Posted: April 17, 2008
Just say no to Carter

Senior Israeli officials were not the first to try to get out of meeting Jimmy Carter. A number of members of Bill Clinton's administration have already tried, including the former president and his wife the candidate; most members of Bush senior's administration, including George H. W. himself; and it goes without saying the same applies to his son and his administration.

Carter has a strange characteristic: He finds it easier to make friends with dictators. If a person's companions testify to his personality and character, then here is a partial list of people with whom Carter has gotten along well: Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and Kim Il Jong.

Carter has helped in no small number of humanitarian activities, said Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush's former U.S. National Security Adviser, but "his political judgment was just awful."

After Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, Carter objected to using force to remove the invaders. He even had a creative idea of how to solve the crisis: "Now is a propitious time for Israel to come forward with a genuine peace initiative."

In simple terms, an Israeli withdrawal from the territories in return for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. He had quite a lot of such creative ideas, few of them useful, a few dangerous and most just eccentric.

American administrations from Reagan to the second Bush were forced to grit their teeth and live with his endless activities, and in particular his amazing talent for public relations. When the Clinton administration reached a deal with North Korea, Carter played a role in reaching the controversial agreement. Senior officials then had to watch the ex-president steal the credit in a broadcast to the nation by a CNN crew Carter had invited in advance. Carter has turned self-promotion through scandalous behavior into an art form.

This is exactly how he sold his books, including the one presenting Israel as an apartheid state. A book which revealed, even if that was not what he meant to do, the fundamental hypocrisy which is the basis for the political partisanship concerning Carter. Whoever attacks a president such as Bush for distorting facts in order to push a political goal has no problem accepting Carter's book, which is nothing but a concoction of exaggerations, inventions, distortions and lies. Whoever disagrees with Bush because of the religious faith that serves as the foundation of his political actions has no problem with the same religious motives of Carter's messianism.

The mistake the Americans made when they elected him president in 1976 was mostly an act to punish the Republican Party after the Watergate affair, and they corrected their mistake at the next available opportunity. But Carter is a gift that continues to give - even when no one wants to receive it any more. The honor due Carter for his help in reaching the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is written in the history books, but he did not come to the Middle East this week for honor, but to work.

And his work, for years, has had one goal: undermining the status of Israel, thwarting its policies and ridiculing its hopes. That is why Israel acted correctly in having him meet with only the ceremonial echelon - President Shimon Peres - and avoided having him meet with those who are supposed to be doing the work: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

In an interview earlier this week, Carter told Haaretz's Akiva Eldar a number of amazing things. Carter seemingly was not particularly distressed by the refusal to meet with him: "In a democracy, I realize that you don't need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels. When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's the dictator, because he speaks for all the people," explained Carter knowledgeably.

The words were very well chosen, with a malicious message wrapped up inside: in a dictatorship it is impossible to trust the ruler to express society's views, but in a democracy such as Israel the opposite is true - the elected government is that which expresses the public's mood, otherwise it would not have been elected.

Carter, once the exaggerated attention is stripped away, is nothing but a nuisance. A painful reminder of the electorate's failure. His views do not represent the American public, his actions are not viewed favorably by the administrations that followed him - Democrats and Republicans alike - and his righteous trouble making is just a guise for continued hostility to Israel, which he views as partially responsible for ending his presidential career after only a single term.

In any case, the choice of those who still continue to insist on the need to listen to Carter is based on lies - it is possible to ignore him, protest his manipulative tricks, and still continue to work for true peace between Israel and the Arabs. There is no contradiction.

Jimma Cotta is to American politics as is A. Crowley to AWE ...... the "village idiot" ......

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CHECK THIS OUT ..... graybeard's "tribute" to Humble Lasher -----> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwFjt2x9Rws ...and another... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JECK3Ed1CN0

Political Correctness defined :
A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

You go gummer....

Carter also chimed in on the growing debate over the upcoming Olypmics and confirmed his belief that the U.S. should not boycott the Beijing games.

Isn't Jimma Cawder the same President who boycotted the 1980 Olympics when it was held in Moscow? What's up now, the Chinese have murder enough Tibeteans and their own people to satisfy Jimma's somewhat strange love for dictators?

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Its better to have fussed and crabbed then never to have fussed at all - Lucy

OPINION
The Sad End of Jimmy Carter
By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
April 25, 2008

The problem is not that he is, or is not, talking to the Syrians – everyone does it to some degree.

It isn't that he went to Damascus to meet with the exiled head of Hamas – everyone, including the Israelis, will one day have to do that too, in accordance with that old rule which says that in the end it is with your enemies not your friends that you have to come to an understanding and make peace.

No.

The problem is how Jimmy Carter went about it.

The problem is the spectacular and useless embrace he exchanged with the senior Hamas dignitary, Nasser Shaer, in Ramallah.
[The Sad End of Jimmy Carter]
Getty Images
Jimmy Carter at the tomb of Yasser Arafat.

The problem is the wreath he laid piously at the grave of Yasser Arafat, who, as Mr. Carter knows better than anyone else, was a real obstacle to peace.

It is that in Cairo, if we are to believe another Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, whose statement has so far not been denied, Mr. Carter apparently described Hamas as a "national liberation movement" – this party which has made a cult of death, a mythology of blood and race, and an anti-Semitism along the lines of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the linchpin of its ideology.

The problem is also the formidable nose thumbing he got from Hamas's exiled leader, Khaled Mashaal, who, at the very moment he was receiving Mr. Carter, also triggered the first car bombing in several months in Keren Shalom on the Gaza strip – and that this event elicited from poor Mr. Carter, all tangled up in his small-time mediator calculations, not one disapproving or empathetic word.

The former president, it will be recalled, is an old hand at this sort of thing.

Going off track like this is not new for the man who 30 years ago was one of the architects of peace with Egypt, but who since then has not stopped vilifying Israel, comparing its political system to that of South Africa during apartheid, ignoring Israel's desire for peace, which is no less real than its errors, even denying its suffering.

A year ago, he told CBS that for years his beloved Hamas had not committed any terrorist attacks resulting in civilian casualties – this, a few months after the assassination of six people at the Karni Terminal, and the attack on Aug. 30, 2004, which killed 16 passengers in two buses in Beersheba.

And it is one thing to speak to CBS, and another to say these words, which are unofficial but have indisputable moral authority, to the belligerents.

It is one thing to say, in Dublin on June 19, 2007, that the true criminals are not those who proclaim, like Mashaal, that "before dying" Israel must be "humiliated and degraded," but those who would prefer that these charming characters be pushed out of the circles of power, sooner or later, with a distinct preference for "sooner." It is quite another to come over in person and put all one's weight behind the most radical elements, those who are the most hostile to peace, the most profoundly nihilistic in the Palestinian camp.

The truth is, if one wished to discredit the other side, to fully humiliate and ridicule the only Palestinian leader (Mahmoud Abbas) who at the risk of his life continues to believe in the solution of two states – if with a word one wanted to ruin the last dreams of men and women of goodwill who still believe in peace – one would be absolutely on the right track.

So what happened to this man, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?

Is it the vanity of someone who is no longer so important, who wants a last 15 minutes in the spotlight before he has to leave the stage forever?

Is it the senility of a politician who has lost touch with reality and with his own party? Barack Obama, even more clearly than his rival, has just reminded us that it will not be possible to "sit down" with the leaders of Hamas unless they are prepared to "renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and respect past agreements."

Could he be suffering from a variant of self-hatred, or in this case a hatred of his own past as the Great Peacemaker?

All hypotheses are permitted. Whatever the reason, Mr. Carter has demonstrated an unusual capacity to transform a political error into a disastrous moral mistake.

Mr. Levy's new book, "Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the New Barbarism," will be published by Random House in September. This essay was translated from the French by Sara Sugihara.

Carter is the worse type of christian, one who is all about forgiveness, without a thought to atonement.

Sort of like those preachers and ladies who get all weepy eyed over vicious murderers who have "converted".

It takes a particularly twisted and sick soul to take the most wonderful christian virtue of forgiveness, and turn it into a sin, but that is Jimmy Carter for you in a nutshell.

Carter is the only Democrat that I have ever voted for in a national race and he is a fraud. It seems we all learn from our mistakes.

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An informed voter scares the Goverment lackeys.

An American first and always a Conservative.

Very glad to see the one last living Christian I know...striving to make peace.

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Cussing out low class inbreds isnt uninteligent, its honest

Good typing is not inteligent its dexiteritous.

Everything you just said is total bullshit

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V8Ek...eature=related

Maybe "peace" within himself but certainly not for the Middle East. Nice try, though.

Your all jsut warmongers hell bent on genocide. Pathetic. You want to fight for these isreali pigs..gorw a pair and get over thier. Carter is working gfor peace.Tough shit if Americans dont like that. A good man and real christian. Good for him