The Hamas Schmuckarter


In his address to the Guardian's Hay-on-Wye literary festival on the border between England and Wales, Jimmy Carter, the meddlesome ex-president extraordinaire, made some comments while discussing Iran’s nuclear program. Following a recent trip to the Middle East, where he met and exchanged hot kisses with members of Hamas, Carter says Israel has 150 nuclear weapons.

"The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union (Russia) has about the same, Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more,”

According to this source, it was unclear whether Carter was citing those estimates, offering his own independent assessment or drawing on US intelligence he would have had access to as president.

Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Aharon Ze'evi Farkash speculated that Carter's irresponsible comments could potentially be used by Iran to push its nuclear development. Farkash further speculated that Carter's shooting off his mouth was mainly a consequence of his hurt feeling, since during his latest visit to the region, he was summarily ignored by the political establishment.

Big surprise, that this morally illiterate man with his mega-ego, vacuous smile, and fanatic religiosity would be unable to contain his bile, even at the price of endangering the security of Israel's 6 million Jews.

Earlier today he called on members of the European Union to break the embargo of the Gaza Strip, which he called "one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth." When asked whether president Bush should face prosecution for war crimes. he suggested that Bush whould "live a peaceful "productive life - in our country." Sands... understood that as "clear confirmation" that while Bush would face no challenge in his own country, "what happened outside the country was another matter entirely."

As I said, here, Carter is a religious fanatic on a mission from God, whose view of Biblical prophecies and the role of Jews is of a piece with Pastor Hagee's. The two men are equivalent in their Jesus-inspired fantasies about Jews, with one distinction: Hagee is not seeking to harm the Jews of Israel. He is rather their friend. Carter is increasingly and visibly becoming their enemy. And while Hagee's friendship cannot protect the Jews, Carter's hatred can actually harm them.

On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made. "With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."

Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins -- and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew -- he is on a mission from God.