Jimmy Carter Doesn't Get It

Cal Thomas
Thursday, April 24, 2008

Just what about total annihilation of the Jews by Palestinian, Arab and Muslim people does Jimmy Carter not understand? Carter's latest leap into the foreign policy breach resulted in his declaration that the terrorist organization Hamas had accepted Israel's "right to exist," if Israel occupied a Palestinian state on Palestinian territories and retreated to pre-1967 Arab-Israeli war borders, borders changed after Israel was attacked by some of the very people who still want the nation's elimination. The working strategy of Israel's enemies is: if at first you don't succeed in killing enough Jews, then try, try again.
AHamas immediately denied Carter's claim it is willing to recognize Israel and introduced the usual caveats about Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, "right of return" for "Palestinian refugees" and so forth. We've heard it all before. Israel's and our enemies tell us what we want to hear while continuing their terrorist and murderous acts in order to achieve their objectives.

Carter has a history of believing (and smooching) murderous thugs. He's kissed and/or met with the late Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev (Carter expressed surprise that Brezhnev had lied to him about invading Afghanistan in 1979. Memo to Carter: dictators lie and so do totalitarian groups like Hamas); the late Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, Hamas' political leader, Khalid Mashaal and North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, who he falsely claimed had agreed to suspend his nuclear weapons program. In each of these meetings, Carter has served the interests, not of peace, or of his own country, but the interests of the dictatorial regimes whose prestige has been elevated by the visit of an American ex-president.

The false premise on which all negotiations with Islamic terrorists have been based is that the terrorists lack something that, if they got it, would bring about instant peace, reconciliation and the study of war no more. This is wishful thinking bordering on self-delusion. Despite multiple concessions over many years, peace overtures, goodwill gestures and offering up of land captured from the very people who have tried before and will try again to destroy Israel, many on the political left in Israel, Europe and America cling to the fiction that it is only Israel that is an impediment to "peace."

People who are not fully aware of the poison forced on Muslim and Arab people by their religious and political leaders would do well to take some time and inform themselves. The level of hatred and vilification for all things Jewish, Christian and Western sounds like the stuff out of a Ku Klux Klan handbook. Young children are radicalized in their first school year with appeals that they become martyrs in order to expunge Jewish "filth" from the region and do Allah's will. This is what we and the Jewish people face. If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, all our good intentions will produce is a superhighway.

Jimmy Carter thinks he is doing God's will by "loving" his enemies. The expectation behind that biblical instruction is that such an act will soften the heart of the enemy. But evil does not respond this way. What evil does is to take these acts (evil people know the commands, too, because they have studied us more than we have studied them) and use such notions to achieve their objectives. They will tell us whatever we want to hear in order to get their way. They believe the Koran allows them to lie to "infidels."

Why won't we understand this? Converts from Islam regularly warn us. Why do we persist in believing their lies when the only thing they have been consistent at is lying? If Carter trusts Hamas, whom else would he trust?

Nothing stinks as badly as a perishable item that has passed its "sell-by" date. That describes Jimmy Carter. His foreign policy was a failure when he was president, most notably his approach to Iran, which toppled that regime and gave us what we face now. Now, as ex-president, he continues to cause damage and undermine his country's foreign policy.

It is said we only have one president at a time. Apparently, Jimmy Carter thinks otherwise.





Cal Thomas is co-author (with Bob Beckel) of the forthcoming book, "Common Ground: How to Stop the Partisan War That is Destroying America"