ISRAEL REAPS WHAT JIMMY CARTER SOWED: He did nothing to prevent this same regime from gaining power in Iran in 1979.

The war launched by Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel has roots that go back centuries, but a more recent critical node in the story is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when militant Islam achieved state power in the ancient Persian land. Then, the world watched as a longtime American ally — the shah of Iran and the Pahlavi dynasty — was ousted from power with the tacit acceptance of the Carter administration, which had been critical of the shah (and other American allies) for “human rights” violations. The revolutionary regime backed “students” who seized the U.S. embassy and 52 American hostages for 444 humiliating days, while President Jimmy Carter belatedly responded with a deeply flawed rescue mission that ended in disaster and further humiliation for the United States. Since then, the Islamic regime that has governed Iran, as Michael Ledeen noted in 2008, has been at war with Israel and the United States. Today, Israelis (and Americans in Israel) are reaping what Jimmy Carter sowed.

As Jay Nordlinger wrote in his 2002 piece on how awful the man was as president, “Carterpalooza,” “No one quite realizes just how passionately anti-Israel Carter is. William Safire has reported that Cyrus Vance acknowledged that, if he had had a second term, Carter would have sold Israel down the river. In the 1990s, Carter became quite close to Yasser Arafat…In The Unfinished Presidency, [Douglas] Brinkley writes, ‘There was no world leader Jimmy Carter was more eager to know than Yasir Arafat.’ The former president ‘felt certain affinities with the Palestinian: a tendency toward hyperactivity and a workaholic disposition with unremitting sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, decade after decade.’ Neat, huh?”