Jimmy Carter defends Obama over missing Paris rally

written by Jon Ward

Former President Jimmy Carter on Monday defended President Barack Obama’s absence from a massive antiterrorism rally Sunday in Paris, and said the French government could not have prevented the attack on a satirical newspaper by two gunmen last week.


“President Obama’s just come back from vacation, and I know how it is when you’ve been gone for a week or two,” Carter said in an interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric.

“Your desk is piled up, and he had other pressing problems to address. So I don’t think there’s any reflection on our country or no criticism is worthy.”

Carter, who turned 90 last October, made his comments about an hour before the White House itself took a different tack and said it had erred in its response to the Paris rally.

“We here at the White House should have made a different decision,” press secretary Josh Earnest said at a press briefing.

“I think it’s fair to say that we should have sent someone with a higher profile,” Earnest said, adding that “the president himself would’ve liked to have been there” but that the last-minute nature of the rally made logistics and security all but impossible.

Nonetheless, Carter said the U.S. government has expressed sufficient support for the French “to eliminate this threat in the future.”

But Carter did not believe the French could have prevented the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday, when it’s believed that two French-born brothers of Algerian descent, Cherif and Said Kouachi, shot and killed 12 people in the newspaper’s offices and wounded another 11 people.

“We didn’t do anything to prevent the 9/11 attacks on our country, not because we were a bad country but just because it was unanticipated,” Carter said. “I think the same thing happened to the French. I don’t think they deserve any condemnation or criticism. I think they did an excellent job in finding the perpetrators of this horrible crime. I’m sure they’ll be much more vigilant in the future, as we have become since 9/11.”

Carter said he believes similar attacks will also be hard to stop, and said the war in Syria has become a new training ground for another generation of terrorists.

“I don’t think we’ll ever be able totally to eradicate the problem,” he said, though he also pointed out that security and prevention measures will be “much more effective” in the future.

“I hope in the future, though, that we can have, you know, full employment for everybody in the country, even the young men who can be most easily seduced into this horrible commitment,” he said.

The former president was in New York to attend a ceremony marking the opening of a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History focused on the fight against guinea worm disease in Africa and Asia. His foundation, the Carter Center, has worked to eradicate the painful disease since 1986.

Carter said that when his center first studied the problem nearly 30 years ago, it found 3.5 million cases in 23,600 villages.

“We’ve been to all those villages,” he said of his foundation, “and last year we only had 126 cases.

“We’re on the verge of eliminating this disease or eradicating it so it will never be known again,” he said.

In comments that are sure to draw criticism, Carter slammed new U.S. sanctions against North Korea, announced by Obama this month in response to the hacking attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

“We’ve been destroying the economy of North Korea for 64 years. We’ve done everything we could to prevent their having a healthy economy,” Carter said. “And I’ve been there several times, out into the rural areas where people live, and see horrible starvation because we refuse to give them any food assistance, even our surplus food.

“But if you concentrate the sanctions just on the top leaders in the country who do these bad things, and don’t make it permeate the entire country … with starvation for people who are innocent, then I think that’s perfectly all right,” he said.

And Carter said he was “delighted” by Obama’s decision to normalize relations with the communist island nation of Cuba.

“President Obama has done a very courageous and wise thing,” he said. “I hope they’ll soon lift the embargo against the Cuban people, which [doesn’t] hurt the Castro brothers, but it hurts the average person who lives in Cuba.”

Carter said Obama’s decision to allow travel from the United States to Cuba will create “much better progress made in Cuba as we permeate Cuba with people from America who [demonstrate] what democracy is.

“I think it’s the best way to bring about improvements in Cuba,” he said.

Watch complete interview below: