Israel Matzav

Jimmy the Dhimmi goes off the deep end

In a press conference in Cairo after meeting with 'Hamas officials' (including terrorists Mahmoud al-Zahar and Said Siam), former US President Jimmy Carter went totally off the deep end:

Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip is an "atrocity," former US president Jimmy Carter said after meeting with Hamas officials in Cairo. Carter also said he had asked Hamas officials to stop rocket attacks into Israel and defended his controversial meetings with the Palestinian terrorist group, saying it was necessary to talk to all parties to achieve peace.

...

"You can't have an agreement that must involve certain parties, unless you talk to those parties to conclude the agreement," Carter said in a speech Thursday at the American University in Cairo. "You have to involve Hamas ... They have to be involved in some way."

He said that although "there is very strict restraint or prohibition" against any US or Israel official speaking with Hamas "I know there are some officials in the Israeli government who are quite willing to meet with Hamas and maybe that will happen in the near future."

Carter said he had requested from the Hamas leaders that they stop rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza, which have prompted IDF military assaults on the Strip. Any "killings of civilians is an act of terrorism," he said.

He said that during his visit to Israel, the first stop on his regional tour, he saw rockets that had been fired by Hamas and "met with people who lost loved ones."

"At the same time, if you live in Gaza, you know that for every Israeli killed in any kind of combat, between 30 to 40 Palestinians are killed because of the extreme military capability of Israel," Carter said, describing the Israel-imposed siege of Gaza as an "atrocity." Carter lamented that "very little progress has been made" in the 30 years since he brokered Israel's historic peace agreement with Egypt, bringing him the Nobel Peace Prize.

I want to make a few points in response to Carter. First, the 'blockade' is designed such that it will have as little effect as possible on the lives of civilians. The fact that Hamas is siphoning off half of the fuel delivered to Gaza speaks volumes about who is really to blame for any shortages caused by the 'blockade.'

Second, as a matter of international law it is most certainly not correct to say that "any killings of civilians is an act [sic] of terrorism." Recall that the Geneva Convention provides quite explicitly that "The presence of a protected person [i.e. a civilian. CiJ] may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations." Thus if a civilian is killed because terrorists are hiding behind him - something that the IDF sees every day in Gaza and which has been repeatedly documented in photographs and videos - that is completely legal and is not "an act of terrorism" or a violation of international law. It doesn't permit targeting civilians, but Israel's not the party that targets civilians anyway.

Third, the comparison between the number of Israelis and 'Palestinians' killed is both odious and misleading. It is odious because most of the 'Palestinians' have been killed while trying to commit terrorist acts or while being used as human shields by the terrorists, and because the 'Palestinians' target civilians while civilians are only killed by Israel in the course of hunting terrorists (what's known in sterile military parlance as 'collateral damage'). And it's misleading because the 'Palestinian' leadership purposely places their 'people' in the line of fire so that they can become 'martyrs,' a concept that is anathema to Israel's leadership. The main reason there are more 'Palestinian' casualties is because the 'Palestinian leadership' has an interest in creating 'martyrs.'

Carter's comparison of the number of casualties each side has sustained also raises the canard that Israel is responding 'disproportionately' to 'Palestinian' rocket fire. For reasons I have discussed at length many times on this blog (most recently here), Israel has no choice but to respond disproportionately to rocket attacks that force its citizens into a constant game of Russian roulette.

Not that I ever expected the Jewish state to get a fair shake from Dhimmi Carter....

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:00 PM