Jimmy Carter To Meet With Hamas Leader

The former U.S. president who justifies Palestinian violence as a reaction to Israeli apartheid will meet with the head of the world’s leading Middle Eastern terrorist organization in Syria this month.

In an unprecedented event that U.S. officials say displays poor judgment, Jimmy Carter will visit with Hamas Leader Khaled Meshal, who runs his violent operation from Damascus to avoid being arrested by the Israeli government. Known by the Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement,” Hamas is committed to eliminating Israel and replacing it with an Islamic state. It has repeatedly attacked Israel with suicide bombers and armed resistance to Israeli military occupation.

The sophisticated and well-funded Palestinian extremist group has for years appeared on the U.S. Department of State’s list of foreign terrorist organizations and for a former commander in chief, or any western leader of Carter’s stature, to meet with its leader is inconceivable. In fact, it completely undermines the U.S. policy of isolating Hamas and could encourage other countries to further dilute sanctions against its brutal regime.

Then again Carter has publicly supported Palestinian extremism for years and has even published a highly controversial book in which he defends Palestinian violence and calls Israel the "tiny vortex around which swirl the winds of hatred, intolerance and bloodshed." It was in the book that the former president outright justified Palestinian violence as simply a reaction to Israeli apartheid.

Many of Carter’s loyal supporters denounced the inflammatory 2006 book ("Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid") as inaccurate and lacking in integrity. In fact, the former president’s longtime confidante and onetime executive director of the Carter Center said the book is "replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments."