Jimmy Carter is Right Again

A volcanic eruption of hysterical outrage from Michelle Malkin, Don Surber, Captains Quarters, Blue Crab Blvd etc etc, was the entirely predictable result of the honest and accurate comments made by Jimmy Carter today in Ireland.

Here's what he said:

Far from encouraging Hamas's move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.

"That action was criminal," he said in a news conference after his speech.

"The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah," he said.

Carter said the United States and others supplied the Fatah-controlled security forces in Gaza with vastly superior weaponry in hopes they would "conquer Hamas in Gaza" - but Hamas this month routed Fatah because of its "superior skills and discipline."

He said plans to reopen international aid to the West Bank, but clamp down on aid to Gaza, would imprison 1.4 million Gazans. He called for both territories to be treated equally.

Here's some of what they said:

Jimmy Carter today sides with Hamas in its struggle to eliminate Israel.
(Surber)

Of course, I would assume, given Carter's point about Hamas that if, say NYC would elect various mafia members to the city council and other elective positions that he would feel compelled to deal with them the same way he would any other elected government because, well, there were elections for heaven sake.
Elections don't legitimize thugs, criminals and terrorists Mr. Carter, although you spent most of your days trying to prove otherwise. (qando)

He should move in with his buddies [Hamas} at once. And leave this country alone. Go away, Jimmy. (bluecrab)

Carter has become an apologist for terrorists -- and in this case, a cheerleader for them. Carter has embarrassed his nation and solidified his status as the appeaser-in-chief who coddled radical Islam at its birth, and seems determined to midwife it at every successive turn. (Captainsquarters)

Carter’s shilling for Hamas has been going on for years. (michelle)

I could go on quoting these folk, but I think you get the picture. Carter opens his mouth; they start frothing.

Please remember that they are condemning him for saying that Hamas (which they have designated a terrorist group) should be treated the same as Al Fatah.(which they have designated a terrorist group)  Further complicating this picture is the fact that Hamas, by winning the most recent election, seems to be more representative of the Palestinian people than Al Fatah. Did I mention that for the last several years the dominant political party in Israel is the Likud, which was designated a terrorist group?

Like the Bush administration, these bloggers never, ever offer any solution to the problems facing Israel. They can only scream like banshees when a Carter says something, actually anything, that might lead to a solution. In 1950 there were less than a million Palestinian refugees - now there are over 4 million.  In Gaza, almost half a million live in refugee camps that were established in 1948 and 1949.

Wing-nuttia can call Hamas, or Al Fatah, all the names that they want, but there is no security without peace.  As their erstwhile hero Donald Rumsfeld might have said - you negotiate with the neighbors you have, not the ones you wish you had.

(P.S. I think what drives them so volcanically frothy is the fact that Carter is so often, so very, right.)

(h/t memeorandum)

 

Comments

[AnonymousCoward]

Don't you know that there are different levels of terrorists?
There are the bad ones, the badder ones, the worst ones, the ones we support, the ones we used to support, the ones we used to support and still support, etc.

Fatah has been upgraded to the bad ones that we support but used to not support, while Hamas has be downgraded to the worst ones we still don't support...

When Al Qaeda will invide Gaza, we might upgrade Hamas once again!

[daveinboca]

On cue, Jimmy Carter steps forward and demonstrates again that there is no fool like an old fool [h/t: Ben Franklin]. You show that even younger people can be incredibly stupid and foolish.

Let's see where this serial idiot got it wrong this time. The US should not favor Fatah over Hamas because...."[it would be an] effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples."?

Fatah has renounced violence and has recognized the possibility of recognizing Israel. Abu Mazen has met with the Israeli PM in an effort to achieve a peaceful solution down the road.

Hamas has espoused terrorism, kidnaps Israeli soldiers and launches missiles into Israel while attempting terrorist attacks on Israel. Its leadership refuses to consider any diplomatic measures toward Israel. I could go on.....

But it already sounds like the Palestinians are two peoples.

So the US should treat Fatah and Hamas the same?

How long ago did this terminal retardo Carter lose the last of his marbles? And why doesn't he just shut up and stop proving Ben Franklin's old adage again and again and again......

[rick]

Carter once said that a deposed Haitian thug was welcome to teach his Sunday school class. So then, nothing else should ever be a surprise. The Hamas charter, written in 1988, calls for the complete destruction of the state of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Islamic state. Arab Palestinianism is as recent and fraudulent as Kwanza. None of these ‘details’ seem to bother Carter. He does build a nice little house though.

[sisterblog]

Great post, Bustard, I would point out that the only expansionist, nuclear state in the mid-East is Israel. The US has in effect managed a coup d'etat against a duly elected government. Hamas won the election, and by arming Fatah and undermining Hamas in every way possible, the US and the Israelis should what real contempt they have for democratic processes in the mid-East. They want to install a puppet they can run for their own interests and against the interests of the Palestinian people. Has Israel renounced violence against the Palestinians? Has Israel obeyed the many UN resolutions that call for it to end the Occupation? And as for kidnappings, many Hamas elected representatives now languish in Israeli jails.

Carter is calling for a balanced approach to the mid-East politics that honors the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Hamas made and kept an 18 month cease fire to get negotiations going. But it is in the Israeli interest to claim that they have no negotiating partner or to set up a puppet partner so they keep their illegal and immoral occupation of Palestinian land.

[rick]

SB
How is Israel expansionist? To what occupation do you refer? What is historic Palestine? Its culture? Its history? You support the election of terrorists? You are surprised they are in jail? There is an enormous refugee problem in the Middle East. They have been herded onto buses and sent to historic Israel to claim via world sympathy what they were unable to achieve though conflicts of aggression. Judea was called Palestine by its Roman occupiers as an insult. Palestinians were Israelis for two thousand years until the 1960s when Arabs decided to begin calling themselves Palestinians in an effort to claim Israel for their own purposes. There is no historic Arab Palestine. There is no historic Arab Palestinianism. It is a ruse. It very easy to argue that Gaza and the West Bank are occupied Israel. It is also easy to see why Carter is widely regarded as purely anti Semitic as he disregards these minor details.

[bbbustard]

Thanks for the comments. I totally agree with both sisterb and the Acoward - with Rick less so. I don't get the obsession with the word Palestine.
What should we call the people who lived in the Mandate of Palestine? Mandatian refugees?

[bbbustard]

Thanks for the comments. I totally agree with both sisterb and the Acoward - with Rick less so. I don't get the obsession with the word Palestine.
What should we call the people who lived in the Mandate of Palestine? Mandatian refugees?

[rick]

I am not obsessed with the word Palestine. I am bothered by the con game that is being played by the Arab world and swallowed by much of the west. More specifically, it is swallowed by the left in the west. Bustard, I once offered that you should read some history that was authored before 1960, or even better, history that was written nearer the turn of the 20th century. That which was written between 1850 and 1950 would cause you to be embarrassed by the positions you now hold. I am sure of it. You are rational and thoughtful. You would be stupefied at the concept of contemporary Palestinianism. It is an invention. Do you know what the 'Mandate for Palestine' was? Mark Twain wrote extensively about his travels through Palestine. Read what he said. More importantly, you should read what prominent Arabs had to say about Palestine before Zionism created an economic miracle in the desert. I was utterly ambivalent before I studied the matter.

S B is a drive by shooter. She leaves a couple of indefensible paragraphs, then disappears because it is preferable to defending blather. Hamas has a 42 % plurality in the 2006 elections and then attacks their political opposition. They drag political opponents into the streets and execute them. That is democracy? And it is Israel's and America's fault somehow? What claptrap! Being elected is only the first step. It is not a mandate for violence. They have relinquished their legitimacy by their actions. They are the very definition of terror.

[Farmer Mark]

I want in on this one. Rick is right that in the late 19th century the Arabs of Palestine were generally not iudentifying themselves as a national entity in the way that modern Palestinians aspire to. Dozens of other national identities are also of relatively recent vintage. When did the national identity of the Italian or the German or the Canadian develop? Does their lack of historical depth lead us to deny their reality or their right to feel that identity? (Well, maybe for Canadians)

I'm no big fan of national identity as a basic organizing principle, but it does seem to be a major one that, once developed, involves deeply felt allegiance. And it often seems to develop when living in close proximity to other strong national movements. Witness, for example, the evolution of Zionism, born in response to nativist militant nationalism in Europe and brought to maturity by the ultimate nationalist madness of Nazism. Because when your neighbors are assertive nation states, you suddenly perceive that your best defense is to organize as a nation state as well.

I count myself among those who strongly support Israel's right to exist, and I believe the justification for that existence is the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination. That very commitment makes me quite reluctant to criticize other late blooming nationalisms, because those who would undermine Israel would point out that the ideal of an actual Jewish nation state is a pretty late arrival. "Next year in Jerusalem" notwithstanding, the aspiration for Zion was not until the recent past an effort to make Jews a nation in the sense that France or the US are nations. And even when that European idea was introduced it was quite controversial among Jews until the holocaust. But now we don't doubt that there are such people as "Israelis", with an actual national identity, an everyday language they virtually created for the purpose from what had become a purely religious tongue, and including among their membership plenty of committed nationalists with not a religious bone in their bodies. National identities evolve.

So while history is everything, it is also nothing. I do not doubt that in the last two generations Palestinians have developed a new consciousness as a distinct people who can only preserve themselves by living in an organized national state. And isn't it obvious how that came about? Having lost an initial confrontation with a vigorous nation state, Israel, they found themselves treated as foreigners and excluded from the developing national lives of their fellow Arabs in their places of refuge. There's nothing like discrimination and shared dispossession and misery to forge a feeling of distinct peoplehood. Just like the Jews, if the Palestinians don't have a state to guard their interests, who will guard it for them? Recent history suggests, ultimately, nobody will.
So what does it matter if their national identity was only latent in the 19th century? It's all too real now, and it's attached to millions of real people living in real misery.

This does not suggest how to deal with Hamas or Fatah or the "peace process", such as it is. This is not to condone nihilistic terroristic acts. But it seems to me that a proper solution will never be achieved if the starting point of either side is to deny the depth of national feeling of the other.

[Farmer Mark]

And what I really should have said is that a proper solution will never be found if the starting point of either side is to deny the right of the other to be organized as a nation.

[Rick]

F M
I not find disagreement with anything that you have said here. Your positions reflect a lot of research and thoughtfulness. I constantly find myself taking issue with those who blame the plight of the Palestinians on Israel or America. It is intellectually shallow and lazy.

Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A. D. and killed an estimated one million Jews and captured and disbursed another hundred thousand throughout the empire as slaves. It is the descendants of these slaves that became the Zionist movement. However, many Jews remained in Palestine and their culture and civilization remained intact in spite of all the conquerors and occupiers. Those who would argue that Arab Palestine was bulldozed in 1947 so that Israel could be inserted are simply ignoring the facts. During the three hundred years prior to World War one, the entirety of the Middle East was held by Ottoman Turks. European Zionists began to buy land from the Turks in the mid 1800s. No one could register a complaint at the time since there had never been a Palestine that was not Israel. At the end of the war, the Middle East was divided into geopolitical states. One could argue “who has the right to do such things?” The short answer has always been the winners of wars. British mandate Palestine was created as a homeland for Jewish peoples. Arabs argued that the Jews were given too much, so 75% of Palestine was ceded to Arab control. That portion of Palestine became modern Jordan. When modern Israel was created in 1947 and following their 1948 war for independence, most Arabs native to the area became citizens of Israel. They are prosperous and free. They vote and hold public office. They wish the scoundrels now calling themselves Palestinians would just go away. Those Arabs that left Palestine did so because the 1948 war was imminent. They were promised a share of the loot after the war when the Jews would all be gone (slaughtered). It is these Arabs who fled of their own volition that now carry the ‘right of return’ banner. The present day Palestinians were Jordanians (or Syrians) in 1970 and attempted to topple the Hashemite government of Jordan claiming that it was their Palestine. The fighting lasted for more than a year and estimates range from 10,000 to 20,000 ‘Palestinians’ were killed. These unwanted Arabs were expelled to Lebanon, Gaza and the west bank and are now claiming that Israel is their Palestine.

The main point is that there never was an Arab Palestinian culture. I can find no evidence of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians prior to 1960. But we do have an enormous refugee problem and an entire underclass (as viewed by other Arabs) of Arabs claiming to be Palestinians today. It is a problem to be dealt with in spite of the fact that their claim is only two generations old.

None of this is Israel’s fault. Nor is it America’s fault. Nor the fault of any American foreign policy.

I am not certain when western political correctness turned its ire against Israel and began to favor the terrorists and the beheaders, but it has happened nonetheless. The differences between the forces for good and forces for evil are never murky. These differences are always crystal clear. It is difficult to attribute this favoritism to anything other than rabid anti Semitism. Can Israelis and their government be criticized? Absolutely! Criticism of government is healthy. Nobody is claiming they can do no wrong. No one is making that claim here either.

[Rick]

I would add that they will have a much greater chance to be regarded as a civilized state when they begin behaving like one.