Jimmy Carter is dead, and he leaves behind him a legacy of utter failure as president and beyond. Among his numerous disastrous policies still harming the world today are his decades of legitimizing terrorist Hamas and undermining Israel. While Americans eulogize a man with no major lasting accomplishment, some Israeli and Jewish outlets are more bitterly remembering an antisemitic politician who spent years backstabbing them to appease radical jihadis.
Carter received a Nobel Peace Prize after brokering a deeply flawed Arab-Israeli peace deal and thereafter always fancied himself an expert on the Middle East and the man most qualified to bring peace between the Jewish nation of Israel and its numerous Muslim enemies. His bungling promotion of jihadi entities, his campaign for countries to recognize genocidal terror group Hamas as legitimate, and his pressure on Israel to vacate areas that have become terror hotbeds under “Palestinian” control were all catastrophic.
Years before Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal launched the Oct. 7 massacre, Jimmy Carter met with them and claimed they weren’t really murderous terrorists. Carter’s book falsely accuses Israel of attempted apartheid and willfully ignores Hamas’s insistence that it will never give up until they have taken over all of Israel, genocidally if need be.
Under Jimmy Carter, Americans were held hostage by the Islamic regime in Iran for 444 days.
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) December 30, 2024
The hostages were only freed on January 20— Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day.
Carter supported Palestinian terrorism against Israelis and lied about an “apartheid.”
Carter was evil.
Just as Carter ensured the destruction of a dictatorial but pro-Western regime in Persia (now pro-terrorist Iran — for which some Iranians still hate him) — and failed to resolve the lengthy American hostage crisis, he helped to strengthen and legitimize terrorists who are now trying to wipe Israel off the map, a goal which they always avowed, even though Carter denied it.
“Demanding an end to all terrorism before final negotiations only guarantees they [the negotiations will] never happen,” Carter insanely asserted in 2003.
Flashback: Hamas Founder’s Son: U.S. Gaza Supporters Belong in 'Insane Asylum'
The Center for Israel Education (CIE) last year published an excellent and comprehensive analysis of Carter’s anti-Israel, pro-Hamas campaign over about 15 years in the early 2000s. Dr. Kenneth Stein, who personally attended at least one of the forums for Carter’s meetings with Palestinians and tried directly to convince Carter that his strategy was all wrong, wrote the piece.
Carter undermined other administrations’ strategies with Israel and Hamas too. Below is an interesting paragraph Stein drew from a 2009 New York Times piece about Carter’s press conference with Ismail Haniyeh, the top Hamas butcher finally assassinated this year:
Hamas welcomed Mr. Carter’s visit as a significant step in its quest for international legitimacy… Hamas leaders have said they will never recognize Israel, and will offer only a long-term truce, not a full-fledged peace treaty, in return for a Palestinian state…Carter said, “that in order to break the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, ‘first of all Hamas has to be accepted by the international community as a legitimate player in the future, and that is what I am trying to do today.’”
So Carter was promoting Hamas even while knowing that it refused to recognize the state of Israel and persisted in its goal of obliterating the world’s only Jewish nation (in contrast to some 50 Muslim countries). Islamic jihadis are the same yesterday, today, and forever because their own sacred texts endorse and encourage the killing of non-Muslims, especially Jews.
And of course, about 14 years after Carter met with Haniyeh and demanded recognition of Hamas, the terror group on Oct. 7, 2023, committed the worst day of slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Haniyeh was one of the most prominent Hamas leaders at the time of the heinous massacre. He and Meshaal are accused of terrorism regarding the Oct. 7 attack by the U.S. Justice Department.
Indeed, Khaled Meshaal coolly affirmed that the horrific atrocities that Hamas perpetrated — including raping women to death, burning babies alive, kidnapping civilians, and gunning down whole families — were “completely within Hamas's strategy.” This year, on the anniversary of Oct. 7, Meshaal called for a global jihad movement from the whole Arab world.
Flashback to 2008 and 2012, when Carter met with Meshaal. Indeed, CIE noted that Carter’s 2012 “long session” with Meshaal in Qatar included recognition of the fact that the Hamas leaders were “pleased” with the rise of Muslim Brotherhood jihadis in Egypt but still promoted Meshaal’s leadership over “Palestinians.” In 2008:
While Carter condemned attacks by Hamas as ‘despicable’ and ‘acts of terrorism’ in his speech yesterday, he sounded encouraged by his talks, which included meetings with the most powerful Hamas leader in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar, and its exiled head, Khaled Mishaal.
As recently as 2015, Carter said of Meshaal, “I don’t believe that he’s a terrorist. He’s strongly in favor of the peace process.” Under Meshaal’s watch, Palestinian terrorists committed over 5,300 terrorist attacks on Israelis in 2022 and the genocidal Oct. 7 attack in 2023, not to mention the ongoing war against Israel by Hamas and allies which has persistently targeted civilians (in contrast to Israel’s efforts to avoid killing jihad-loving Gazans).
CIE summed up the facts in a thought-provoking conclusion:
A fifteen-year mindset to embrace Hamas as a viable and legitimate political player evolved from former President Jimmy Carter, and from half a dozen other notable individuals, scholars, writers, think tank analysts, former US and European diplomats and scholars. Their belief was that Hamas would come around to negotiate with Israel. And that Israel should, in turn, negotiate with Hamas. The unanswered question is: What impact did those regular verbal endorsements have upon hamas intentions to destroy Israel? And did that embrace have an emboldening impact upon what transpired on October 7, 2023?
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