First of all, someone here is lying. Benjamin Netanyahu says Jimmy Carter wanted to meet with him during his current visit to Israel, and Netanyahu refused.
Carter says he never wanted to meet with Netanyahu because it would be a waste of time, although he did admit that he asked to meet with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and got turned down.
My sense of it: Jimmy Carter is a liar. But then you would have to be if you're going to be an apologist for Hamas, and that sort of thing is right up Jimmeh's alley:
Former US president Jimmy Carter called Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal a strong proponent of the peace process Saturday, and said he wasn’t meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because it would be “a waste of time."
The president, who has been visiting Israel and the West Bank, met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Saturday but didn’t meet with Netanyahu or President Reuven Rivlin.
He told reporters that he didn’t ask to meet with Netanyahu or his government, and never has, because it would be a “waste of time.” He told Channel 2 in an interview broadcast Saturday that he requested to meet Rivlin, but the president’s office declined.
Israel officials said last week that Netanyahu and Rivlin had refused invitations to meet with Carter, who was described by an Israeli diplomatic source as “a disaster for Israel,” who holds “anti-Israel positions.”
Carter, who cancelled a planned visit to Gaza on this trip, said Saturday he “deplored” criminal acts by members of Hamas, but said he was looking to support moderate members of the group, which he said wasn’t a terrorist organization.
The statement that Hamas is not a terrorist organization is classic Carter. The easiest way to deal with an uncomfortable set of facts is to simply deny the facts exist. But I think the more noteworthy statement is the one about Mashaal supporting the "peace process." Sure. Of course he does, and that's easy to understand if you can grasp the massive distinction between the "peace process" and actual peace.
The so-called peace process involves all kinds of bad actors sitting around a table engaging the charade by which they presume to work toward "peace," all while their surrogates in the field are launching rockets toward Tel Aviv and blowing up buses in Jerusalem. And dunderheads like Jimmy Carter sit there at the table with them and give presumptive credibility to their presence. The "peace process" is the perfect cover for the likes of Hamas, which uses it to convince useful idiots they are not terrorists even as they continue to employ terrorist tactics on a continual basis.
The reason Netanyahu has little interest in the peace process is that he has learned the lessons of history and he knows what a crock it is. Even when you get the occasional agreement - Camp David in 1979, Oslo in 1993 - it doesn't change the basic dynamics of the Middle East, which is that Israel's enemies refuse to recognize its right to exist, and continue to seek new ways to destroy it.
Jimmy Carter is an evil man and a horrible human being because his mission in life is to bestow credibility upon the people who do this. You can say he's just a buffoon, and he is that, but that's no excuse for a man who has spent so many years on the global stage. The only way for him not to understand reality is for him to willfully deny it because he wants to keep helping these thugs. The only saving grace of this whole situation is that most people know what a fool he is and don't take him seriously, so Hamas can't actually attain much credibility as a result of Carter trying to bestow it.
But that doesn't get him off the hook. This jerk has been traveling the globe since left office looking for any opportunity to prop up tyrants and terrorists, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to Benjamin Netanyahu for calling him out and saying plainly what he really is.
A disaster. Shut up, Jimmy. And go away.
