Joseph Farah WND
There’s nothing I hate more than cleaning up after Jimmy Carter’s verbal messes.
It’s really a full-time job. And I have several already.
But I couldn’t let this one go unanswered.
During a speech to Ireland’s eighth annual Forum on Human Rights, the 83-year-old former president called for recognition of one of the most vile, hateful, murderous terrorist groups in the world – Hamas, a strategic ally of both al-Qaida and Hezbollah.
Carter thinks it’s unfair the U.S., European Union and Israel have refused to recognize Hamas’ victory in the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections. The Islamists won 42 percent of the popular vote and a majority of parliamentary seats.
In fact, Carter doesn’t just think it’s unfair that those elections results were ignored. He thinks it is “criminal.”
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Frankly, Carter seems to be a fan of Hamas. He commended the group’s “superior skills and discipline” in routing Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction. He commended the group for being “shrewd in selecting candidates” in last year’s election.
Once again, the U.S. is the rogue – the criminal. To Carter, Hamas is a victim.
I will say this about U.S., European and Israeli policy toward the two Palestinian adversaries: It is foolish to choose sides between terrorist groups. It is foolish to think you can work with one terrorist group and not another. It is foolish to think Abbas’ Fatah is quantitatively more moral or trustworthy than Hamas.
I totally disagree with that premise. Quite frankly, if the goal is peace and freedom in the region – both for Israelis and Arabs – there is simply no substitute to destroying them both.
President Bush’s mistake – along with Israel and the EU – has been to believe that “democracy” can somehow bring peace and freedom to the Middle East. It cannot. It will not.
Groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad will use the polls to win power. But they will always use that power to create Islamist states that will kill, destroy and create mayhem for their non-Islamist citizens and their neighbors.
Islamists don’t value the will of the people. They value of the will of Allah, as only they can interpret it through a fundamentalist reading of the Quran.
Elections are only as good as the people who participate in them. America’s founders understood and explained this concept, but it is one we obviously must relearn in the 21st century. Only a moral people are capable of self-government.
Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany through elections. That didn’t make him a legitimate leader. Instead, his election was an indictment of the morality of the German people at that time in history. Likewise, Hamas’ electoral victories last year don’t make the murderers politically legitimate. They are an indictment of the morality of the Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank.
Having said that, however, it should be pointed out they didn’t have the option of voting for freedom-loving statesmen. Their choice was between the corruption represented by Abbas, a disciple of Yasser Arafat, and the unrelenting fanaticism of Hamas. They chose the latter.
Frankly, the world would have been better off had the Americans and Europeans minded their own business and not weighed in on the side of corruption.
Palestinian Arabs are taught to hate Jews – all of them – from the time they are infants. It is the central guiding principle in their education. They are taught to believe in jihad and to esteem the suicide bomber. Christians are infidels, too, and subject to widespread persecution throughout the Palestinian Authority.
What would one expect from an election held under such conditions?
Does it really matter who wins and who loses?
The truth is we all lose when election charades are held in such hateful authoritarian hellholes.
It’s wrong to choose sides between devils like these – wrong for Bush and wrong for Carter.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 and is filed under opinion.
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