No, that’s nonsense.
When you start throwing around the word “bigot” you know exactly what you are doing: trying to squelch criticism of Israel via implicit accusations of anti-Semitism.
Seeing things that don’t exist is generally not a good habit to be in.
Well, I going to go ahead and make the wild and crazy assumption that I know why I do stuff better than you know why I do stuff. 
BTW, you may consider in this respect my earlier post in this very thread where I state exactly why I do not think even excessive and prejudiced criticism of Israel is of necessity anti-Semitic, contradicting someone who though excessive criticism must of necessity be based in anti-Semitism… assuming, of course, that little things like “evidence” make any difference to you. 
It is objective fact that Carter has written statements, in the book you mentioned, which he knew to be false. It is objective fact that Carter has written statements that, with the basest amount of due diligence or a pinch of common sense, he would have known were false. Now, you know all of this, because you’ve been educated about it, at least once. Hell, even Tom agreed with much of what I said but quibbled about a minor but, and I showed him why he was wrong on that point, too. If you support Carter’s claims as factual, then you do so in the teeth of having had every chance to change you mind with actual facts which gainsay his claims.
Is someone who will lie and will deliberately ignore basic fact checking in order to demonize one group as and one paint another group as pretty much ceaselessly good, someone who is “obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance”
The answer, of course, is yes.
Your desire to claim that correctly pointing out that someone is an anti-Israel bigot somehow means that he’s being called an anti-Semite is ludicrous. Despite the use that the “You can’t criticize Israel without being called an anti-Semite!” meme has for some folks who don’t have actual arguments, it’s actually absurdly weak if you try to substitute it for an actual argument in an actual debate. Especially when you’re reduced to the equivalent of claiming “There, see, see! You didn’t call him an anti-Semite! That just goes to prove how you’re calling him an anti-Semite!”
I’m looking at your source which seems to just be a rabid win at all costs agenda group for Pro-Israel positions.
http://dailyfreepress.com/2010/03/04/letter-chomsky-manipulated-facts/
Claiming that Chomsky would ever say terrorism is justified is absurd. Putting things in context to give people a more accurate picture of the grievances on either side is not distorting the facts. The line taken by CAMERA here is Orwellian where only by distorting facts in favor of Israel’s image is considered “fair and balanced”, presenting actual numbers and conditions is “distorting”. Only relying entirely in non-quantified abstracts with as little detail as possible is considered by them “balanced”.
Here’s what looks to be a fair reporting of the group’s M.O.
"In an April 2008 article, the pro-Palestinian online publication[66][67] Electronic Intifada revealed the existence of a Google group set up by CAMERA.[68] The stated purpose of the group was “help[ing] us keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors”.[69] Electronic Intifada accused CAMERA of “orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged”.[70] Andre Oboler, a Legacy Heritage Fellow at the Israeli non-governmental organization NGO Monitor, responded that “Electronic Intifada is manufacturing a story.”[71]
Excerpts of some of the e-mails were published in the July 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine under the title of ″Candid camera″.[72] In April 2008, CAMERA’s “Senior Research Analyst” Gilead Ini would not confirm that the messages were genuine but maintained that there was a CAMERA email campaign which adhered to Wikipedia’s rules.[73] In August 2008, Ini argued the excerpts published in Harper’s Magazine were unrepresentative and that CAMERA had campaigned “toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy”.[74]
A group of Wikipedia administrators strongly believed an editor on Wikipedia to be Gilead Ini and blocked that user account indefinitely.[71][75] In April 2008 Gilead refused to say whether he was behind the Gni account,[73] and in May 2008 he denied that the account belonged to him.[71] Andre Oboler alleged that groups such as “Wikipedians for Palestine” have engaged in similar practices.[71] Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah insisted that his group would never encourage a similar e-mail campaign.[69]
Commenting on the incident, Gershom Gorenberg, of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, stated “CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media. And like others engaged in the narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy.” Gorenberg criticized CAMERA for telling members not to share information about the campaign with media, and he also argued Ini’s definition of accuracy “only means not printing anything embarrassing to his own side”.[45] David Shamah, of The Jerusalem Post, stated that “the vast anti-Israel lobby that haters of our country have managed to pull together” hate it when groups like CAMERA mess up “their anti-Israel propaganda with (gasp!) facts”.[76]
Five editors involved in the campaign were sanctioned by Wikipedia administrators, who wrote that Wikipedia’s open nature “is fundamentally incompatible with the creation of a private group to surreptitiously coordinate editing”.[77][78]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Accuracy_in_Middle_East_Reporting_in_America
Come up with something that isn’t the equivalent of Fox News for your sourcing and maybe I’ll listen to your cites about Carter.
I know nothing about CAMERA. But Carter’s Book is riddled with factual errors, some very basic ones, that anyone who is familiar with the history of the region would know (and some that are only known to participants in the various negotiations). Those participants have, in some cases, directly contradicted Carter’s accounts of meetings he was personally involved in and at which they were present.
To give a very basic one, it would (or should) be surprising if a guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize would get wrong who attacked who in the conflict that he is credited with aiding. Yet Carter states in his book that Israel launched a preemptive strike on Jordan in '67. This is, objectively speaking, untrue (Israel attempted to keep Jordan out of the war; Jordan felt that it had to fight, because of its alliance with Egypt; Jordan attacked Israel). It is a significant error, considering that it was Jordan’s loss of the West Bank to Israel in that conflict that is the root cause of much of the conflict.
I don’t think this is in serious dispute. The problem is, when Carter is tasked with those errors, his response is to simply state he had the book fact-checked and that his critics are missing his point; also, that outside of America, his book is recognized as a necessary voice. The problem is that in each and every case, his factual errors make Israel look more aggressive or otherwise in a bad light.
Whether Carter has his heart in the right place is a matter of opinion. Unfortunately, his facts are not reliable and true to history.
I haven’t found a source just now that I’m 100% happy with as an authority on this but the gist I get is that it’s at least taken seriously that the 67’ war was started by Israel attacking Egypt in a preemtive strike and that attack forced Jordan’s hand due to their treaties with Egypt at the time. (obviously there are events leading up to this)
If Carter’s book misstates the case making it sound more like the attack was against Jordan directly it just sounds like quibbling over semantics. Israel would have been well aware of these treaties and understood that by attacking one they were attacking the other. Hardly evidence of a systematic pattern of misrepresenting facts to put Israel in a bad light.
Maybe you have something better than this?
While I think all Dopers agree that factual errors are bad things and should be avoided, I wonder if it’s a bit exaggerated to describe Carter’s book as “riddled with” them.
The CAMERA webpage that FinnAgain links to in his linked post claims to list “A Comprehensive Collection of Jimmy Carter’s Errors”, which sounds as though they tried to be as thorough as they could about finding all the flaws—and certainly CAMERA would not be inclined to cut Carter any slack on such an issue.
Well, considering claims cited from the book and excluding the few that were attributed only to personal media appearances, I count only 23 claims that CAMERA calls “errors”.
Of course, any error is one too many, but even if all of those are objectively and provably false, 23 errors in a 288-page book doesn’t seem to me all that “riddled”. And I think “objectively and provably false” may be stretching it a bit in some cases. For instance:
Well, the statements by Carter that the CAMERA site objected to, which I’m presuming are what you mean, were the following:
While I see what you’re getting at about the specific details of various countries’ involvement in the 1967 war, the objections to these statements seem to me more about condensed overgeneralization and disputed interpretation than about “objective untruth”. Here, for example, is the Economist’s “History in brief” summary of the same events:
It is certainly not universally agreed, but it is certainly not generally considered “objectively untrue”, that Israel’s actions in the Six Day War did involve pre-emptive strikes. I agree that saying “Israel defeated Egypt and other countries after launching pre-emptive strikes” is not exactly the same as saying “Israel launched pre-emptive strikes separately against each one of these countries and defeated them”. But it doesn’t seem clear to me that Carter’s phrasing is insisting on the latter interpretation rather than just being a clumsy way of saying “Israel launched pre-emptive strikes and fought such-and-such countries in this sequence”.
It’s very true that differences in phrasing can produce differences in interpretation, and I don’t defend anybody’s being careless with the facts. But twenty-three detail criticisms of this sort in a 288-page book are not what I think of when I hear a book sweepingly described as “riddled with errors” and “not reliable and true to history”.
But, interestingly enough, not the actual information.
Funny, that. You do engage in some Ad Hominem by arguing that their factual claims are incorrect because… they tried to make factual corrections to Wikipedia. Shocking!
As you’re the fellow who’s been arguing that we have to disprove anti-Semitic stereotypes and you’ll continue to believe them until forced to do otherwise? Let’s just say I’m not exactly chomping at the bit in the race to cater to your cite requests.
Of course, the fact that you couldn’t actually address the factual accuracy of a single point I cited leads me to believe that you can’t. So, there’s that.
Huh? Who attacked who is hardly a “quibble” when dealing with matters of peace and war.
In any event, the book is rife with errors. Some are understandable, some are not - but the cumulative effect is that, in each case, they make Israel look worse, more intractable, and less willing to make peace.
To give but one further example - Carter insists that Assad (you know, the father of the current guy busy murdering his own population in Syria) was perfectly willing to make a deal on the Golan Heights - the main stumbling block for peace with Syria - but the Israelis were not. The guy who was present at the meeting with him, who took the notes for Carter, remembers it differently:
In the book itself, perhaps the oddest bit (to me anyway) was the part where Carter lectures Golda Meir about the fact that Israel has always been punished when it turned away from God, and wasn’t Meir (leader of the secular Labour party) worried about that? That’s just strange.
Well, you chose a fairly minor one which hinged on (albeit basic) syntax, but many of the errors are foundational. For example:
“Page 57: The 1949 armistice demarcation lines became the borders of the new nation of Israel and were accepted by Israel and the United States, and recognized officially by the United Nations.”
*In point of fact, the agreement Israel signed specifically and explicitly said that they were not borders and would not prejudice future negotiations as to what the borders should be. If Carter can’t even get something as simple as that correct, when he damned well should know better, yes, it does show that his narrative is “not reliable and true to history”. And it is, indeed, riddled with errors. I’ll elaborate on a few more. *
**
“Page 71: Israel has relinquished its control over … almost all of Lebanon …
Page 98: [A number of events influenced] Israel’s decision in May 2000 to withdraw almost completely from Lebanon after eighteen years of occupation, retaining its presence only in Shebaa Farms.” **
*Even the UN has certified that Israel 100% withdrew and Shabaa Farms is not part of Lebanon. Syria and Lebanon had both certified that it wasn’t Lebanese before Israel captured it. After, Syria used it as a wedge issue. Carter is either lying or too misinformed to opine on the topic of occupied territory. That is to say “not reliable and true to history”.
*
“Page 190: The governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert have built the fence and wall entirely within Palestinian territory, intruding deeply into the West Bank to encompass Israeli settlement blocs and large areas of other Palestinian land.”
*Again, this is simply fictional. Carter is either lying or so casual with the facts that he just made something up because it sounded good. He is “not reliable and true to history”. *
Since these errors, and many others, are what Carter builds his case upon, it is perfectly accurate to say that his book is riddled with errors and that he is not a reliable narrator and that his claims are false-to-facts when it comes to both history and current events. And all of his errors, without exception, serve to distort reality in order to demonize Israel and/or exonerate its enemies. All. Given that’s the case, it’s pretty much impossible to conclude anything other than that he’s a liar/senile/incredibly intellectually lazy, but all of the possibilities amount to the conclusion that he is “obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.” And the he “Regards or treats [Israel] with hatred and/or intolerance.”
I disagree. I’m thinking specifically of the one I read which (going by memory here) stated that Israel launched a preemptive strikes on Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The only way of reading that sentence was that Israel made preemptive strikes on all its neighbours, including Jordan - which is not the case.
Normally, this level of error would be no big deal, as normally we are not dealing with a book that is attempting to set the record straight on the human problems that were largely caused by the defeat of that very country in that particular war.
See, the problem is that each and every time Carter is sloppy with the facts its effect is to make Israel look worse - more aggressive, less willing to make peace.
Certainly one can quibble with each error. So Carter mislabelled some of the maps he uses? Big deal, can happen to anyone. So Carter accidentally gives the impression Israel preemptively attacked Jordan? It’s perhaps not the most felicious phrasing, but the book is giving a summary. So Carter misremembers a diplomatic conference with Assad? Well, memory is not perfect … and so and on.
Well, I didn’t choose it: I was responding to Malthus’s choice of it. Malthus, apparently, does not agree with you that the disputed claim in question was “fairly minor”, but rather considers it “very basic” and “significant”. Opinions can vary, of course.
Just checking: are we still talking about those twenty-three items in CAMERA’s “Comprehensive Collection” that you linked to? One of which you’ve now described as “fairly minor”?
Hmm.
Indeed. I mentioned that one because it stood out to me as a howler. Opinions vary of course, but it seems to me that if one is writing a book about the human disasters of the West Bank, one should get right who attacked whom.
Isn’t that exactly the cite I was talking about in my post that you just responded to?
Oh, I certainly wouldn’t deny that Carter’s book may indeed show some systematic bias of interpretation against Israel. Most books, no doubt including my own, reflect some systematic bias on the part of the author; it’s hard to avoid bias altogether in one’s views and expositions.
What I’m not persuaded of is that we should consider such bias tantamount to the book being actually “riddled” or “rife with errors” (or perhaps I just have a high riddling threshold?).
I just elaborated on three very specific errors, any one of which would indicate that Carter isn’t to be trusted as a source. That this is not an issue of “bias” but out and out factual errors. Clear factual errors. I pointed out that, given his errors, the only three possibilities are that he’s a liar and deliberately says false things, he’s senile and can’t tell the difference between false things and true things, or he’s so intellectually lazy that he just doesn’t care about whether or not the things he says are true and he’s gonna say 'em anyways, by gum. You responded to that with “hmm”. On the factual issues, you’ve attempted to change the subject.
Why, exactly?
I assume so. I did not know whether those quotes were directly from the book or from the CAMERA website. My point (perhaps clumsily expressed) is that I was not referring to the CAMERA website, but from my own memory of reading the thing, albeit some years ago now.
Fair enough. To my mind, from what I have read, the errors seem pretty basic. So far I’ve only specifically cited two - “who attacked whom” and “who was willing to make peace with whom”. For a book dealing with questions of peace and war, I don’t know what errors one could make more basic.
? What do you mean, “change the subject”? I used the word “bias” in responding to Malthus, who doesn’t seem to think it was irrelevant to our conversation.
I’m sorry if my interleaved responses to you and Malthus have confused you as to who I was talking to. I thought that responding to each of you in separate posts would keep things sufficiently clear.
[ETA: Note to mods that I didn’t misquote FinnAgain’s original response in my above reply: he edited his post after I had started to answer him.]
Except many of the errors you’re talking about are more than likely in dispute as the parties negotiating did so in private and make different claims afterward. If you assume that Israel’s position on all things is always true than I’m sure Carter is Satan himself under that criteria. (Which is exactly what it looks like CAMERA would do given their approach). This sort of fact checking is absolutely fatuous. It’s the kind of thing only extremist groups do and is only believed by their captured audience.
For what it’s worth, I’d misread the specific quotations that were being quibbled over. I thought it was an issue of syntax where Carter just meant to put in that Israel preemptively attacked certain countries, and then fought with Jordan. But, no, on re-reading it’s pretty clearly that Carter was trying to claim that Israel preemptively attacked Jordan. That’s not a matter of interpretation, it’s just fictional. And yes, in a book at who attacked whom (especially in a book that paints one side as bloodthirsty warmongers), such errors become much more significant.
Of course, that also can lead to the question of just why Carter makes so many basic factual errors which he did or should have known were false. But regardless of that reason, whether he’s a liar, or he’s senile, or he simply doesn’t care whether or not what he says is true, the fact that each and every single error he makes serves to demonize Israel? That does indeed prove that on that topic he’s a bigot who is unwilling to let facts get in the way of his prejudice.