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Jimmy Carter just can’t seem to stop reminding everyone of why he was a one-term president. In an op-ed with Mary Robinson, the disgraced former leader drags out the same old line about dealing with Hamas. The op-ed is entitled “How to Fix It”. The solution involves lifting the blockade, paying Hamas salaries and generally giving the terrorist group everything it wants including diplomatic recognition. Carter blames Israel (shocker) for the current conflict, accusing Israel of sabotaging the PLO-Hamas Unity agreement which he calls “a promising move toward peace in the region”. It’s not surprising that Carter’s vision of peace...

Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jimmy Carter takes to ForeignPolicy.com to argue that the key to ending the current war in Gaza is "recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political actor." Writing along with fellow "Elder" Mary Robinson (part of an "international group of elder statesmen"), the former president pins the blame for the current conflict on Israel's refusal to appreciate a "major concession" made by Hamas in April and to recognize the new Palestinian government formed by the Hamas-Fatah "reconciliation": This tragedy results from the deliberate obstruction of a promising move toward peace in the region, when a reconciliation agreement among...

Ending this war in Gaza begins with recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political actor. [snip] There is no humane or legal justification for the way the Israeli Defense Forces are conducting this war.

Israelis and Palestinians are still burying their loved ones as Gaza's third war in six years continues. Since July 8, when this war began, more than 1,600 Palestinian and 65 Israeli lives have been sacrificed. Many in the world are heartbroken in the powerless certainty that more will die, that more are being killed every hour. This tragedy results from the deliberate obstruction of a promising move toward peace in the region, when a reconciliation agreement among the Palestinian factions was announced in April. This was a major concession by Hamas, in opening Gaza to joint control under a technocratic...

Wow. A reputable poll shows that the public believes Barack Obama is the worst president since World War II. Worse than Richard M. Nixon, driven from the presidency by Watergate? Much. Worse than Jimmy Carter, for decades the very symbol of the feckless chief executive? Loads. Worse than George W. Bush, still a lightning rod on the left and a symbol of disappointment on the right? Definitely. These startling poll results set loose the predictable reaction: A flurry of told-you-so nods on the right and a fusillade of this-tells-us-nothing assertions on the left. For once, they're both right. Obama is...

CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Friday's Morning Joe program featured a discussion about the ongoing Israel and Hamas conflict. Joe Scarborough spoke with Zbigniew Brzezinkski the National Security Adviser for Jimmy Carter, famous for helping to create the Taliban, inventing anti-Israel conspiracy theories, and spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric. For viewers who are anti-Israel Brzezinski did not disappoint. He blamed the present conflict on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu; a right-winger who is "determined to prompt, to precipitate a direct military collision with Gaza." Brzezinski also presented Hamas as a terrorist group that has moderated. It was a tough interview for...

Truth be told, it was principally the Republican party in the United States that saw the value of Mohammad Reza as an ally and treated him with warmth, respect, and friendship. Prominent Republican President Ronald Reagan, who held office from 1980 to 1988, spoke favorably of the Shah, calling him "a stalwart ally" and criticizing Jimmy Carter's attitudes towards him. Another Republican President, the well-known Richard Nixon, who sat from 1969 until 1974, openly praised the Shah. Hosting the Shah at a dinner at the White House, Nixon referenced a visit he had made to Iran in the aftermath of...

Here's a safe prediction: Florida's same-sex marriage ban is going down. The end could come soon if a Miami-Dade County judge sides with six couples who claim that the ban is unconstitutional. On Wednesday their attorney asked Judge Sarah Zabel to award the plaintiffs summary judgment, meaning they would win without a trial because the facts are clear. Zabel will rule in a few weeks. Based on what has happened in the year since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, however, the six couples should be optimistic. Nearly two dozen consecutive judicial rulings have gone...

"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see (evil's) final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices."--C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters" Call it déjà vu, the feeling that we've been here before, that events in the news are happening again, only with a...

The final acts of the Obama foreign policy will play out in the next two years. Unfortunately, bad things happen when the world concludes that the American president has become weakened, distracted, or diffident about foreign policy. As Richard Nixon became increasingly paralyzed by Watergate in late 1973, the enemies of Israel felt that it was an opportune time to launch their so-called Yom Kippur War. The next year, the negotiated armistice in the Vietnam War collapsed, and the North Vietnamese seized the Mekong Delta and prepared for a final offensive against South Vietnam. In 1979, after two full years...

t’s been a disastrous couple of weeks for President Barack Obama. His signature legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is a slow-motion train wreck. His poll numbers have tanked. Now, things have gotten so bad for Obama that former president Jimmy Carter has called President Obama incompetent in the family-friendly pages of Parade magazine. “He’s done the best he could under the circumstances,” Carter said of Obama in an interviewed published on Thursday. “His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.” (RELATED: Jimmy Carter: America no longer has a functioning democracy)...

Former President Jimmy Carter said President Obama couldn’t have done anything to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from annexing Crimea. “I think that was a foregone conclusion,” Carter said on MSNBC. “He was going to do it regardless of the consequences. I think now, that’s far enough.” In comments Monday on "Morning Joe," Carter compared Obama's response to his own decisions at the White House in 1979, when he decided to boycott Moscow's Summer Olympics after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is warning Egypt that its transition to democracy after years of political turmoil is faltering ahead of presidential elections later this month. His Carter Center won’t be sending observers for Egypt’s May 26-27 election, which many believe retired Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi handily will win following the overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi last year that he led. However, the center will be sending a small team of experts. In a statement Friday, the center warned that “Egypt’s political transition has stalled and stands on the precipice of total reversal.” The center said Morsi’s overthrow...

"It would be impossible to implement any peace agreement between Israel and just one portion of the Palestinians,” the former president wrote in the "Washington Post." The Palestinian unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah offers Israel an opportunity to move the peace process forward since any future agreement would incorporate all of the West Bank and Gaza, former president Jimmy Carter argues in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday. “This reconciliation of Palestinian factions and formation of a national unity government is necessary because it would be impossible to implement any peace agreement between Israel and...

Ramesh and Reason’s Nick Gillespie have been going back and forth over Rand Paul’s claim (from a number of years ago) that Jimmy Carter was a more fiscally conservative president than Ronald Reagan. Mother Jones collected a series of appearances over the years in which the Kentuckian argues that Reagan’s budget performance, compared with Carter’s, is evidence Republicans don’t really mean it when they claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism. Gillespie argues that Reagan’s deficits means he wasn’t a fiscal conservative, while Ramesh argues (and Nick seems to agree to some extent) that probably a better measure is rate of increases in spending...

Anti-Semitism is not a simple bigotry. It is a complex neurosis. It involves assigning malign intent to Jews where none exists on the one hand, and rejecting reason as a basis for understanding the world and operating within it on the other hand. John Kerry’s recent use of the term “Apartheid” in reference to Israel’s future was an anti-Semitic act. In remarks before the Trilateral Commission a few days after PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas signed a unity deal with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, Kerry said that if Israel doesn’t cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it...

<p>A quick glance at this morning's news coverage makes clear that the media is more than a little eager to let Secretary of State John Kerry off the hook for accusing Israel of devolving into an "apartheid state" if it doesn't make peace with the Palestinians. The media is also going to let Kerry get away with claiming that those who criticized his reprehensible remark are motivated only by "partisan politics."</p>

Today is Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — a day on which Jews and all civilized people around the globe commemorate the 6 million who died at the hands of virulent antisemites. Israel takes this day very seriously. For those unclear on the whole Israel concept (Obama, Kerry, and State Department, I’m speaking to you), Israel is the only liberal democracy within the Middle East. It’s the only nation in that region that allows all people to worship freely, that accords full rights to women, and that protects all minorities, including sexual and racial minorities, from discrimination, even while...

Secretary of State John Kerry has issued a statement on his controversial remark about Israel and apartheid that led Senator Ted Cruz to call for his resignation today, saying he “would have chosen a different word” if he had a second chance at saying it. Kerry says that during his service at the State Department and in the U.S. Senate, he’s “walked the walk” and shown repeated support for the state of Israel, reiterating his desire for a two-state solution “that results in a secure Jewish state and a prosperous Palestinian state.” He defiantly declares, “I will not allow my

Reporting for Duty, unfit as ever.Not since Jimmy Carter wrote the widely unread book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has a higher ranking know-it-all suggested that Israel might become an apartheid state. For the record, “apartheid” is a term appropriated from the racist regime of South Africa and applied to Israel because it always elicits the desired outrage. As far as emotional college slogan campaigns go, it’s right up there with “Free Palestine.” The Apartheid accusation is false at every level, and was a deliberate propaganda strategy devised at the anti-Semitic Durban NGO conference in 2001. In other words it works...