Say Anything Blog

Last week, the single most unjustifiably self-righteous former president in our nation’s history, Jimmy Carter, went out of his way to piss off the US government and our allies, the Israelis, by staging meetings in Damascus and Cairo with leaders of the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas.

After the meetings, Carter announced with customary fanfare that he had achieved a breakthrough.

Mr. Carter… announced what appeared to be a significant concession in an address yesterday to the Israeli Council on Foreign Relations.

Hamas (according to Carter) “said they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders if approved by Palestinians, and that they would accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor in peace, provided the agreements negotiated by [Palestinian Authority] President [Mahmoud] Abbas were submitted to the Palestinians,”.

Predictably, Carter has been proven wrong.

Last week’s meeting between former US president Jimmy Carter and the exiled leader of Hamas militants did not produce any results, Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki said here Wednesday.

“President Carter came to the region thinking he could achieve something. Unfortunately president Carter left without anything concrete,” he told a conference in the Spanish capital.

“The only thing he achieved was permission on the part of Khaled Meshaal of Hamas to deliver a letter from a detained Israeli soldier to his family. Nothing else,” he said.

“Hamas offered nothing to president Carter. They reiterated the same positions. There was no change on the part of Hamas,” Malki added.

(Carter) was unable to secure a ceasefire or a prisoner exchange for an Israeli soldier seized by Gaza militants in 2006, but on Monday Carter said Hamas told him it would recognise Israel’s right to exist such a deal was approved by a Palestinian vote.

Just hours later Meshaal told a press conference in Damascus that Hamas would not recognise the Jewish state and would insist on the right of return for 4.5 million Palestinian refugees.

“We accept a state on the [1967] line with Jerusalem as capital, real sovereignty and full right of return for refugees, but without recognizing Israel,” Al Jazeera quoted him as saying.

If one wasn’t aware of the million and millions donated to the Carter Center by the oil-rich Arabs, one might wonder just why Carter bothered with the trip at all.