The American Spectator

Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas has been roundly condemned as another expression of his anti-Israel sentiment. Ken Stein, director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel at Emory University, who resigned as a fellow of the Carter Center in the wake of the former president’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, said at the time that Carter recasts Hamas as a moderate partner ready to negotiate with Israel. He launders its reputation both with careful word choice and omission. He uses the past tense, for example, to describe Hamas as an “Islamic militant group that opposed recognition of Israel [and] perpetrated acts of violence.”

But Carter is not alone in this sordid exercise. Three weeks ago I wrote an article revealing that Barack Obama’s national campaign co-chairman believed that the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East were Jewish voters who were acting in opposition to American interests and against a lasting peace. Most of the criticism of the piece came from Jewish leftists who not only support the Carter trip but share his view — and the view of many Obama advisers — that the principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East is a small handful of neocons and Christian Zionists who abet Israel in its willingness to hang on to Jerusalem and the territories.

p>Much like Carter, groups such as the Israel Policy Forum seek a “shift” in America’s approach to the Middle East that begins and ends with making nice to Hamas. Read how Seymour Reich, President of IPF — like Jimmy Carter — played down Hamas’s genocidal actions Hamas through semantics and omission in a recent Boston Globe editorial : br> /p>

While there are legitimate concerns [!] over Hamas policy and over direct engagement with it, it is impossible to achieve an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians on any of the key issues without engaging Hamas through some means. Hamas is the governing authority in Gaza, a reality we can no longer ignore… Hamas can torpedo talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by intensified rocket attacks or suicide bombings…

br> Reich is correct when he notes that Hamas is the governing authority. But like the rest of the Jewish Left, he construes terror as a tactic, not an instrument of jihad. He ignores the fact that when Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 Hamas-sponsored rocket activity surged by 500 percent. That increase, along with the tunnels that were built to allow genocide bombers to enter Israel even as Israel was forcibly dismantling settlements, had nothing to do with an effort to undermine peace talks. Negotiating for a cessation of violence that a return of territory was supposed to produce is called rewarding terrorism.

Except in the eyes of Jimmy Carter and the likes of the Israel Policy Forum. When Hamas was elected and took over Gaza, Congress crafted legislation that would insure any funds going to the Palestinian Authority did not go to Hamas. The Israeli government supports the initiative. Who opposed it? Hamas and the IPF.

M. J. Rosenberg, IPF’s policy director who has kinder things to say about Hamas than he does the Jewish residents of the settlements, said at the time, “We oppose the legislation. The U.S. should be extending carrots to Hamas, and not just slapping them with sticks.”

Indeed, Rosenberg has kinder things to say about Hamas, Stephen Walt, and John Mearsheimer than he does about his Jewish brethren. He calls Jewish settlers that have, with support of the government and often at the cost of their lives and the lives of their children, tamed a dangerous border, “the worst of the worst.” (He claims young Israeli soldiers hate every minute of their service in Hebron. He should speak to my son who serves in the IDF and has nothing but good things to say about Hebron’s residents.)

p>Meanwhile, here’s what he has to say about Walt-Mearsheimer