Former President Jimmy Carter has been accused of plagiarizing and distorting several maps from Dennis Ross' memoir, The Missing Peace. For more on the controversy, see the blog Jewish Current Issues.

Appearing on CNN's Situation Room, the former president denied the charges:

CARTER: My maps came from an Atlas that's publicly available.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

[BRIAN] TODD: We tried to contact the firm that Carter says he got those maps from, it's called the Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem to see if they got those maps from Dennis Ross. We were unable to reach that company.

Carter also denied the charges in an interview in Newsweek:

Well, the maps are derived from an atlas that was published in 2004 in Jerusalem and it was basically produced under the aegis of officials in Sweden. And the Swedish former prime minister is the one who told me this was the best atlas available about the Middle East.

By googling "Applied Research Institute" I was able to find this atlas, most recently published in 2004. The maps cited by Carter do not seem to be listed in the contents, but as I do not have access to a copy I cannot confirm this.

If this is indeed the correct atlas, we can learn quite a bit about the objectivity of the officials in Sweden under whose aegis it was basically produced. See, for example, the map of Wars and Border Changes (1948 - 1982). Note that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is divided into two areas: those "occupied by Israel" in 1967 and those "occupied by Israel" in 1948. "Ending the occupation" means eliminating the State of Israel.