Loosening the Carter Pin
Former President Jimmy Carter argued that "Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns." Blue Crab Boulevard and Captain Ed and Power Line comment.
Carter said the American-Israeli-European consensus to reopen direct aid to the new government in the West Bank, but to deny the same to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, represented an "effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples."
Jimmy Carter's absurd remarks really follow from a more fundamental absurdity. The idea that America, Israel and Europe are at peace with the Palestinian Authority, whatever that might be. In fairness, that fiction has been perpetrated by none other than the US, Europe and Israel themselves and encapsulated in one of the most dishonest phrases of modern diplomacy: "the peace process". If the US were truly "at peace" with the Palestinian Authority -- whatever that mean -- then Carter would be be perfectly correct in saying that neither the US, Europe nor Israel had any business meddling in the internal affairs of Gaza and the West Bank.
But in the fictive world of Middle Eastern diplomacy, this "peace process" consists entirely of the US, Europe and Israel declaring they are at "peace" with the factions in the Palestinian Authority, while the factions in the Palestinian Authority consistently and steadfastly declare their intention to war upon Israel and the United States. It is really a state of war which a lying diplomacy has managed to represent as a state of peace.
Bereft of this fundamental understanding, or perhaps because he is at the root of this very deceit, Jimmy Carter can argue, with a straight face that the US, Europe and Israel go on to fund the agency of their destruction. To help unify the Palestinian People -- including the West Bank -- under the legitimate authority of Hamas. To send them monies with when they have already publicly declared their intention to kill every Jew in Israel and any man Jimmy Carter once swore to defend and protect. This is where the absurdity of the premises have led. Here is my understanding of Jimmy Carter's argument. Give our countries enemies, who we call friends, a new stropped straight-razor and let them cut our throats. Sorry. But I disagree.
posted by wretchardthecat at 6/19/2007 05:14:00 PM
31 Comments:
Wretchard: "Here is my understanding of Jimmy Carter's argument. Give our countries enemies, who we call friends, a new stropped straight-razor and let them cut our throats."
…Or, to put things even more succinctly:
Carter is non compos mentis.
Blogger is going through a conniption and it is hard to edit the main post, which is full of typos right now, but sometimes I wonder whether Carter has finally come to believe in his own fantasies. The real danger of all lies is that we eventually take them for the truth. A story we have told about our past. A claim we make about a fact. A vision we hold before the public.
At the beginning of a lie we can still sometimes distinguish the truth. With the passage of time even the liar believes his lie. So we are peace with Hamas, even though they swear, by everything that is holy to them, that they want to kill us. We should give them money because they are a legitimate government. Well Tonga is a legitimate government too. Maybe more legitimate than Palestine's. But nobody has to give Tonga money. A nation gives away taxpayer monies on the basis of its self-interest. What pray tell, is our self interest in arming Hamas?
But to be perfectly fair to Jimmy Carter, he is simply taking the standard diplomatic line to its logical conclusion. If the result is lunacy it is only because the premises themselves are lunatic. The trouble is, most diplomats are still dimly aware of the deception. But for Carter, on the other hand, both the sea and sky have fused and the horizon is no more.
Hitler was appointed Chancellor in accordance with the Weimar constitution and earned his mandates repeatedly in plebiscites following the seizure of power. And of course, the Nazis were far more organized in their political and military showdowns too. So no doubt Jimmy would have approved of him as well.
Wretchard,
It really is this simple.
America and the West are huge. We dominate commerce. We have a population of around a billion. We have conquerored much of the world at one point or another. We are wealthy beyond the measure of history. Our culture is unconquerored.
We can take a much bigger hit than 9/11, 7/7, 3/3, and a few Sbarros eateries in Israel.
So, we will wait till the conflicted Left finds their line in the sand crossed.
A few million here and there. Maybe a billion, eh…
A true WWIII…
I wonder whether Carter has finally come to believe in his own fantasies.
Yes, probably: unless he's a sociopath, cognitive dissonance would require that he actually believe his puerile pontifications. Then again, and for much the same reason, he undoubtedly believes that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because he is a veritable avatar of peace. He's not necessarily deceitful, just witless although (as I think you would agree, Wretchard) in the end the distinction isn't terribly meaningful.
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not to fret, the islamic nutjobs will not let us down in the end, no matter what a crazy ole coot like dhimmi jimmi says...
in ONE thing I can say, is that these "islamic true believers" do truly believe and will do something even more blood thirsty than steven king on crack could imagine....
Since these retards have gutted, drilled, chopped, blown up, tossed over board and building, even their BROTHER moslems and have attempted to do the same to ever other person from jew, hindu, christian, athiest, buddist, pagan, satanist and wiccan they could kidnap, it stands to reason these same retards will never let us down in their sole ability to slice and dice humans like warm meat loaf....
patience, even dhimmi jimmi will wake up one day... most likely that day when they are dicing and slicing HIM... the saying from a previous post comes to mind... "but i aint no jooooo"
"America and the West are huge...Our culture is unconquered."
How powerful will the West be when Europe is
Eurabia'd? At present rates of Islamic procreation and immigration that's about two generations away. Then America will stand alone. And the pressures to "compromise" will increase and become insistent. After all, reasonable people will say, you don't need freedom to live. Not really. And so we will submit.
No more manna from western heaven, please, but we should encourage The Carter Center to relocate to Gaza. Jimmy and His people could do so much good over there.
Sadly, Carter is more concerned with his legacy. If he admits that the "peace process" sham or even that the palestinians (small p) cannot really be trusted, his peace prize will be as impotent as he. After all, it's all about him.
One cannot make peace with those whom one is already at peace. One makes peace with those whom one is at war. A peace process is indicative of war, or at the very least of a peace not achieved.
A peace process should not be confused for genuine peace any more than process cheese should be confused for genuine Jarlsberg.
jpost hates Jimmah today. This op-ed basically blames terrorism as we know it on him: Father of the Iranian revolution
Carter will never wake up and understand what he has done. He lives in another world.
No one need be surprised about Jimmy Carter’s penchant for evil. Carter is not only a good ole’ anti-Semite he is the bought-and-paid-for stooge of the same Saudi Sheik whose money was so dirty that even Harvard finally gave in to the brave and persistant Rachel Fish and refused to take it. See Dershowitz: http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28044
There's no need to call President Carter names. He does a good enough job himself.
Try to understand this from Carter's perspective. Most conservatives will have nothing to do with him, and are openly insulting. Leftists adore him, and do all int heir power to boost his ego. His natural indecisiveness, pacifism, human conceit and good intentions does the rest.
Someone made a connection between Carter's comments regarding Hamas and the Germans under Nazism, as if to profess the absurdity of Carter's reasoning. Note, however, that at the peak of Hitler's "democratic and highly organised" regime, a political figure very similar in disposition to this ex-president - one Neville Chamberlain - came to exactly the same conclusion, and with as much heartfelt sincerity.
The main difference - and we should be very thankful for it - is that Carter's days of being able to decisively affect his country's foreign policy decisions are long past. At the time, Chamberlain was the acting prime minister of his nation.
The results are of course well known. Food for thought.
Wretchard -- there is enough cumulative evidence to show that, conclusively, Jimmy Carter is an anti-Semite.
Prof. Pipes and Prof Dershowitz have done a far better job of painting Jimmy Carter in all his narrow-minded, bigoted, hate-filled, intolerant, fundamentalist "glory."
But it all boils down to this: demanding Israel be perfect while excusing savagery from it's enemies. Who are, not so coincidentally, our enemies.
There is within Christianity a particularly hate-filled degeneracy masquerading as "pacifism" that Frank Miller depicted quite accurately in "300." Jimmy Carter resembles nothing more than the Ephors of that film. The soul brother of Father Coughlin and Lord Haw Haw.
"...Jimmy Carter’s penchant for evil."
He is the most wicked person to have been President...and has not let up since leaving the office.
On cue, Jimmy Carter steps forward and demonstrates again that there is no fool like an old fool [h/t: Ben Franklin].
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......
whiskey_199:
I "accumulated" all the evidence I needed about Carter's antisemitism many years ago when I saw him being interviewed by Bill Moyers. It wasn't even the berating of American Jews for supporting Israel that got me. He then started referring to Jews as "the Chosen People", his voice and demeanor dripping with sarcasm, venom, and contempt. I couldn't believe I was hearing this Stormfront stuff from a former POTUS. There is *asbolutely no question* that Carter is a fanatic, dyed-in-the-wool antisemtic hatemonger on a par with Buchanan, Duke and Farrakhan. Much worse, really, because of his undeserved stature.
The Peace Process is unalloyed Orwellian Newspeak.
Wretchard is correct. The Peace Process is a sham meant to hide a fifty-year-old war that the West refuses to acknowledge, in order to protect sources of petroleum.
Fatah and Hamas are feuding brothers in arms playing a game of Good Cop, Bad Cop against the West. They agree that they want to kill all the Jews and Americans but disagree on how to do it. And when they were trapped together in one country, Gaza, without convenient Jews or Americans to murder and terrorize, they decided to kill each other. When competing Jihadists are penned together they end up killing each other. This seems like a situation where the US should be playing both sides against each other to encourage them both to make Gaza as miserable as possible.
Further, instead of continuing to appease whenever Fatah or Hamas unleashes a new terror attack, the Israeli and Western method of negotiation needs to change to the takeaway. Every time the Jihadists break an agreement something comes off the table.
More at Jimmy Carter and Hamas, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G
The racism Mr. Carter is exhibiting may be less about Jews than about their neighbors. That is, his willingness to excuse the barbarous tactics of Israel's neighbors may come from his dehumanization of Arabs whereas he points fingers of condemnation against those he regards as human beings.
I think Mr. Carter is applying the old "White Man's Burden" to Jews as well as to Christians. And just like many men of privilege, he fails to comprehend the real costs of setting a higher moral standard for the "white race" than for other people. "Liberal" white racism in the form of masochistic anti-white hatred is not an uncommon reaction against the white racism of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan.
I think Mr. Carter's problem is that he sets the moral bar for Jews so high that they cannot possibly meet his standards. In this, he is not much different from Mahatma Gandhi. In other words, Mr. Carter may feel genuinely aggrieved that Jews aren't complete models of perfection given that they are called the Chosen People. This is a man who sees segregation in Israel and cannot see any difference between discrimination against Arabs now and the Jim Crow of his youth. What he fails to comprehend is that if black activists had used suicide bombing against white people during the Civil Rights Era, the white American reaction would have been far less restrained than the modern Israeli response. After all, if non-white peoples are to be held to lower standards than the white race, all moral responsibility rests in the Chosen People, whether that chosen people is white Israeli or white American. Moreover, if all moral agency exists in white people, any and all barbarity from non-whites must necessarily be attributed to the sins of white people. Thus, all Palestinian (non-white) atrocities must be attributed to Israeli (white) moral failure.
Although I would argue that the practical effect of Mr. Carter's myopia is anti-Semitism, one ought not confuse the cause for the effect. To paraphrase Dr. Frank N Furter, Mr. Carter appears to lack the historic cause of Judeophobia, but not the symptom.
With all respect, Alexis, I think you may have been taken in a bit by Carter's phony pose of piety and self-righteousness. Try Occam's Razor - Carter just really, *really*, REALLY hates Jews.
Above should have been "phony pose of piety and righteousness" - OF COURSE he's self-righteous!
Hi -
It's not just Carter, although he certainly shares a lot of the blame.
It's the whole mind set of the nattering nabobs, those who are now calling for the West "not to choose sides", even the FT has called for this.
They're wrong, of course: see
http://21stcenturyschizoidman.blogspot.com/2007/06/ft-really-doesnt-get-it.html
for more... (sorry for the shameless plug...)
Jimmy Carter is the ultimate Zero Sum anti-American. The core of his political and economic philosophy is that every penny of wealth owned by an American is at the expense of some oppressed third worlder. If Americans had less then the rest of the world could have more. I have a vivid memory of one of his Sweater Talks when he said that "Americans have to settle for less." He meant it.
I believe that he used his Presidency to deliberately engineer the maximum harm to the USA. Interest rates were close to 20%. Heating oil cost a fortune. Business expansion was dead. The stock market was in the tank. The Soviets were marching into Afganistan. The Shah was cached. The Communists were running amok in Central America.
During Carter's term, and most likely with his consent, Ted Kennedy made overtures to the Soviets to work closely with them in a disinformation campaign to villify the Republicans and keep the Democrats in power through the 80s. Carter isn't doing anything new.
Under postmodern whackoism Carter is a good guy because his intentions are pure.
I never thought I'd agree with Jimmy Carter, even in the result, but here he's right - the Palestinians are one people, united in hatred of Israel and the West and absolutely committed to achieving the downfall of both, by whatever means necessary. The only difference between Hamas and Fatah is that they advocate different means. Hamas is open, Fatah deceptive. Decades of evidence prove this point. To think that one can negotiate in any meaningful way with Fatah is suicidal self-deception.
Get this - clearly, the ordinary people of Gaza really do hate Israel:
Scared Gazans Clamoring to Enter Israel
From Associated PressJune 20, 2007 4:36 AM EDT
EREZ CROSSING, Gaza Strip - Israel's new defense minister ordered the army on Wednesday to allow into Israel any of the hundreds of Gazans holed up at a fetid crossing who might desperately need medical treatment.
A teenager with leukemia was on his way through shortly after, the military said.
In related news, Israel's Supreme Court was hearing a petition Wednesday by a human rights group, demanding that Israeli authorities offer immediate medical treatment to 26 critically ill Palestinians hospitalized in Gaza.
About 200 Gazans, petrified by the chaos in the Hamas-controlled coastal strip, have been camped out for six days in a tunnel on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing with Israel, pleading with Israeli authorities to grant them safe passage to the West Bank.
Some in the tunnel fear their lives are in danger because of their Fatah loyalties; others seek a better life than volatile Gaza can offer.
Among their number are people wounded in gunbattles between the rival factions.
Carter is like Herpes, he keeps coming back to irritate.
Why can't our politicians just retire and shut up!
A little off topic, but James Kirchick had a good article in the 6/18 Weekly Standard about how the Carter Administration handled Mugabe and Zimbabwe.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/746zsgtg.asp
It is hard to believe an officer in the U.S. Nuclear Navy, a submariner, can turn out to be such an incompetent president and utter idiot!
When he was given the Nobel Peace Prize, I called the Carter Center in Atlanta and told them the only reason he deserved it was because, as President of the United States, the birth of the Trident Submarine, MX Missle and the Tomahawk Cruise Missle became reality.
Gotta give him credit for calming the nation during the Three Mile island meltdown. He was eminently qualified to deal with that problem.
Our HUMINT capability was gutted on his watch too.
Ironic, aint it? I love the irony of naming a spy sub after him too!
Salaam!
About the 200 Gazans:
They're not Gazans. They're Russians, Ukrainians, and other ex-Soviets who married Arab students studying in the former Soviet Union.
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