A Response to David Horovitz and Other Critics of Jimmy Carter's Meeting With Hamas

A Response to David Horovitz and Other Critics of Jimmy Carter's Meeting With Hamas
Excuse me, Mr. Horowitz, but Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, is responsible for the rockets that are landing in Israel and killing innocent people and ruining lives? Hamas has supposedly smuggled in 80 tons of explosives and longer-range rocketry courtesy of Iran and Syria to Gaza during this little so-called calm period. (Thank you, China for knocking Israel off the front page, at least for awhile.) Do you suppose they are there to celebrate Independence Day on the fourth of July with their American brethren? Why wouldn’t someone go talk to him and let him know that their good behavior will be somehow rewarded? It’s just good business. Not to mention the right thing to do. Anything less is complicity in the deaths. If it doesn’t work, what is lost? We at least have our honor intact – we tried to start a discussion. There has to be a new conversation with some new people. What is going on in Israel is just madness. And I wouldn’t care if it was Hitler himself that goose-stepped his way to talk to Meshaal as long as he was telling them to get with the program or open the door for someone else to tell them that, for example one Barack H. Obama, who has been endorsed by every one of the Carter children and grandchildren, while Jimmy himself has "not committed". Right. Let us hope that this is Carter’s mission.

Carter himself set forth the goals of the meeting:.

"I think that it's very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and to cooperate with the Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians, maybe to get them to agree to a cease-fire _ things of this kind,"

The fact that Hamas is even willing to have a meeting whose subject is an enemy whose destruction is its foundation, is already a victory for Israel and shows that recent reports of Hamas running out of gasoline are apparently true. Terrorists need gas to wreak terror.

Even such insignificant people such as the former head of Shin Bet have said that someone needs to meet with the terrorists. Not to mention 64% of Israelis, according to a poll taken by Haaretz in February. I would be with those 64%, and if that position, in this country, defines me somehow as being a "left-wing" "self-hating Jew", or any of the other usual sobriquets heaped upon people who think like me, then I stand guilty as charged.

Mr. Horowitz, you and your followers’ ideas are leading Israel to its eventual destruction. You seem willing to pontificate morality and ethics as well as your politics at the expense of other people's lives. You go live in Sderot, and tell me after the first rocket misses you and your family for the first time, you will do anything that makes sense to stop the madness. I believe that Carter's ultimate goal here is a noble one. The status quo is unacceptable. Israel, like a shark, must move forward or die. The same is true of the Palestinians. It's time for a reminder, and if ever there was someone that the Palestinians feel they can talk seriously to, it's a man that accused their enemy, Israel, of having an apartheid state and otherwise of Jew-hate, at least by most American metrics.

Because of the predominance in the US of quasi-Likud politics among both Christian and Jewish supporters of Israel, it comes to me as no surprise that every public official in the US and Israel is in lock-step to condemn the move while privately, at least, I hope they are wishing Mr. Carter some success.

Let us hope and pray that something positive, anything, comes out of his meeting with the Hamas terrorists. At present, there is everything to lose and everything to lose.

Randy Shiner