Carter Center fellow resigns over book

A longtime aide to former President Carter has resigned from the Carter Center think tank, calling the former president’s new book on Israel and the Arabs one-sided and filled with errors.

Kenneth Stein, the Carter Center’s first executive director and founder of its Middle East program, sent a letter to Carter and others bluntly criticizing the book.

Stein wrote that the book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” was replete with factual errors, material copied from other sources and “simply invented segments,” according to an excerpt of the letter published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Deanna Congileo, Carter’s spokeswoman, said the former president stands by the book.

Carter issued a brief statement saying that Stein had not been actively involved with the center for more than 12 years and was not involved with the new book.

Carter did not directly address the allegations made by Stein, who is director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel at Emory University.

It is not the first time Carter and Stein have disagreed over Middle East policy, said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Tulane University and author of the 1998 Carter biography “The Unfinished Presidency.”

“They’ve never been on the same page in the Middle East,” Brinkley said.

He said he had read Carter’s book but would not address Stein’s accusations.