Editor,
Last week, former President Jimmy Carter began a self-appointed diplomacy mission on what he refers to as the road to peace.
Carter's private Middle East peace process was criticized by the U.S. administration, and Israeli officials chose not to be included. During an interview with Haaretz, Carter said, "The most important single foreign policy goal in my life has been to bring peace in Israel and peace and justice to Israel's neighbors. I have done everything I could, in office and out. The security of Israel is a paramount and integral issue."
In an interview with Aaron David Miller, who, for the past two decades, has played a central role in U.S. efforts to negotiate Arab-Israeli peace, Carter said that since he was three years old, he has had the Holy Land as a focal point in his religious life.
Miller devotes a chapter in his book, The Much Too Promised Land, listing his experience working with Carter.
Contrary to the two previous presidential mediators - Henry Kissinger and Howard Baker - with whom Miller worked, Carter was determined from the beginning of his presidency to make Arab-Israeli peace a personal mission.
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Given Carter's religious convictions and experience, we would expect him to be capable of better judgment concerning the Israelis and Palestinians.
But while portraying Hamas as rational and reasonable, he views the Israeli government and Hamas as morally equivalent. Although Carter is sincerely interested in peace, his knowledge of Hamas is sorely lacking and naive.
For example, article three of the Hamas Charter of 1988 states, "The basic structure of the Islamic Resistance Movement consists of Muslims who are devoted to Allah.... They have raised the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors in order to extricate the country and the people from the (oppressors') desecration, filth and evil."
Article nine adds: "The state of truth has disappeared and was replaced by the state of evil. Nothing has remained in its right place, for when Islam is removed from the scene, everything changes. As to the objectives: discarding the evil, crushing it and defeating it, so that truth may prevail, homelands revert (to their owners), calls for prayer to be heard from their mosques, announcing the reinstitution of the Muslim state. Thus people and things will revert to their true place."
Article twelve says: "Conferences (Peace) initiatives, so-called peaceful solutions and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over the homeland as they fight their Jihad.... The Islamist Resistant Movement does not believe that those conferences are capable of responding to demands.... Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint unbelievers as arbiters in the lands of Islam. Since when did unbelievers do justice to the Believers?"
We wonder if Carter has read the Hamas Charter.
Mae Eye
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