President Carter: 'U.S. Is the No. 1 Warmonger on Earth'

Georgia native and 39th president of the United States Jimmy Carter shared his views with Time magazine on topics ranging from the current showdown with Vladimir Putin to the need for a more active American role in Middle East peace efforts.

After speaking Tuesday night at the Lyndon Johnson Library in Texas to mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, the magazine spoke with Carter.

The Democrat criticized President Obama for not taking a more hands-on role in working toward Middle East peace in his first term.

“I know from experience that the best way to have the United States be a mediator is for the President himself to be deeply involved,” Carter said. “In this occasion, when Secretary Clinton was Secretary of State, she took very little action to bring about peace.”

The magazine also asked Carter about a recent quote attributed to him that “the U.S. is the No. 1 warmonger on Earth.”

The Nobel laureate replied, “Yes it is. It has been. You can look at the record, ever since the United Nations was formed after the Second World War, the United States has almost constantly been at war somewhere. There are about 30 countries where we have initiated armed conflict.”

"A Call to Action," a new book by President Carter, urges the end of discrimination and abuse against women, calling it the world’s biggest challenge, says his website. The book builds on the work of faith leaders and human rights defenders who met last summer at The Carter Center to commit to advancing women's rights. Religion, they said, should be a force for equality and human dignity, not oppression.

In the book, Carter writes that Jesus Christ was the greatest liberator of women in his culture. Time asked the former president to elaborate.

“He set an example that should be emulated down to the ages, and one of the examples that he set invariably in every word and deed of his life was to emphasize the equality of women and even to exalt women well beyond any status they had enjoyed in any previous decades or centuries or even since then," Carter said. "But unfortunately there have been interpretations of what Jesus did by very wonderful theologians that wrote individual letters to individual churches all across Asia minor and so forth, that can be misinterpreted and to prove by male religious leaders that women should not be equal in the eyes of God.”