Jimmy Carter: rolled by Hamas, so very willingly
From a January 14 Al Jazeera article on the Palestinian election, in which the anti-Hamas position of the Carter associate National Democratic Institute was imputed personally to Jimmy Carter:
Carter plans to arrive in Israel soon as part of the Washington based National Democratic Institute (NDI)/Carter Center push to help monitor the upcoming Palestinian legislative elections. Carter is part of a delegation of some 80 others who will try to assure a smooth election day in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
In a pre-election assessment released by NDI on 6 January 2006, the NDI/Carter Center called on Israel to allow the Palestinians in Jerusalem to vote as they did in 1996 through the local post offices, despite the issue of Hamas. NDI nonetheless also criticized the Palestinians for letting Hamas become a political party. The report stated: “While it is in the long term interest of Palestinian democratic development, and likely in the long term security interests of Israel, that a wide spectrum of groups participate in lawful and peaceful political processes, Hamas’ current political participation, while simultaneously advocating violence, undermines a fundamental principle of democratic elections.” Carter’s position on Hamas could harm his impartiality as monitor with the Palestinians.
By January 20, Carter had made it clear that he actually liked Hamas, via Jerusalem Post:
Former US president Jimmy Carter expressed optimism Friday over Hamas’s participation in next week’s Palestinian parliamentary elections. Carter told CNN in an interview that although Hamas were “so-called terrorists,” so far “there have been no complaints of corruption against [their] elected officials.”
He conceded that “there is an element within Hamas who deny Israel’s right to exist,” but compared the current situation to negotiations with the PLO, which was still outlawed as a terrorist organization during his presidency. He drew an additional comparison with Menachem Begin’s rise to Israel’s premiership in the seventies. “The Irgun, to which Begin belonged, was also characterized as a terrorist organization,” he noted.
Finally, in a show of unrivaled obsequiousness, Carter has called for giving Hamas money, despite revealing his having been humiliated by Hamas a decade ago when Carter had been the personal emissary of Yasser Arafat, via Toronto Star:
By Carter’s reckoning, the Authority will run out of funds to pay its workers — everyone from policemen to schoolteachers, at the end of February. He’s urging Western donors to find a way to work around their objections to Hamas and continue giving, at least until Hamas makes its intentions known. And he’s calling on the cash-rich Arab world, now “inundated with oil revenues,” to step up with financing to get Palestinians through this crisis….
Carter professes no insight into whether Hamas is capable of the challenge of leadership. But he’s old enough to have seen many in this region make the transition from terror to power with aplomb.”Despite the concerns expressed about the character of Hamas, we have to hope for the best. My prayer is the Hamas leaders, now serving in positions of unprecedented authority, will lead the Palestinian people on a peaceful, non-violent path toward a two-state solution.”
No accommodation to a terrorist can be too great.
January 31st, 2006 at 4:58 am
I will never forget seeing Warren Christopher, President Carter’s Secretary of State, telling us that the way to deal with HAMAS was to set up a jobs training program.
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Here’s a money quote from Christopher Hitchens – whatever you think of him, it’s hard to argue with this:
The preferred analysis, which certainly derives from a kernel of fact, is that the vote represents a repudiation of the baroque corruption of the Arafat gang . But there are at least two difficulties with this comforting conclusion. For one thing, anyone voting for a clerical party in the hope of abolishing corruption is asking to be considered a fool and also treated as one: There is corruption all over the Middle East, but it is nowhere as flagrant and exploitative and damaging as in the region’s two main theocracies, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Those who come to power as puritans lose no time in becoming positively gorgeous in the excess of their corruption, and Hamas will not be an exception to this rule.