A new LOW, even for Jimmah....
IT’S EITHER AN UNPRECEDENTED LOW IN PARTISAN DISCOURSE OR POLITICAL SURREALISM worthy of André Breton: on Tuesday, former president Jimmy Carter, speaking on foreign soil, denounced the policies of his successor as “criminal” because they fail to subsidize a genocidal Islamic terrorist organization that has killed Americans. Then, he blamed internecine Palestinian warfare on Americans and Israelis.
Speaking in Ireland at the eighth annual Forum on Human Rights – without an apparent hint of irony – Carter said the Bush administration had sinned against heaven and earth in its decision to withhold direct aid to Hamas once that group came to power in the Palestinian Authority. “That action was criminal,” he said. The Palestinian people had elected Hamas fair-and-square in elections his Center described as “orderly and fair.” (Carter said the same of Hugo Chavez’s election.) He deemed Hamas “shrewd in selecting candidates.”
The world’s most famous Sunday School teacher further praised the genocidal terrorist organization, at a human rights conference, by citing its penchant for bloodshed. Hamas, Carter doddered, was more orderly than the rival Fatah organization, which Hamas demonstrated in military clashes that showed its “superior skills and discipline.” (The Jerusalem Post reported his argument thus: “Carter said Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns with the Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.”) One can only imagine how impressed he would have been by the “efficiency” of the SS.
Sounding like a junior anchor for al-Jazeera, the Nobel Peace Prize winner incredibly blamed the Palestinian civil war on Crusaders and Zionists. “The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine,” he said, “and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah.” He continued:
This effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples now is a step in the wrong direction. All efforts of the international community should be to reconcile the two, but thereÂ’s no effort from the outside to bring the two togetherÂ…I don't see at this point any possibility that public officials in the United States, or in Israel, or the European Union are going to take action to bring about reconciliation (between Fatah and Hamas).
Thus, the Americans and the Jews are to blame for divisions between groups of Palestinians that chuck fellow Palestinians out of windows. Only in the most fevered Islamist media are Muslims so excused from personal responsibility for their brutality toward one another.
Carter does not persuasively explain why Israel would want to “reconcile” terrorist groups bent on jihad. (Few things reconcile Palestinians more than dangling an unarmed Jew in front of them.) The Hamas Charter instructs, “There is no other solution for the Palestinian problem other than jihad.” Killing infidels is “an individual duty binding on every Muslim man and woman; a woman must go out and fight the enemy even without her husband’s authorization, and a slave without his master’s permission.” This makes jihad nearly the only thing she can do without her husband’s permission. But Carter, who once lectured Pope John Paul II for his “perpetuation of the subservience of women” and blasted “the mandated subservience of women by Christian fundamentalists” wants us to fund this misogynist death cult. You’ve come a long way, Baby....
Carter skirts the fact that Hamas is not merely a threat to Israelis; the group has claimed the lives of numerous Americans. Its ever-expanding U.S. infrastructure may one day conduct terror strikes on U.S. soil. Authorities nabbed Hamas member Ismail Selim Elbarasse in August 2004 for videotaping Maryland’s Bay Bridge in what authorities worried constituted “a potential link between Hamas and al-Qaeda.” Last October, a Hamas commander ominously told Time magazine, “We shouldn't stand by idly while the Americans are plotting against us.” But Carter has indicated the Bush administration is criminal for not supporting this stouthearted nationalist.
“Criminal” might better describe the workings of any government in the Muslim world, so conspicuously over-represented in the Carter Center’s donations – nations in which, for instance, its elected officials have to consult with and bribe a departed leader’s widow to find out where he hid billions of dollars of their people’s assets. Nonetheless, the U.S. is sending barrels of greenbacks and weapons to the kleptocratic Fatah, whose membership largely overlaps with that of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the group responsible for the Mickey Mouse Murder Hour. Condoleeza Rice has also announced the U.S. is shipping tens of millions of dollars to the UNRWA, where future terrorists are incubated. Yet Carter denounces his own country for failing to establish a Marshall Plan for totalitarian murderers.
Thus concludes a rational progression for Jimmy Carter: in the 1970s, he blundered into establishing terrorists as Iran’s all-powerful theocratic rulers. In the 1980s and ‘90s, he wrote speeches for Yasser Arafat and defended extremists around the globe. Now, he calls the U.S. president a pariah for refusing to underwrite unrepentant jihadists dedicated to spilling as much infidel blood as possible.
Thus, Man from Plains confirms what many long suspected: the Worst President of the 20th Century does not want the United States to end the War on Terror. He merely wants us to switch sides.
