Teach Your Children Well, Part II

Four weeks ago, you may recall, His Majesty visited KA and offered us a crash course in Middle Eastern Diplomacy. Just after that enlightening visit, a student of mine, energetic and insightful Jadallah, said to me, “You know Jimmy Carter’s family is like some of our best friends. My dad is really like best friends with his son Chip Carter—do you want him to come to class?”

So yesterday Chip Carter visited KA, and riveted the student body with tales of work he has done with the Carter Center, his thoughts on U.S. presidential candidates, musings on life as a famous kid, and his passion for solving the stalemate over Palestine. Just like when His Majesty came and spoke, the students truly engaged with the speaker, and both men clearly relished the chance to talk with our young people.

And for those who know me, what a great chance for me to pick someone’s brain and ask him all kinds of questions, ranging from what fun things one does in the White House, to invasive press coverage, from what it is like to have your dad win the Nobel Peace Prize to discussions about Chip’s work with the fairly recent elections in Liberia and his upcoming work with Barack Obama.

What a nice guy.

He has spent the last month staying with Jadallah’s family in Amman, and yesterday he joined us for lunch at school and talking with him could not have been easier. He went up to faculty members and just introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Chip, how is everything here going?” and then you find yourself talking about BBQ in Atlanta, or how nice Diane Sawyer is, or how his dad Jimmy went from being a farmer to Governor. I shared with him my memories of his father’s election and inauguration (although in the back of my mind I can hear my father saying, “I still haven’t met anyone who voted for Jimmy Carter,” to which I always replied: “That’s because you don’t talk with Democrats!”).

Chip is a shaggy-haired guy with an earring (“I put this earring with the peace sign on when George Bush got re-elected, John,” he told me.), a winning smile and a weather-beaten face. Jadallah introduced him to the school as “a friend who has been to all 50 U.S. states at least three times and 92 countries around the world.”

His message is common sense, but he articulated it well to our students: “If we can simply learn to be just, can extend human rights, we will have a better world.” But it was not just platitude talk—it was plain talk about what the Carter Center headquartered in Atlanta does: “we wage peace in the world, especially trying to eradicate health risks.” He made even disease talk sound cool and thrilling as he explained about this certain guinea worm disease had plagued 24 countries, and through their diligence and work, had reduced that to 2 countries.

But it was his passion about the Palestinian cause that especially moved the audience.
“My father wrote a book this last year about the Palestinian cause and the intolerance he has observed toward Palestinians. It’s not just about land, but also about a loss of jobs, and that loss of money means a loss of self-respect for the Palestinians. To many of us around the world, in fact the majority of the world, people equate the plight of the Palestinians with that of the Jews after WWII—without national or individual rights, forced from their homeland, and still suffering from the oppression of a military power after more than a generation,” Carter noted. “They have been denied the right to self-determination. At least 12,000 Palestinians a year are induced, or forced, to leave their ancestral homes and move east, either into Jordan or to join the many wandering refugees in other countries,” he continued.

As I have been learning this autumn, time and again, the cycle of distrust and violence roils, and efforts for peace are frustrated.

Later, I went back to Chip’s father’s 2007 book, Peace Not Apartheid, and here are two choice quotations I have been mulling over:

“There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East: (1) Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Arab land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and (2) Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories. In turn, Israel responds with retribution and oppression, and militant Palestinians refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel and vow to destroy the nation.”


"The only rational response is to revitalize the moribund peace process. Here are the key elements to the “roadmap”: (1) the security of Israel must be guaranteed (b) the internal debate within Israel must be resolved in order to define Israel’s permanent legal boundary, going back to the internationally approved UN Resolution 242, which Israel has time and again confirmed abstractly in international meetings, but has never agreed to a time table for reality and (c) the sovereignty of all Middle Eastern nations and sanctity of international borders must be honored."


Chip made impassioned points that it is time for a new leader in the United States to have the courage to do what President Reagan did in Berlin in the 1980s, to stand before the Berlin Wall and implore, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Carter explained that in the Palestinian areas there are walls just like the Berlin Wall, and a President must be audacious enough to demand that the wall around these nouveau-concentration camps come down.

The students rewarded him with a huge round of applause, and Chip reminded them that as future leaders of the world, they must spend their political capital on “those who don’t have as much as you.”

Clearly smitten with Chip’s charisma, one student asked, “Why don’t you run for President?” Chip’s face beamed with a devilish grin: “Oh, I have done too many bad things and fun things ever to be elected!” But he then explained how he would spend the month of January, 2008 working on the Barack Obama campaign (“this is the man for our time,” said Chip) before coming back to Jordan in February.

Aferwards Chip visited my class, and there were a handful of students who had a free period who wanted to come and hear him talk more.

Hmmm…on the last day of school before our winter break, in the last class before freedom, some students eagerly wanted to come and listen to someone talk about politics???

We are making progress…