PoliGazette

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations struck back hard at former US President Jimmy Carter, for meeting with leaders of the terrorist organization Hamas recently. In a luncheon brieving for reporters , sponsored by The Israel Project, Ambassador Dan Gillerman said that Carter “went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas.”

The ambassador’s harsh words for Carter came days after the ex-president met with Mashaal for seven hours in Damascus to negotiate a cease-fire with Gaza’s Hamas rulers. Carter then called Mashaal on Monday to try to get him to agree to a one-month truce without conditions, but the Hamas leader rejected the idea.

The ambassador called last weekend’s encounter “a very sad episode in American history.”

He said it was “a shame” to see Carter, who had done “good things” as a former president, “turn into what I believe to be a bigot.”

I agree with TigerHawk that there’s little to no other explanation possible for Carter’s behavior, perfectly described by Bernard-Henri Levy for the Wall Street Journal :

 The problem is not that he is, or is not, talking to the Syrians – everyone does it to some degree.

It isn’t that he went to Damascus to meet with the exiled head of Hamas – everyone, including the Israelis, will one day have to do that too, in accordance with that old rule which says that in the end it is with your enemies not your friends that you have to come to an understanding and make peace.

No.

The problem is how Jimmy Carter went about it.

The problem is the spectacular and useless embrace he exchanged with the senior Hamas dignitary, Nasser Shaer, in Ramallah.

The problem is the wreath he laid piously at the grave of Yasser Arafat, who, as Mr. Carter knows better than anyone else, was a real obstacle to peace.

It is that in Cairo, if we are to believe another Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, whose statement has so far not been denied, Mr. Carter apparently described Hamas as a “national liberation movement” – this party which has made a cult of death, a mythology of blood and race, and an anti-Semitism along the lines of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the linchpin of its ideology.

The problem is also the formidable nose thumbing he got from Hamas’s exiled leader, Khaled Mashaal, who, at the very moment he was receiving Mr. Carter, also triggered the first car bombing in several months in Keren Shalom on the Gaza strip – and that this event elicited from poor Mr. Carter, all tangled up in his small-time mediator calculations, not one disapproving or empathetic word.

The former president, it will be recalled, is an old hand at this sort of thing.