Carter's arrogance knows no bounds

If Jimmy Carter was not an arrogant fool he would see the damage he is doing to democracy, freedom, the people of Israel and his own country.

His recent tour of the Middle East as was, for instance, like his freelance “diplomacy work” during the Clinton administration, an impingement and a roadblock on the country’s foreign policy aims and hurts any possible progress we may make with rogue regimes such as Hamas, never mind stand any chance of peace in the Middle East.

Carter’s arrogance knows no bounds. It is not that he feels he is still the president, but the fact that it is only he who can do the job no matter who sits in the Oval Office (Democrat or Republican). There is this feeling of self-anointing; that only he can see what the rest of us can’t; history teaches him no lessons.

Carter was a major thorn-in-the-side to the Clinton administration. The problems of a nuclear North Korea holding a gun to the head of the rest of the world can be traced back to Carter’s negotiations with Kim Il Sung. We are still paying for Carter’s fecklessness now.

Then there was his relationship with the man who invented modern-day terror, Yasser Arafat. Carter on this recent visit laid a wreath at his tomb.

The obvious seems to escape Carter. For instance, considering that Hamas is committed to a policy of jihad, that their charter specifically rules out peace conferences and negotiation –it is a totalitarian ideology committed to killing Jews in a way the Nazis could only dream of– what does Carter expect to get out of a meeting with Hamas or its leader, Khalid Mashaal? What is there to negotiate with an organisation whose position is not only set in stone but is also an anathema to Western civilised values? Has Carter ever read the Charter to which Mashaal and Hamas are devoted, unwavering and committed to?

What is Carter’s value to Hamas? Why, he should ask, would they want to speak to him when in the past they have refused all others?

The reason Mashaal will sit down with Carter is because the ex-president will offer a sympathetic ear. Not that Mashaal seeks sympathy; what he seeks is to reinforce his well crafted propaganda and what better than to have this propaganda legitimised as it is repeated from the mouth of a former U.S. president. Carter will even go above and beyond, maybe, as he did with his old friend, Arafat. Carter will probably offer Mashaal help in crafting his message, working on his PR or spin with the West. Carter, as a useful idiot to the extremist Arab cause, will duly perform for Mashaal.

It won’t be the last we will hear of Mashaal and Carter. I predict that as Arafat, Kim and a host of dictators before him, Mashaal will court Carter by phone and letter. Carter will build a relationship with this terror master in a deluded sense that he is furthering peace when in fact he is fostering and furthering terror by an admitted enemy of the United States.

Carter is more than just a public joke or nuisance. He almost goes out of his way to besmirch his country. But it is one thing to lower himself to the level of accepting a Nobel Peace prize simply as a way to allow the Nobel Committee to insult a sitting U.S. president. It is quite another to frustrate the foreign policy aims of an elected chief executive of one’s country (especially when one is a former holder of that office himself).

America was founded on a principle that we, as a people, were self-determinant and could run our own affairs. Even George Washington, slightly more qualified for the presidency and ranked slightly higher than Carter in the presidential stakes, knew when his time was over; it was Washington who insisted on leaving the stage of the presidency after two-terms even though the people would have had him for much longer. Carter meanwhile was rejected after one term. It really is time he left the stage.