I saw Carter’s piece in the NYT, and it stank like rotten meat for exactly the reasons set forth below from Arutz-Sheva’s reportage. Either he did not understand what Meshaal was telling him, or, as the title of the article indicates, he is misrepresenting (indicating an intent to deceive the public about) Hamas’ positions. Carter is many things, but he is not stupid. That leaves only the other option available. It is one thing to go and try to start a conversation but to misrepresent what was said in those discussions or what came out of them indicates to me that Carter’s goal was not simply to start a discussion. He did not want the world to think he was a failure. With the lies and misrepresentations in his NYT op-ed piece, Carter is a failure, involved in a serious self-deception as to his motivation to start the talks in the first place. For shame.
Randy Shiner
Carter Mis-Representing Hamas Positions
by Hillel Fendel
In a New York Times op-ed on Monday, ex-Pres. Jimmy Carter says Hamas wants peace - while Hamas leader Khaled Meshal presents an entirely different picture.
Carter wrote in the Times about his recent meetings in Israel with the leaders of Hamas and Fatah, and painted a rosy picture of prospects for peace with Hamas. He attacked the United States and Israel for having categorized Hamas as a terrorist organization, and for therefore not talking with them.
It is a "counterproductive Washington policy [of] recent years," Carter writes, "to boycott and punish political factions or governments that refuse to accept United States mandates. This policy makes difficult the possibility that such leaders might moderate their policies."
Carter himself, on the other hand, talked with Hamas officials, and based on their "official responses," came up with the following conclusions (inter alia):
"Hamas will accept any agreement negotiated by Mr. Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert provided it is approved either in a Palestinian referendum or by an elected government.... Hamas will disband its militia in Gaza if a nonpartisan professional security force can be formed... Hamas will accept a mutual cease-fire in Gaza, with the expectation (not requirement) that this would later include [Judea and Samaria]..."
At an April 21 press conference in Jerusalem, Carter said, "Hamas said they would agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders [enabling Israel to continue to exist as it did prior to 1967 - ed.] if this was approved by the Palestinians, and that they would agree to accept Israel's right to exist as a neighbor with whom they would have peaceful relations."
Arab affairs analyst Yehonatan D. HaLevi writes that an interview given by Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal shows that Carter either did not understand the answers he was given, or that he is purposely presenting a false picture designed to "launder" Hamas in Western eyes.
Meshal: The Struggle Will Continue
HaLevi writes that Meshal told Al-Jazeera just three days ago from Syria something very different: "As opposed to the rosy picture presented by Carter, according to which Hamas is willing to recognize Israel under the current circumstances, Meshal said that the struggle against Israel would continue."
HaLevi quoted Meshal as having explained, "Israel is only willing to accept our ceasefire proposal - including a full retreat from eastern Jerusalem and to the '67 borders, the return of the refugees, but no recognition of Israel - if circumstances force it to do so and if a change in the balance in power forces it do so. Hamas is working to make sure this happens."
Hamas Accepts Democratic Results - Only Under Certain Conditions
In addition, though Carter says Hamas is willing to accept the results of a Palestinian Authority referendum, in actuality, Hamas has placed so many qualifications on this as to render it totally moot. Meshal told Al-Jazeera, "Hamas will accept the will of the Palestinian nation, as reflected in free elections for the Palestinian National Council in accordance with agreed-upon principles, or in a free referendum inside [within the PA-controlled areas] and outside [abroad] - on condition that the Palestinian negotiator will be obligated to Palestinian rights in accordance with the Document of National Consensus on the issues of Jerusalem, the refugees, and borders."
"In other words," HaLevi sums up, "Hamas will accept the results if they are identical with the original Hamas position."
Hamas and Shalit
It should also be noted that Carter says approvingly of Hamas that it will "permit Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured by Palestinian militants in 2006, to send a letter to his parents." No date has been set for this to happen. "If Israel agrees to a list of prisoners to be exchanged, and the first group is released, Corporal Shalit will be sent to Egypt, pending the final releases," Carter writes - without noting that the "list of prisoners" is many hundreds of names long and includes many who have been involved in the murder and maiming of dozens of Israelis in terrorist attacks.
HaLevi says Carter's position is puzzling: "He sees nothing wrong with Hamas even though it is a terrorist organization... He is essentially enabling terrorist and Fascist organizations to take over western democracies whenever these groups win a majority of the vote. In addition, Carter is trying with all his might to launder Hamas and to market it to Israel and the international community as a moderate force - even though Hamas itself presents a totally opposite stance."
Showing posts with label Jimmy Carter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jimmy Carter. Show all posts
29 April 2008
23 April 2008
Carter’s Hamas Talks Could Aid Exodus to Peace
Published on Monday, April 21, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Carter’s Hamas Talks Could Aid Exodus to Peace
by Ira Chernus
Jews around the world sat down to their Passover seders this past weekend, commemorating their ancestors’ exodus from slavery to freedom. Yet right now the person who is doing more than anyone else to free the Jews is a devout Baptist, Jimmy Carter. The former president is meeting with leaders throughout the Middle East — including, most controversially, the top political leadership of the Hamas party. This has predictably angered the U.S. and Israeli governments and the U.S. mainstream press.
But they, like so many Jews, are still in slavery. The “Egypt” that enslaves them is a set of self-defeating beliefs in their own minds. They are enslaved to the notion that Hamas must be treated as pariah “terrorists,” and one must never talk with “terrorists.” That convenient tale prevents the Israeli government from entering peace negotiations. It keeps Israeli Jews trapped in the continuing risks and tensions of a state-of-siege mentality that prevents the exodus they need so badly now: moving from insecurity to genuine peace and security.
In a larger sense, the view of Hamas as a party so evil that no one may even talk with it keeps many Jews in a state of spiritual slavery. It reinforces their long-standing habit of defining Jewish identity primarily in terms of radical vulnerability, as if the only meaningful way to be Jewish were to stand firm against an enemy and always be ready to shoot at that enemy.
This slavery is especially tragic because it is self-imposed. It arises not from objective perception of facts imposed from outside, but from choices that Jews themselves make, choices that Jimmy Carter calls them to reconsider. So this Baptist leader, more than anyone else, can now claim the title of a modern-day Moses, willing to lead the Jews from slavery to freedom. Carter stands as a fine example of what the ancient rabbis called “a righteous gentile.”
A growing number of Jews, in Israel and the U.S., publicly agree with Carter that Israel must reach a peace agreement with a Palestinian government representing all Palestinian people. That government must include a significant element from Hamas, the party that the Palestinians democratically elected to lead them, if Israel is every to have real peace and security. The sooner Israel negotiates with Hamas, the more lives can be saved.
As a recent editorial in the prestigious Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz said, Israel’s continuing attacks in Gaza are “only out of revenge.” They lead to “retaliation with numerous casualties, which leads to another attack, and so on and so forth, as if it were an endless gang war. … The only way to ensure the safety of the people living near the Gaza border is through a political effort to reach a cease-fire agreement.”
The editorial concluded with the crucial point: A negotiated truce “may create a different atmosphere in which Hamas, too, would have something to lose. Israel has not done everything it can to reach such an agreement.” That’s quite an understatement. In fact, Israel has done everything it can to rebuff or ignore Hamas’ leaders repeated calls for a long-term truce that would open the way to peace talks.
The Israeli resistance to Carter and negotiations has to be understood on several levels. Deepest of all is the level of symbolism. Too many Jews have staked their sense of cultural identity primarily on resisting “the anti-semites.” They would be hard pressed to know what it means to be a Jews if there were no enemy to fight. Fortunately their numbers are shrinking, especially here in the U.S. But the process of change is agonizingly slow.
That deep issue of identity leads to a complicated sets of maneuvers on the practical political level. Many nations and factions see their own interests served by excluding Hamas.
Because so many Jews feel the need to have an enemy, political leaders in Israel must at least appear to be standing fast against some enemy if they want to get elected. Therefore, they have to treat negotiations with Palestinians as a battle against an enemy, and they must come out with something that looks like victory. Whatever Palestinian state they agree to has to be demonstrably weaker than Israel and militarily, at least, under Israeli control. The Israelis hold out a serious hope that Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, who control the West Bank, might agree to such a one-side peace.
Any negotiation with Hamas would complicate matters for Israel. It would signal that Hamas is a legitimate political party and a significant political player deserving a place at the table. But Hamas would insist on more stringent and equal terms for a final-status agreement than Fatah. So the Israeli government is determined to exclude Hamas from any negotiations. The best way to do that is to deny Hamas any hint of political legitimacy by labeling them a mere “terrorist” group.
Fatah is more than happy to play along with Israel in hopes of destroying its rival Hamas, which would leave Fatah in total control of Palestinian political life. Egypt supports Fatah, fearing that a democratically elected Islamist government right next door would give a major boost to the powerful Islamist parties in Egypt, which the government there has been suppressing violently for years.
The Bush administration is just as afraid of legitimizing any Islamist government. So it casts Hamas as part of the world-wide enemy, “Islamic extremism,” signaling that the U.S. will mobilize its immense power even against democratically elected Islamist governments. And the U.S. leads a global campaign of economic isolation that is bringing starvation and misery to over a million innocent victims in Gaza.
Bush and all the candidates bidding to succeed him agree in principle on this inhumane policy. Even Obama, who claims to be the candidate of “change,” criticized Carter and recited yet again the mandatory mantra of mainstream U.S. politics: “We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel’s destruction.”
In fact, there are surely behind-the-scenes negotiations with Hamas going on now (just as the Israelis secretly negotiated with Yassir Arafat’s officially tabooed PLO at Oslo in the early 1990s). Carter recently said that he knows some Israeli government officials are quite willing to meet with Hamas leaders. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Eli Yishai, openly sent word through Carter that he wants to meet with Hamas leaders.
According to Ha’aretz, Yishai’s Shas party would like to see a cease-fire (just what Hamas leaders have offered for years now) in order to “lessen pressure to reach a final-status agreement, which could lead to a coalition crisis with Shas.”
However Yishai could also aid a larger Israeli agenda of working out a secretly-arranged truce deal. Without it, Israel’s has only two options: either continue attacks in Gaza, which are disastrous politically and diplomatically while achieving no real military gain, or cease those attacks and appear “weak,” which would be disastrous politically for an Israeli government always under attack from the political right.
The Bush administration knows that the Israelis have to reach some truce agreement with Hamas, and the sooner the better. Again, the pressing need is to do it secretly, so that Hamas can be denied legitimacy. Perhaps that’s why, according to Carter, no U.S. officials objected to his plans until they became public knowledge. It’s OK as long as it remains secret.
In public, governments in Washington and Jerusalem are committed to keeping their people, and themselves, enslaved to an ideology of “fighting the evildoers.” With every other consideration — even peace and security — subordinated to that mythic vision of heroic battle, there is no exodus from the endless round of killing and counter-killing.
Hamas foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar suggested a way out this week in a Washington Post op-ed. “A ‘peace process’ with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently.”
The Post printed these words so that it could run an adjacent editorial denouncing their author as a “terrorist” who is clearly not interested in peace. To make their case, the Post’s editors treated al-Zahar’s words as preconditions for negotiation. Anyone really interested in peace would recognize that they are just a diplomat’s opening gambit and a suggested blueprint for a final-status agreement — the endgame of the negotiations, not the starting point.
Since al-Zahar’s words say nothing about Palestinians taking control inside Israel’s 1967 border, they are yet another in a long line of indirect signals from Hamas that, while it may never officially endorse Israel’s “right” to exist, it is quite ready to accept the fact that Israel does exist. In fact, his words generally match the final-status arrangement that most unbiased observers see as reasonable and inevitable.
This Passover, Carter’s meeting with the Hamas leaders offers a way for Israel to start down the path from the slavery of its own self-defeating ideology to the freedom of truly meaningful peace talks with Hamas as well as Fatah. As the Passover story tells us, the Israelites of old spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before they reached the promised land. Modern day Israel has already spent 41 years in the moral wilderness, as the military occupiers of another people’s land. Thousands have died, most of them Palestinians but far too many Israelis as well. Jimmy Carter is right. It’s time to end the wandering and begin to cross over to the promised land.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. chernus@colorado.edu
Carter’s Hamas Talks Could Aid Exodus to Peace
by Ira Chernus
Jews around the world sat down to their Passover seders this past weekend, commemorating their ancestors’ exodus from slavery to freedom. Yet right now the person who is doing more than anyone else to free the Jews is a devout Baptist, Jimmy Carter. The former president is meeting with leaders throughout the Middle East — including, most controversially, the top political leadership of the Hamas party. This has predictably angered the U.S. and Israeli governments and the U.S. mainstream press.
But they, like so many Jews, are still in slavery. The “Egypt” that enslaves them is a set of self-defeating beliefs in their own minds. They are enslaved to the notion that Hamas must be treated as pariah “terrorists,” and one must never talk with “terrorists.” That convenient tale prevents the Israeli government from entering peace negotiations. It keeps Israeli Jews trapped in the continuing risks and tensions of a state-of-siege mentality that prevents the exodus they need so badly now: moving from insecurity to genuine peace and security.
In a larger sense, the view of Hamas as a party so evil that no one may even talk with it keeps many Jews in a state of spiritual slavery. It reinforces their long-standing habit of defining Jewish identity primarily in terms of radical vulnerability, as if the only meaningful way to be Jewish were to stand firm against an enemy and always be ready to shoot at that enemy.
This slavery is especially tragic because it is self-imposed. It arises not from objective perception of facts imposed from outside, but from choices that Jews themselves make, choices that Jimmy Carter calls them to reconsider. So this Baptist leader, more than anyone else, can now claim the title of a modern-day Moses, willing to lead the Jews from slavery to freedom. Carter stands as a fine example of what the ancient rabbis called “a righteous gentile.”
A growing number of Jews, in Israel and the U.S., publicly agree with Carter that Israel must reach a peace agreement with a Palestinian government representing all Palestinian people. That government must include a significant element from Hamas, the party that the Palestinians democratically elected to lead them, if Israel is every to have real peace and security. The sooner Israel negotiates with Hamas, the more lives can be saved.
As a recent editorial in the prestigious Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz said, Israel’s continuing attacks in Gaza are “only out of revenge.” They lead to “retaliation with numerous casualties, which leads to another attack, and so on and so forth, as if it were an endless gang war. … The only way to ensure the safety of the people living near the Gaza border is through a political effort to reach a cease-fire agreement.”
The editorial concluded with the crucial point: A negotiated truce “may create a different atmosphere in which Hamas, too, would have something to lose. Israel has not done everything it can to reach such an agreement.” That’s quite an understatement. In fact, Israel has done everything it can to rebuff or ignore Hamas’ leaders repeated calls for a long-term truce that would open the way to peace talks.
The Israeli resistance to Carter and negotiations has to be understood on several levels. Deepest of all is the level of symbolism. Too many Jews have staked their sense of cultural identity primarily on resisting “the anti-semites.” They would be hard pressed to know what it means to be a Jews if there were no enemy to fight. Fortunately their numbers are shrinking, especially here in the U.S. But the process of change is agonizingly slow.
That deep issue of identity leads to a complicated sets of maneuvers on the practical political level. Many nations and factions see their own interests served by excluding Hamas.
Because so many Jews feel the need to have an enemy, political leaders in Israel must at least appear to be standing fast against some enemy if they want to get elected. Therefore, they have to treat negotiations with Palestinians as a battle against an enemy, and they must come out with something that looks like victory. Whatever Palestinian state they agree to has to be demonstrably weaker than Israel and militarily, at least, under Israeli control. The Israelis hold out a serious hope that Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, who control the West Bank, might agree to such a one-side peace.
Any negotiation with Hamas would complicate matters for Israel. It would signal that Hamas is a legitimate political party and a significant political player deserving a place at the table. But Hamas would insist on more stringent and equal terms for a final-status agreement than Fatah. So the Israeli government is determined to exclude Hamas from any negotiations. The best way to do that is to deny Hamas any hint of political legitimacy by labeling them a mere “terrorist” group.
Fatah is more than happy to play along with Israel in hopes of destroying its rival Hamas, which would leave Fatah in total control of Palestinian political life. Egypt supports Fatah, fearing that a democratically elected Islamist government right next door would give a major boost to the powerful Islamist parties in Egypt, which the government there has been suppressing violently for years.
The Bush administration is just as afraid of legitimizing any Islamist government. So it casts Hamas as part of the world-wide enemy, “Islamic extremism,” signaling that the U.S. will mobilize its immense power even against democratically elected Islamist governments. And the U.S. leads a global campaign of economic isolation that is bringing starvation and misery to over a million innocent victims in Gaza.
Bush and all the candidates bidding to succeed him agree in principle on this inhumane policy. Even Obama, who claims to be the candidate of “change,” criticized Carter and recited yet again the mandatory mantra of mainstream U.S. politics: “We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel’s destruction.”
In fact, there are surely behind-the-scenes negotiations with Hamas going on now (just as the Israelis secretly negotiated with Yassir Arafat’s officially tabooed PLO at Oslo in the early 1990s). Carter recently said that he knows some Israeli government officials are quite willing to meet with Hamas leaders. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Eli Yishai, openly sent word through Carter that he wants to meet with Hamas leaders.
According to Ha’aretz, Yishai’s Shas party would like to see a cease-fire (just what Hamas leaders have offered for years now) in order to “lessen pressure to reach a final-status agreement, which could lead to a coalition crisis with Shas.”
However Yishai could also aid a larger Israeli agenda of working out a secretly-arranged truce deal. Without it, Israel’s has only two options: either continue attacks in Gaza, which are disastrous politically and diplomatically while achieving no real military gain, or cease those attacks and appear “weak,” which would be disastrous politically for an Israeli government always under attack from the political right.
The Bush administration knows that the Israelis have to reach some truce agreement with Hamas, and the sooner the better. Again, the pressing need is to do it secretly, so that Hamas can be denied legitimacy. Perhaps that’s why, according to Carter, no U.S. officials objected to his plans until they became public knowledge. It’s OK as long as it remains secret.
In public, governments in Washington and Jerusalem are committed to keeping their people, and themselves, enslaved to an ideology of “fighting the evildoers.” With every other consideration — even peace and security — subordinated to that mythic vision of heroic battle, there is no exodus from the endless round of killing and counter-killing.
Hamas foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar suggested a way out this week in a Washington Post op-ed. “A ‘peace process’ with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently.”
The Post printed these words so that it could run an adjacent editorial denouncing their author as a “terrorist” who is clearly not interested in peace. To make their case, the Post’s editors treated al-Zahar’s words as preconditions for negotiation. Anyone really interested in peace would recognize that they are just a diplomat’s opening gambit and a suggested blueprint for a final-status agreement — the endgame of the negotiations, not the starting point.
Since al-Zahar’s words say nothing about Palestinians taking control inside Israel’s 1967 border, they are yet another in a long line of indirect signals from Hamas that, while it may never officially endorse Israel’s “right” to exist, it is quite ready to accept the fact that Israel does exist. In fact, his words generally match the final-status arrangement that most unbiased observers see as reasonable and inevitable.
This Passover, Carter’s meeting with the Hamas leaders offers a way for Israel to start down the path from the slavery of its own self-defeating ideology to the freedom of truly meaningful peace talks with Hamas as well as Fatah. As the Passover story tells us, the Israelites of old spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before they reached the promised land. Modern day Israel has already spent 41 years in the moral wilderness, as the military occupiers of another people’s land. Thousands have died, most of them Palestinians but far too many Israelis as well. Jimmy Carter is right. It’s time to end the wandering and begin to cross over to the promised land.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. chernus@colorado.edu
13 April 2008
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
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
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