Various writers have been drawing attention to the Arab — and particularly, Saudi — connections to Jimmy Carter and James Baker III. Rachel Ehrenfeld sets out Jimmy Carter’s links here, while on FrontPageMag.com Jacob Laskin wites:
Especially lucrative have been Carter’s ties to Saudi Arabia. Before his death in 2005, King Fahd was a longtime contributor to the Carter Center and on more than one occasion contributed million-dollar donations. In 1993 alone, the king presented Carter with a gift of $7.6 million. And the king was not the only Saudi royal to commit funds to Carter’s cause. As of 2005, the king’s high-living nephew, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, has donated at least $5 million to the Carter Center.
Meanwhile the Saudi Fund for Development, the kingdom’s leading loan organization, turns up repeatedly on the center’s list of supporters. Carter has also found moneyed allies in the Bin Laden family, and in 2000 he secured a promise from ten of Osama bin Laden’s brothers for a $1 million contribution to his center. To be sure, there is no evidence that the Bin Ladens maintain any contact with their terrorist relation. But applying Carter’s own standard, his extensive contacts with the Saudi elite must make his views on the Middle East suspect.
Meanwhile at The American Thinker, Ed Lasky reports on Baker’s Saudi contacts.
Baker became involved in the legendary Washington, D.C. based Carlyle Group: an investment group heavily-funded by Saudi Arabian investors. Not only is he the senior counselor of the Carlyle Group; he also has an estimated $180 million dollar stake in the firm.
His interests are clearly aligned with those of the Saudis. He established the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. No information is listed on the Institute’s website about major donors, but the Institute’s impressive building bespeaks lavish funding. The Saudis are known to favor think tanks established by former government officials with generous support, possibly because they may prove useful to them in the future, or to reward them for past service to the Kingdom, and offer an example to others still charged with serving American national interests.
Baker’s Houston-based law firm, Baker and Botts, has offices in the Saudi capital of Riyadh and in the Persian Gulf nation of Dubai. Baker and Botts defended, among others, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia who was sued by the families of the World Trade Center victims for alleged complicity in the attacks. Baker has had quite a lucrative career after his government career.
… Baker is a Machiavellian maneuverer, an artful street fighter and one of the foremost practitioners of stealthy power plays in Washington. He constructed a façade of a supposedly neutral bi-partisan working group of ‘experts’ that would formulate policies. Behind the façade, the wizard worked his wonders. He seeded the key working groups with many members who had long histories of anti-Israel activism, have records of making statements that in some cases border on anti-Semitism, and are beneficiaries of Arab oil money.
With such connections making them the kept creatures of the Arab world, it is therefore no surprise that they are intent on smoothing the path to Israel’s destruction. What is startling, however, and unforgiveable, is that with few exceptions the media has not drawn attention to this information which wholly negates their claim to be taken seriously on these matters, and instead has presented them as dispassionate and well-intentioned observers.
Can you imagine what the media response would have been if the ISG or a former US President who made recommendations about the Middle East had spent years trousering cash from Jewish or Israeli interests? Quite.
