Here he goes again! Hat tip to DRJ:
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Report: Jimmy Carter to Meet With Hamas Leader in Syria
By Joseph Abrams, Fox News
NEW YORK CITY — Former President Jimmy Carter is reportedly preparing an unprecedented meeting with the leader of Hamas, an organization that the U.S. government considers one of the leading terrorist threats in the world.
The Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat reported Tuesday that Carter was planning a trip to Syria for mid-April, during which he would meet with Khaled Meshal, the exiled head of the Palestinian terror group Hamas, on April 18.
Deanna Congileo, Carter’s press secretary, confirmed in an e-mail to FOXNews.com that Carter will be in the Mideast in April. Pressed for comment, Congileo did not deny that the former president is considering visiting Meshal.
“President Carter is planning a trip to the Mideast next week; however, we are still confirming details of the trip and will issue a press release by the end of this week,†wrote Congileo. “I cannot confirm any specific meetings at this point in time.â€
Meshal, who lives in Syria to avoid being arrested by the Israeli government, leads Hamas from his seat in Damascus, where he is a guest of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
The State Department has designated Hamas a “foreign terrorist organization,” and some groups hold Meshal personally responsible for ordering the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack once said of the prospect of meeting with Meshal, “That’s not something that we could possibly conceive of.”
Former President Carter has just never gotten over the fact that he isn’t president any more! We trusted him once with that job — and, to my everlasting shame, I actually voted for him in 1976 — but he proved himself unfit for the job, and we replaced him. And he was replaced in no small part due to his total ineptitude in foreign policy: he responded to an act of war with pitiful, third party negotiations that produced nothing, at least nothing until the Iranians knew that he was being replaced by someone who might just respond to that act of war with an act of war.
President Clinton tried to use our 39th president as a negotiator with North Korea concerning the development of nuclear weapons. Mr Carter went around his instructions from the Clinton Administration, and the former president make concessions of which the real president disapproved, but which caught him in a bind.
And now, Jimmy Carter is trying to undercut American foreign policy again. He doesn’t have to approve of our foreign policy, but as a former president, he is honor-bound not to undercut the current one.
Oh, wait, did I say that Mr Carter was honor-bound? Never mind, forget I said it; to be honor-bound implies that you actually have some honor.
DRJ concluded:
Let’s hope this report is either untrue or, if true, that someone talks sense to Carter before he actually makes the trip.
If anyone actually did talk some sense into Jimmy Carter, it would surely be a first. The best for which we can hope is that the report is inaccurate.
There’s an additional concern. From my book review of Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid:
The former president spends some time telling us about the various impediments to a peaceful solution, and while he certainly does mention terrorist attacks by the Palestinians, he clearly placed much more blame on Israeli government policies. But there was one episode in particular which caught my attention, because it dramatically demonstrates the differences between the way the Israelis and President Carter think.
Well, yes, it certainly was. Here we had a former President of the United States, secure in his Western mindset, running with one Secret Service agent and two Israeli soldiers, in an area where Palestinian terrorism had occurred before, and in an area where hostage-taking for political purposes was hardly unknown; one would think that Jimmy Carter would have been familiar with that concept, given that the Iranian hostage crisis was a major reason why he was no longer president. What if one of those men had had a gun behind a newspaper? Mr Carter himself wrote that a jog like this was not unusual for him. What would have been the impact if an Arab terrorist had managed to either kidnap or kill a former President of the United States?
If Mr Carter goes to this meeting, we will have the spectacle of a former President of the United States putting himself in the hands of the leader of Hamas, a terrorist organization which has used kidnapping as a weapon in the past. Just what would the implications be if Hamas kidnapped Jimmy Carter?
I’ll admit, it seems that such would be absoplutely the wrong move; I cannot find any logical justification which would make this sound like a wise idea for Hamas. But I’m a Westerner, and I employ the logic of the Westernized democracy in which I live; the Palestinians have, many times, employed reasoning of their own which makes absolutely no sense to Westerners, but is perfectly reasonable to them.
Of all of our former presidents, Jimmy Carters ties with LBJ for being loathsome. His veneer of pseudo-piety makes him all of the worse.
He was a southern liberal who (once)fooled the people with his accent and played the twice-born, double-dipped routine with great effect.
Some are convinced that he served on a nuclear submarine but he was really one of Rickover’s comptetent toadies. He got out of sea duty by playing the ‘compassion’ card.
As a governor, he must have made an unfavorable impression on Maryland Governor Marvin Mandell. Marv was so disguste with Jimmah that he supported Governor Moonbeam durin the primary. After Mandell was framed on a RICO charge, Carter blocked efforts for an early release. Reagan was a lot more merciful. The charges were later reversed. Seems as if it is dangerous to oppose a vindictive hypocrite.
We may never find out what was behind the dumping of the Shah. Was there money involved or just plain stupidity? We are still paying the price.
Pullin out of the Olympics to protest the invasion of Afghanistan was typical Carter. Symbolism over substance.
Most former presidents have avoided making mischief after their time in office. However, Truman and Ike did seek the advice of Hoover.
Carter has made a career of rehabilitation of his record. He will always be seen as a loser.
If Carter decided to go to:
Why? The Left would say to open a dialogue. OK, admirable, but Carter would not do that because he would too busy be bad mouthing the USA.
I wouldn’t mind Mr Carter visiting such places, if only he’d stay there!
What would Mr Carter have thought if, during the Iranian hostage crisis, former President Ford flew to Tehran to negotiate for the hostages’ release, without any authorization from his government and without any instructions concerning what we were and were not willing to do?
If our 39th president really does make this visit, our 43rd president ought to stand up and say, “Mr Carter can say any fool thing he wants, but he does not speak for the United States government, and nothing he says will be held as binding on the United States.”
I wish we could pull his passport — after he’s left the country — but that’ll never happen.
[...] As I noted yesterday (shameless blog plug alert!), Hamas has used kidnapping as a tactic previously. While it would seem, to Western logic, extraordinarily stupid of Hamas to kidnap former President Carter, they’ve done many things that, to us, seem totally insane, but which make perfect sense to them. Just what would we do if Hamas held a former President of the United States hostage? [...]
Just what would we do if Hamas held a former President of the United States hostage? […]
We should deal with the situation in a way that Carter would approve. We could send in Cyrus Vance as a negotiator but he’s dead. Maybe we could still send him, for all the good he did when he was alive. Ramsey Clark might be an alternative.
[...] What would our friends on the left say if George Bush tried to undercut the foreign policy of the next president?Here he goes again! Don Singleton | Don Singletonelap(’1207743000′); [...]
In checking out the Blogrunner link above, I came across this article, from an editor of the Progressive Review, in which he states that only Ralph Nader of the presidential candidates (yeah, right; didn’t he ask Harold Stassen?) has expressed support for former President Carter’s trip.
Another fine commentary on Mr Nader’s intelligence.