What of Hamas?
As embedded in a new study about what Muslims believe, there seems to be dissatisfaction among Muslims worldwide that the US and Israel treat Hamas with such disdain. http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL07688520.html
"While admiring Western values, many Muslims feel they are not respected by the West and that the values the West espouses, such as democracy, are only given lip service when it comes to applying them in the Muslim world.
A recent example was the 2006 election in the Palestinian territories, which the Islamist movement Hamas won in a free and fair poll. The United States and Israel have since done much to ignore the result and try to push Hamas out of office."
comment: There are some folks who would not like to ignore Hamas. (1) the IDF; (2) Jimmy Carter.
US government criticizes Carter meeting with Hamas 04.10.08, ynetnews.com
The US State Department said on Thursday it had advised ex-President Jimmy Carter against meeting the leader of Hamas in Syria next week, saying it went against US policy of isolating the militant group.
"We have counseled the former president about having such a meeting," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, adding the advice was not to go ahead with such talks. "US government policy is that Hamas is a terrorist organization and we don't believe it is in the interests of our policy or in the interests of peace to have such a meeting," he told reporters when asked about Carter's plans. (Reuters)
The Trouble with Talking to Hamas - Lee Smith (Power Line)
Next week Jimmy Carter is headed to Damascus to speak with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.
Meshaal is not a Hamas "hardliner" ostensibly at odds with more "moderate" Hamas figures; rather he is the man who calls the shots. This is why chief of Egyptian military intelligence Omar Suleiman dealt primarily with Meshaal during the Gaza breakout in February, and not Ismail Haniyeh. In Damascus, Meshaal gets his marching orders from Tehran, which means that the former American president, during whose tenure the U.S. lost a pillar of its Persian Gulf security strategy to the Khomeinist revolution, will effectively be talking to a representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One of the goals of the Iranian revolution is to overthrow the established order by routing the U.S. and driving it from the region. In the Persian Gulf, Iran is bullying Washington's Sunni allies and, as Gen. Petraeus' Senate testimony made plain, waging open war against the U.S. in Iraq. In the Eastern Mediterranean it is fighting U.S. allies in Lebanon and Israel and threatening Egypt.
Egypt's alliance with the U.S. is the fruit of the 1978 Camp David accords, and the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is the one foreign policy achievement the Carter White House can point to with pride. The Iranian project is to put an end to all that, and this is what lay behind Hamas' breakout in Gaza, to force Cairo eventually into a situation that would lead to it breaking the treaty with Israel. Unfortunately, it is difficult not to conclude that Jimmy Carter is unaware that the man he will be sitting down with is plotting to turn his legacy into dust.
The writer is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Future Security Strategies.
