President Carter yesterday went to Geneva and, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post, said President Bush’s support for Israel is contributing to terrorism.”Bush’s inordinate support for Israel allows the Palestinians to suffer,” Mr. Carter said, according to the Jerusalem Post report. “This is a source of anti-American sentiment in the world and encourages terror.”

Compare that to how President Bush’s undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, handled the issue last month at the Council on Foreign Relations when asked about the impact on terrorism of America’s support for Israel.”Don’t know how to measure it, but it’s clearly an element,” Mr. Feith responded. “There are a lot of people who are focused on that conflict and don’t like our policy. But I think that the terrorist phenomenon is considerably bigger and more complex than just the Arab/Israeli conflict. And I think that a large part of what is going on in the world that underlies, that motivates terrorism is really a clash within the world of Islam between people of a particularly extremist view and school and the people who oppose them. And Al Qaeda’s main enemy for years, as one gathered from their public pronouncements, was not Israel or even the United States, but Saudi Arabia and the government of Saudi Arabia.”

Mr. Feith’s formulation is far better than Mr. Carter’s. The way Mr. Carter formulated it — “Bush’s inordinate support for Israel allows the Palestinians to suffer”— is particularly pernicious. It’s most patronizing of all to the Palestinian Arabs themselves, because it denies them any responsibility for their own suffering. The Palestinian suffering is the result of the Palestinians’ own refusal to let Israel exist in peace, of their tolerance of terrorist groups, of their corrupt leadership. You don’t hear Mr. Carter maundering on about how America’s inordinate support for the Egyptian and Saudi dictatorships allows the Egyptians and Saudis to suffer and prompts anti-American sentiment. The anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment, such as it is, is largely fostered by the Egyptian and Saudi regimes as a way of allowing popular anger to be channeled away from them.

Mr. Carter’s remarks throw the virtues of the Bush administration into sharp relief. Mr. Carter thinks the problem in the Middle East is that America has been too supportive of Israel, the sole beacon of freedom and democracy in the region. Mr. Bush’s position has been that we should do more to create other free and democratic nations in the region. Mr. Carter told Time magazine this week that the Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean had met with him in Georgia and called him occasionally. If Mr. Carter’s outlook infects the Dean campaign, it is hard to imagine that the result will be anything but adverse for the Democrats at the polls.