Is Jimmy Carter a Major Obstacle to Peace in the Middle East?

BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY spanks the silly little mediator wannabe with a metaphorical paddling of the sort the diminuitive midshipman used to suffer while his upperclassmen made him sing "Marching Through Georgia" at the Naval Academy:

The problem is the wreath he laid piously at the grave of Yasser Arafat, who, as Mr. Carter knows better than anyone else, was a real obstacle to peace.

It is that in Cairo, if we are to believe another Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, whose statement has so far not been denied, Mr. Carter apparently described Hamas as a "national liberation movement" – this party which has made a cult of death, a mythology of blood and race, and an anti-Semitism along the lines of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the linchpin of its ideology.

The problem is also the formidable nose thumbing he got from Hamas's exiled leader, Khaled Mashaal, who, at the very moment he was receiving Mr. Carter, also triggered the first car bombing in several months in Keren Shalom on the Gaza strip – and that this event elicited from poor Mr. Carter, all tangled up in his small-time mediator calculations, not one disapproving or empathetic word.

Ben Franklin summed up the template of this energizer bunny with no brain & a motor mouth that keeps on spewing nonsense very succinctly:

"There's no fool like an old fool."