Kenneth W. Stein on Jimmy Carter's New Book

Is it me, or does Kenneth W. Stein, "an Emory University professor who also directs the university’s Middle East Research Program and the Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel", take the poodle for Palestine and his new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" on with a vengeance:

A promient Middle East scholar, Dr. Kenneth W. Stein, announced his resignation as a fellow of Emory University’s Carter Center, in response to former President Jimmy Carter’s new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Stein, an Emory University professor who also directs the university’s Middle East Research Program and the Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel, characterized Carter’s book as “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments” in an email that announced his resignation yesterday.

He explained: “My continued association with the Center leaves the impression that I am sanctioning a series of egregious errors and polemical conclusions which appeared in President Carter’s book. I can not allow that impression to stand.”

[the paragraph below is a portion of the email from Professor Stein announcing his resignation - .ed

]Any material which he used from the book we did together in 1984, The Blood of Abraham, he used unilaterally. President Carter’s book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook. Having little access to Arabic and Hebrew sources, I believe, clearly handicapped his understanding and analyses of how history has unfolded over the last decade. Falsehoods, if repeated often enough become meta-truths, and they then can become the erroneous baseline for shaping and reinforcing attitudes and for policy-making. The history and interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is already drowning in half-truths, suppositions, and self-serving myths; more are not necessary

This is far more serious for the ex Failure-in-Chief. Stein wrote a book with Carter, was at one point, strongly affiliated with the Carter Center. His contentions are not only with the thesis of Carter's book, but with his scholarship and even his integrity. Ouch.