Jimmy Carter said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is contributing to the recent wave of terrorism in France. Photo: Mark Turner via Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Former US president Jimmy Carter blamed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as fueling Muslim terrorist attacks and contributing to the recent wave of terrorism in France.

During an appearance on Comedy Central‘s The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart asked Carter what he thought were the factors behind the recent attacks in Paris.

“Well, one of the origins for it is the Palestinian problem,” Carter said. “And this aggravates people who are affiliated in any way with the Arab people who live in the West Bank and Gaza, what they are doing now—what’s being done to them. So I think that’s part of it.”

Carter, who accused Israel of becoming an “apartheid state” in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and has met with leaders of the Hamas terrorist group, did not elaborate on how the “Palestinian problem” caused the recent attacks in France nor how solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue would resolve the violent conflicts currently plaguing the Arab world.

The former president went on to say that the world is witnessing “a new evolutionary development in terrorism.”

“I think this is a new evolutionary development in terrorism, where people go into Syria, they get trained there, they have a passport from France, from Great Britain or from the United States,” Carter said. “They stay there for a few months and learn how to be a terrorist and then they come back through Turkey and you know they have been there and you know who they are. And I think this event in Paris is going to waken up the people in charge of security to watch those people more closely than they have in the past—and not single out all of the Muslims in the country.”