Anti-Defamation League on Jimmy Carter's Paris Comments: 'Continues to Show His Bias Against Jews and Israel

The Anti-Defamation League slammed former President Jimmy Carter after his comments suggesting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict helped provoke last week's terror attacks in Paris.

AP Photo/Ric Feld

"Well, one of the origins for it is the Palestinian problem," Carter said Monday on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." "And this aggravates people who are affiliated in any way with the Arab people who live in the West Bank and Gaza, what they are doing now — what’s being done to them."

Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman on Wednesday said Carter "continues to show his bias against Jews and Israel."

"His on-air remarks were highly insensitive to the victims and their families, and his downplaying of the role of radical extremist Islamic ideology in the attack, and suggestion that other external factors were to blame, is divorced from the realities of the anti-Semitic and fanatical anti-Western beliefs of the perpetrators of the attacks in France," Foxman said in a statement. "At a time when Christians are being targeted for violence by extremists in Arab countries throughout the Middle East and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have lost their lives in Syria, President Carter used his appearance on 'The Daily Show' to once again express his ossified perspective on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians."

Host Jon Stewart had asked Carter whether he thought there were any other motivations for what happened in Paris besides religion. After Carter answered about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he also said Paris should wake people up to the "new evolutionary development in terrorism" where European or American citizens travel to Syria or elsewhere and receive militant training.

"While we agree with President Carter’s concluding analysis that the Paris attacks are a wakeup call in the fight against a ‘new evolutionary development in terrorism,’ ignoring the true root causes of these attacks by focusing on unrelated factors will ultimately prove counterproductive in international efforts to combat growing anti-Western and anti-Semitic extremism and terrorism," Foxman said.