money from a
Saudi foundation that has described Jews as "the enemies of
all nations" and the Holocaust as "a fable." I guess he
realized he could make more for selling his integrity than
his peanuts. The amounts he received were certainly not
peanuts. For shame.
Naomi

What is going on in the world

By Alan Dershowitz

I have known Jimmy Carter for more than thirty years. I
first met him in the spring of 1976 when, as a relatively
unknown candidate for president, he sent me a handwritten
letter asking for my help in his campaign on issues of crime
and justice. I had just published an article in The New York
Times Magazine on sentencing reform, and he expressed
interest in my ideas and asked me to come up with additional
ones for his campaign. Shortly thereafter, my former student
Stuart Eisenstadt, brought Carter to Harvard to meet with
some faculty members, me among them. I immediately liked
Jimmy Carter and saw him as a man of integrity and
principle. I signed on to his campaign and worked very hard
for his election. When Newsweek magazine asked his campaign
for the names of people on whom Carter relied for advice, my
name was among those given out. I continued to work for
Carter over the years, most recently I met him in Jerusalem
a year ago, and we briefly discussed the Mid-East. Though I
disagreed with some of his points, I continued to believe
that he was making them out of a deep commitment to
principle and to human rights.

Recent disclosures of Carter's extensive financial
connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi
Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I
was first told that he received a monetary reward in the
name of Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the
money, even after Harvard returned money from the same
source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not
believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity
enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And
let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation
is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in
helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than
$2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School
received from this source. Initially I was reluctant to put
pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity
School, but then a student at the Divinity School-Rachael
Lea Fish-showed me the facts
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=348172>. They
were staggering. I was amazed that in the twenty-first
century there were still foundations that espoused these
views. The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up-a
think-tank funded by the Shiekh and run by his son- hosted
speakers <
http://www.adl.org/Anti_semitism/zayed_center.asp> who
called Jews "the enemies of all nations," attributed the
assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad and
the 9/11 attacks to the United States' own military, and
stated that the Holocaust was a "fable." (They also hosted a
speech by Jimmy Carter.) To its credit, Harvard turned the
money back. To his discredit, Carter did not.

Jimmy Carter was, of course, aware of Harvard's decision,
since it was highly publicized. Yet he kept the money.
Indeed, this is what he said in accepting the funds: "This
award has special significance for me because it is named
for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan."
Carter's personal friend, it turns out, was an unredeemable
anti-Semite and all-around bigot.

In reading Carter's statements, I was reminded of the bad
old Harvard of the nineteen thirties, which continued to
honor Nazi academics after the anti-Semitic policies of
Hitler's government became clear. Harvard of the nineteen
thirties was complicit in evil. I sadly concluded that Jimmy
Carter of the twenty-first century has become complicit in
evil.

The extent of Carter's financial support from, and even
dependence on, dirty money is still not fully known. What we
do know is deeply troubling. Carter and his Center have
accepted millions of dollars from suspect sources, beginning
with the bail-out of the Carter family peanut business in
the late 1970s by BCCI, a now-defunct and virulently
anti-Israeli bank indirectly controlled by the Saudi Royal
family, and among whose principal investors is Carter's
friend, Sheikh Zayed. Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the
bank, gave Carter "$500,000 to help the former president
establish his center...[and] more than $10 million to Mr.
Carter's different projects." Carter gladly accepted the
money, though Abedi had called his bank-ostensibly the
source of his funding-"the best way to fight the evil
influence of the Zionists." BCCI isn't the only source:
Saudi King Fahd contributed millions to the Carter Center-
"in 1993 alone...$7.6 million" as have other members of the
Saudi Royal Family. Carter also received a million dollar
pledge from the Saudi-based bin Laden family, as well as a
personal $500,000 environmental award named for Sheikh
Zayed, and paid for by the Prime Minister of the United Arab
Emirates.

It's worth noting that, despite the influx of Saudi money
funding the Carter Center, and despite the Saudi Arabian
government's myriad human rights abuses, the Carter Center's
Human Rights program has no activity whatever in Saudi
Arabia. The Saudis have apparently bought his silence for a
steep price. The bought quality of the Center's activities
becomes even more clear, however, when reviewing the
Center's human rights activities in other countries:
essentially no human rights activities in China or in North
Korea, or in Iran, Iraq, the Sudan, or Syria, but activity
regarding Israel and its alleged abuses, according to the
Center's website

The Carter Center's mission statement claims that "The
Center is nonpartisan and acts as a neutral party in dispute
resolution activities." How can that be, given that its
coffers are full of Arab money, and that its focus is away
from significant Arab abuses and on Israel's far less
serious ones?

No reasonable person can dispute therefore that Jimmy Carter
has been and remains dependent on Arab oil money,
particularly from Saudi Arabia. Does this mean that Carter
has necessarily been influenced in his thinking about the
Middle East by receipt of such enormous amounts of money?
Ask Carter. The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish
influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It
is Carter-not me-who has made the point that if politicians
receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to
decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It
is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished
reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because
they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter's own
standards, it would be almost economically "suicidal" for
Carter "to espouse a balanced position between Israel and
Palestine."

By Carter's own standards, therefore, his views on the
Middle East must be discounted. It is certainly possible
that he now believes them. Money, particularly large amounts
of money, has a way of persuading people to a particular
position. It would not surprise me if Carter, having
received so much Arab money, is now honestly committed to
their cause. But his failure to disclose the extent of his
financial dependence on Arab money, and the absence of any
self reflection on whether the receipt of this money has
unduly influenced his views, is a form of deception
bordering on corruption.

I have met cigarette lobbyists, who are supported by the
cigarette industry, and who have come to believe honestly
that cigarettes are merely a safe form of adult recreation,
that cigarettes are not addicting and that the cigarette
industry is really trying to persuade children not to smoke.
These people are fooling themselves (or fooling us into
believing that they are fooling themselves) just as Jimmy
Carter is fooling himself (or persuading us to believe that
he is fooling himself).

If money determines political and public views-as Carter
insists "Jewish money" does-then Carter's views on the
Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the
vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the
piper calls the tune, then Carter's off-key tunes have been
called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say
this, but I now believe that there is no person in American
public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent
integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his
integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it
now turns out, is extraordinarily low. He is no better than
so many former American politicians who, after leaving
public life, sell themselves to the highest bidder and
become lobbyists for despicable causes. That is now Jimmy
Carter's sad legacy.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His most
recent book is Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways
(Norton, 2006)