It's bad to read only opinions you agree with and have already verified. It's also bad to read and blindly accept materials which might be wrong and possibly fill your head with lies. It also takes a lot of time to research what you're reading, if you're going to do it well.

These three truisms would seem to imply one won't have time to absorb much new information, if it takes a lot of time to verify, and you don't want to be suckered.

Instead, to save time, what I tend to do is "audit" a controversial position. I don't accept it all blindly, nor do I reject it blindly because it disagrees with what I believe. I choose a few especially important-sounding contentions which I disagree with, ones which should be easy to verify, and then research them. Based on those few samples, I extrapolate the accuracy or inaccuracy of the author. And I learn something either way.

Today, I audited Jimmy Carter. Sadly, he's done quite badly so far.

Here are excerpts of important things he says in his new book, Peace Not Apartheid. There's quite a lot of material there, and most of it makes Israel look quite bad, and Palestine look comparatively good.

So, pretty much at random, I chose this contention -- which seemingly implies the alleged "generous offer" to the Palestinians, in the final days of the Clinton administration, never actually existed:

A new round of talks was held at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact is that no such offers were ever made. Barak later said, "It was plain to me that there was no chance of reaching a settlement at Taba. Therefore I said there would be no negotiations and there would be no delegation and there would be no official discussions and no documentation. Nor would Americans be present in the room. The only thing that took place at Taba were nonbinding contacts between senior Israelis and senior Palestinians." (p. 152)

Concerning the quote from Barak, it seems Barak was spinning a bit at the time, and Carter should have known this given the context of the quote, which Carter hides from his audience:

First, discussing president Bill Clinton's peacemaking efforts, Carter discounts well-established claims that Israel accepted and Arafat rejected a generous offer to create a Palestinian state. "The fact is that no final offer was ever made," Carter asserts. To prove his point, he disingenuously cites a quote of then-prime minister Ehud Barak that there were "no negotiations" but "non-binding contacts" at the later stage talks in Taba. Barak made this statement in order to cut his political losses during an election...

Regardless, Carter certainly gives the impression that no offers were made, and no notes taken. But according to even left-leaning sources like FAIR, that's simply not so:

The Taba talks are one of the most significant and least remembered events of the "peace process." .... In February 2002, Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz (2/14/02), published for the first time the text of the European Union's official notes of the Taba talks, which were confirmed in their essential points by negotiators from both sides.

So, um so much for the "no notes" angle from Carter. Yes, there were "no Americans" in the room -- but Carter misleads his audience into thinking there were no third-party observers at all, when the EU was, in fact, there. Naughty former president Carter!

And what about Carter's contention that "no offers were made"? FAIR continues:

"Anyone who reads the European Union account of the Taba talks," Ha'aretz noted in its introduction, "will find it hard to believe that only 13 months ago, Israel and the Palestinians were so close to a peace agreement." At Taba, Israel dropped its demand to control Palestine's borders and the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians, for the first time, made detailed counterproposals -- in other words, counteroffers -- showing which changes to the 1967 borders they would be willing to accept. The Israeli map that has emerged from the talks shows a fully contiguous West Bank, though with a very narrow middle and a strange gerrymandered western border to accommodate annexed settlements.

FAIR is certainly not on Israel's side, and depicts Barak as walking out unilaterally only because of "Israeli public opinion" -- with no hint of Palestinian recalcitrance. But even their account doesn't support Carter's main contentions about Taba: that no offers were made, and no documentation exists.

The view from the right is similar. Rick Richman over at The American Thinker, writes:

Carter next asserts that '[a] new round of talks was held at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton presidency.' But the talks were not in the last few days of the Clinton presidency. They began on January 20, 2001 — the day Clinton left office. And Carter's factual mistake in this regard is not inconsequential.

Richman is right: Bush was inaugurated on January 20th, 2001, and Taba took place from January 21st through 27th.

David Makovsky, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, whose 'Taba Mythchief' in the Spring 2003 issue of The National Interest remains one of the most comprehensive discussions of Taba to date, noted that the Palestinians specifically wanted Taba to begin after Clinton left office, because they thought they 'were about to reap a political windfall' — Clinton's replacement by Bush 43, the son of a Republican president (Bush 41) who had been memorably unsympathetic to Israel. The Palestinians' thinking, according to Makovsky, was that American Jews, who had supported the Democrats, would be losers in a new Bush Administration, especially given the Bush family connections to the oil industry. At Taba, the Palestinians actually withdrew from positions they had taken at Camp David and 'widened the gaps' on several fundamental issues. Carter mentions none of this.

The facts, demonstrable from many published accounts by people who, unlike Carter, were actually there (Dennis Ross at Camp David and Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami at Taba) is that Israel offered the Palestinians a contiguous state on 100% of Gaza and close to all of the West Bank (after compensatory land swaps), with a capital in East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians refused, multiple times.

This seems to match up with the EU's published notes about Taba, found here. Perhaps that explain why there was "public pressure" to end the talks, something FAIR doesn't seem to mention.

So the long and short of this is that where I've bothered to check him, Carter's account of Taba is at least hugely factually wrong -- seemingly from an alternate reality -- and, at worst, deliberately deceptive. (I don't know how anyone could seriously study Taba and not know the EU published notes about the proceedings, whose essential content was confirmed by both sides: I found this mentioned everywhere I looked!)

So at this point, I'm supposed to narrow down my options: Is Carter a mere fool -- the kind of guy who writes authoratitively about events when he can't even get the right date and adminstration? Or is he a bald-faced liar?

Only God knows for sure, but I do have trouble understanding how he could leave people with the impression there was no documentation of the negotiations Taba when it was so easy to find. That degree of negligence is hard to write off as anything short of a moral failing.

One wonders how long it will be before existing left-leaning/anti-Israeli narratives of Taba (and other things Carter writes about) will be rewritten to conform to and cite Carter's new, fictional version of events. As someone once joked about the Soviet Union: The future is certain, but it's the past which keeps changing!