Posted on 12/12/2003 12:34:22 AM PST by Stultis
THE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME OCCURS IN TERRORISM VICTIMS. Freed from airliner skyjackers, people with this syndrome continue for minutes, hours or days to say friendly things about their captors. Perhaps this is a survival tool built into our DNA. If we identify with and exude friendship for someone pointing a gun at us, this makes him a bit less likely to shoot. After decades of Middle East terror bombings, some act as though peace can be achieved through such psychological surrender to terrorists.
A different kind of “Stockholm Syndrome” can be seen among scientists and others. Most begin with the ambition of being awarded a Nobel Prize in Stockholm. But somewhere between ages 40 and 60, each looks in the bathroom mirror one morning and realizes that the fame of a Nobel Prize will never be theirs. Most become resigned to this fate and live on in honorable obscurity.
But a few decide instead to turn their lives into a “Hail Mary” pass, a “bomb” in the direction of eternal fame. Among scientists, these are the ones who stake their reputations on becoming the advocate for some wild new theory or claim about UFO propulsion or discovering Atlantis or discovering a magical cure for cancer, like a gambler betting his entire life savings on one number at roulette. They were losing anyway, such people believe, but if this long-odds bet pans out they can yet win fame, fortune, the Nobel Prize and a name that will live in history.
Two similar politicians, both rejected overwhelmingly by voters in their own nations, this month joined together to push a high-risk effort to win historic greatness. One is Israeli Yossi Beilin, whose ambition to become his nation’s Prime Minister has slipped forever beyond his Far-Left grasp.
The other already has a tarnished Nobel Peace Prize but desperately wants to be seen as a major historic figure. He is former President Jimmy Carter. As we shall see, his ambition has become so pathological that this former Commander-in-Chief now haunts the world as what Time magazine’s Lance Morrow called an “anti-President,” behaving as if he still had his former authority.
Both Democratic and Republican high government insiders have described the deliberate damage ex-President Jimmy Carter has been doing to the United States in the world as “treasonous.”
Carter’s and Beilin’s parallel ambitions, and what together they are willing to embrace to get the historic fame they crave, might kill us all and plunge the world into a new Dark Age of terror.
* * *
Imagine the year is 2006. Terrorist attacks have spread across our country for three years, killing nearly 48,000 Americans and leaving blood and fear on the streets of nearly every major American city.
The government proposes to end this siege with a newly-developed high-tech barrier that will prevent terrorists from entering the United States.
But in Geneva, Switzerland, the Clinton Administration’s former socialist Secretary of Labor Robert Reich joins hands with a Leftist Hollywood actor and with a former leader of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization to offer what they promise will be a different kind of prophylactic against terrorism – a piece of paper.
“If we agree to give Al Qaeda its own Muslim territory inside the United States, free from attack by America, and if its members are paid large sums of money and given ‘unfettered access’ to the United States,” declares Reich, “they will sign a peace treaty promising to recognize and to try to end terrorist attacks against America.”
The world’s Leftist press and leaders cheer Secretary Reich’s proposal wildly. The United States opposes the risky treaty. But chief among the cheerleaders urging Americans to trust their future survival to this piece of paper is Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President Jimmy Carter, smiling like a demented Cheshire Cat as he undermines the elected government of his own country in the eyes of the world.
Which would you trust in that climate of terror to protect the lives of your loved ones – high technology or a treaty on paper?
This nightmare scenario is waking reality in Israel. During the three years since the latest cycle of bombings began in September 2000, at least 836 Israelis have been murdered by terrorists and several thousand have been injured.
In this Jewish State of only five million Jews, this is equivalent to terrorists killing nearly 48,000 people in America, more than 16 times the 3000 who died in the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And because Israel is geographically small, roughly the same size as New Jersey, these bombings are always nearby and have killed or injured some friend or relative of almost every Israeli family.
The Israeli Government, while international efforts to negotiate peace grind on, is moving towards a high-tech solution. It is, as this column has detailed, a sensor-laden fence that would detect and help intercept 99 percent of incoming terrorists.
The technology works so well, my sources relate, that U.S. forces in Iraq may have quietly adapted Israeli fence techniques in the barriers around our military facilities and the “Green Zone” secure enclave in Baghdad where our contractors and 9,000 pro-American Iraqis live. (It used to be home to Saddam’s Ba’athist elite, which called it “Patriot Village.”)
The technology works so well against terrorists that we reportedly have begun using it to cordon off dangerous Iraqi villages, in imitation of Israel’s painfully-learned techniques.
But the United States has been critical of Israel using this fence to defend itself, and has punished the Jewish State’s policy with cuts in American loan guarantees. What’s good for America to use in Iraq, it seems, is not Politically Correct when used for self-defense by the nation that helped develop our technology.
Israel’s right to build such a protective fence has also been challenged by the United Nations General Assembly, which on Monday passed a resolution asking the International Court of Justice, the World Court in the Hague, to rule on the barrier’s legality. As is typical of the U.N., this resolution never mentioned the word “terrorism” and was denounced by one United States diplomat as “one-sided and completely unbalanced.”
“We think the resolution could undermine, rather than encourage, direct negotiations between the parties,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agreed to cooperate with the World Court’s investigation of issues concerning the security fence. The biggest issue is whether this anti-terrorist fence effectively annexes to Israel land that Palestinians claim for what they want to be their future state, a possibility now involved in international negotiation.
* * *
“Peace is far too serious to be left exclusively to governments,” said Richard Dreyfuss, the Leftist activist and Oscar-winning actor who famously co-starred with animatronic creatures in “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
On a stage in Geveva, Switzerland, standing with an olive tree at center-stage to symbolize peace, Master of Ceremonies Dreyfuss on December 1 declared that “[This initiative] is the people’s claim to their place at the table.”
This unofficial “Peace Accord” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict written by two private citizens was being officially boycotted by both Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and the Israeli Government, which denounced the document as subversive of peace, tantamount to national suicide and a “Swiss golden calf” from the Israeli Left.
But the freelance, unofficial nature of what its authors call a “virtual peace agreement” made no difference to the world press, which reported it almost as if a superhighway back to the Garden of Eden. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, said critics, encouraged such reportage by giving a few not-unfriendly words about the effort and taking a brief meeting with its two authors.
Secretary Powell did reaffirm support for the Bush Administration’s “Roadmap to Peace” being constructed brick by brick in tough negotiations that include Russia, the European Union and the United Nations as well as Palestinians and Israel.
The freelance accord unveiled in Geneva, by proposing to bypass the roadmap’s step-by-step process and go immediately to a Final Solution (in the Hitlerian sense, according to its critics), could delay or destroy this more conventional road-to-peace’s construction.
But this unofficial accord was encouraged by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, one of 58 former world leaders including British Prime Minister Tony Blair who signed letters supporting the potentially-harmful effort.
President Jimmy Carter spoke at the Geneva gathering and, as the December 1 Jerusalem Post reported, declared that “a source of anti-American sentiment in the world” that “encourages terror” is President George W. “Bush’s inordinate support for Israel” that “allows the Palestinians to suffer.”
“Inordinate support” for Israel? Apparently Jimmy Carter believes Israel should be given something less than America’s full, unwavering support – but how much less? And how much less can Israel survive without?
“Carter said the main flaw of the US-brokered road map is its step-by-step approach,” wrote Jerusalem Post reporter Gil Hoffman, “which he said has allowed Israel to stop its advance by building ‘an enormous barrier wall’ and with ‘the colonization of Gaza.’”
The Bush Administration’s peace plan “is now a dead issue,” wrote Carter in the November 3 issue of USA Today. Ex-Presidents, regardless of party, used to avoid any public statement that could interfere with international treaty negotiations being conducted by the person voters had put in the Oval Office.
But Mr. Carter has not hesitated to interfere with sitting Presidents, Democrat or Republican. In this case he has put up a “Detour” sign on the Road to Peace that undermines American efforts and could drive Middle East peacemaking into a dangerous ditch for years to come.
“Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential career,” observed Slate Magazine’s Chris Suellentrop, “has been characterized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to continue the presidency that American voters ended in 1980. Nowhere is this tendency more evident that in Carter’s free-lance diplomatic efforts, which have been governed by an anti-democratic attitude.”
In November 1990, for example, the first Bush Administration was lobbying fellow United Nations Security Council members for a declaration empowering U.S. action to push invading Iraqi troops out of newly-occupied Kuwait in what would become the Gulf War.
As then-National Security Advisor General Brent Scowcroft recounted in the 1998 memoir A World Transformed co-authored with President George H.W. Bush, the Canadian Prime Minister sent them a letter just received from Jimmy Carter. The ex-President had written to all Security Council members asking them to reject the U.S. request for an ultimatum to Iraq and instead to support the perpetual delay proposed by the Arab League.
“It was an unbelievable letter, asking the other members of the council to vote against his own country,” wrote Scowcroft. “We found out about it only when one of the recipients sent us a copy…. It seemed to me that if there was ever a violation of the Logan Act prohibiting diplomacy by private citizens, this was it.”
President Bush “was furious at this interference in the conduct of his foreign policy and deliberate attempt to undermine it,” wrote Scowcroft, “but told me just to let it drop.” He could have filed criminal charges against Mr. Carter and perhaps sent him to prison.
By other accounts, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney lapsed into obscenity at the news and, reports National Review’s Jay Nordlinger in a major article about ex-President Carter’s irresponsible behavior, “Some people actually allowed themselves to utter the word ‘treason.’”
In 1994 President Clinton “dispatched Carter to defuse an impending war with North Korea over that country’s nuclear program.” In violation of his directions and diplomatic protocol, wrote Suellentrop, Carter “conducted some free-lance diplomacy, this time on CNN. After meeting with Kim Il Sung, Carter went live on CNN International without telling the administration. His motive: Undermine the Clinton administration’s efforts to impose U.N. sanctions on North Korea.”
Of this incident, which opened the way for this Marxist dictatorship to acquire nuclear weapons, Douglas Brinkley in his history of Carter since 1980 called The Unfinished Presidency notes, a Clinton Cabinet member referred to Jimmy Carter as a “treasonous prick.”
* * *
The two authors of the so-called Geneva Accord are both former officials experienced in negotiation. One is Yasser Abed Rabbo, former Palestinian information minister. Although Arafat gave no official approval for the accord, for reasons we shall see, the veteran PLO terrorist personally called it “a brave and courageous initiative…that opens the door to peace.”
The other author is Leftist Israeli politician Yossi Beilin, born December 6, 1948, in Petah Tikva during a lull in Israel’s War of Independence, who held several Labor Party cabinet positions, most recently Justice Minister.
But Beilin bolted Israel’s Labor Party last June to form his own movement allied with the Left-of-Laborite Meretz Party, whose crushing loss in last January’s election cost Beilin his seat in the national legislature, the Knesset.
Rightist opponents have accused Meretz of hatred towards all religious Jews and of being “financed in part by the enemies of the State of Israel.”
“Oslo [the controversial 1993 peace agreement] wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t started it,” he once modestly told the Jerusalem Post, which described this political intellectual as “More of a writer than a fighter.” He never rose higher than staff sergeant in the Israeli army, where comrades gave him the demeaning nickname “Soap.”
Among Israelis this Leftist politician and protégé of Labor leader Shimon Peres – the man who crippled the Labor Party by snootily referring to Israel’s darker-skinned Sephardic Jews who supported the rightist Likud Bloc as “onion-pickers” – is still known by the moniker Yitzak Rabin gave him: “Peres’s Poodle.”
“All politicians are actors,” said Beilin in that same Jerusalem Post profile. “Even the restraint is an act.” No wonder he wanted to play peacemaker on the same stage with Richard Dreyfuss in Geneva.
Beilin has been lionized in the U.S. by the wacko movement journal of neo-Trotskyite Lyndon LaRouche.
Beilin named his own peacenik movement Shahar, the Hebrew word for “dawn” or “the light before dawn.” Those who study Biblical scripture for deeper meaning will notice that Shahar is linked to the origin of Lucifer. You might ponder what, if anything, this reveals about Beilin, his politics and his peace proposal.
The devil is very much in the details of Beilin’s and Rabbo’s proposed peace accord, say critics. To see most of its text (but not Appendix Ten, which purportedly resolves tiny uncertainties such as security arrangements), click here.
In oversimplified thumbnail sketch, the proposed accord would create a more-or-less demilitarized Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem and sovereign control of the Temple Mount (the “Noble Sanctuary,” Dome of the Rock) atop the Western Wall, which would remain sovereign Israeli territory. Everyone would have “unimpeded access” in safety to the Temple Mount, protected by international peacekeepers.
Israel would return roughly to its pre-1967 War borders. (Would this include the commanding Golan Heights, from which Syrian cannon used to fire down on the whole of Galilee and where today Israeli radars can give vital long-range warning of aircraft and missile attack?)
Israel would retain some settlements, home to about half of today’s 200,000 West Bank and Gaza Strip settlers. Palestinians would be ceded other land, land in the Negev bordering Gaza, comparable in size to Israel’s retained settlement land.
A road corridor would be created between the West Bank and Gaza (overcrossed with Israeli bridges or tunnels) to effectively make Palestinian territory contiguous and allow travel.
Palestinians would waive the right of about 3.6 million people whose families became 1948-49 refugees to return to what is today Israel. Roughly 30,000 Palestinians would be allowed to settle in Israel. Those who lost land would be compensated.
The new state of Palestine and Israel would diplomatically recognize one another as well as each other’s right to exist. Saudi Arabia would secure comparable recognition for Israel and its right to exist in peace from other Arab nations. And these are but a few of the “virtual” agreement’s details.
A gushingly-supportive New York Times has dismissed criticisms of the Geneva Accord’s details as “nitpicks,” noted strategic analyst Max Singer of the Hudson Institute and Bar-Ilan University.
“It is a ‘nitpick’ that the ‘agreement’ does not use the word Jew or Jewish, because of Palestinian refusal to recognize that there is a Jewish people, much less that that people has the normal right of a people to a state,” he writes. “It is a nitpick that the agreement requires Israel to compensate the Palestinians for every acre of land it keeps from the territory occupied by Jordan before its 1967 aggression against Israel….
“It is a nitpick,” Singer continues, “that the agreement provides that Israel compensate the Arab countries where Palestinian ‘refugees’ have lived – but makes no mention of compensation to the larger number of Jews who were ethnically cleansed from these same Arab countries…during Israel’s War of Independence.”
The Geneva Accord would implement all these changes simultaneously, gambling that if one side or the other reneged on some provisions the result would still be better than today’s ongoing conflict. The Bush Administration’s Roadmap to Peace, by contrast, agrees with the Israeli Government that peace must exist in advance of each careful incremental step so that no fatal missteps are made.
* * *
Why is Beilin mistrusted by many Israelis? He had been involved, e.g., with President Clinton’s negotiated October 1998 Wye Accord between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. That agreement, noted the Zionist Organization of America, explicitly required the Palestinian Authority to outlaw all terrorist organizations. But while Israel honored its part of this bargain, Arafat refused to take any steps to outlaw groups such as Hamas (which, incidentally, has already rejected the Geneva Accord) and Islamic Jihad.
What was Beilin’s response to Arafat’s reneging on the Wye Agreement? Beilin, then Deputy Foreign Minister in Ehud Barak’s government, declared that Arafat was “not obligated” to outlaw such groups.
(Former Labor Prime Minister Barak, incidentally, a week ago denounced Beilin’s Geneva Accord as “rewarding terror. It will not save lives. It will lead to more deaths.”)
Since the day Beilin declared that Arafat had no obligation to outlaw terrorist groups, more than 1,000 Israelis (and more than 3,000 Americans) have been killed by terrorists. If you were an Israeli, would you trust the safety of your children and grandchildren to a paper agreement made by Yossi Beilin? The latest poll suggests that the leftmost 31.2 percent of Israelis would, but that 37.7 percent of other Israelis oppose this “virtual” peace accord.
A publicity budget of more than $8 million dollars has been established that over the next two years will be used to propagandize you and pressure Israel to accept this Geneva Accord. Did part of this money come from Arab oil? Probably. But much of the money reportedly comes from peace activist Alexis Keller, 40, son of one of the most prominent bankers in Switzerland.
(In its reporting about this the New York Times did not discuss whether Keller’s father was with one of the Swiss banks that retained money deposited by Jews later killed in the Holocaust. The chief lawyer defending this for one of these blood-money Swiss banks was anti-Semite Hillary Clinton’s chief Senate campaign fundraiser in New England.)
The Swiss Government, official host of the Geneva Accord meeting, reportedly underwrote the $542,000 event “with substantial help from private donors,” unnamed in its coverage by the New York Times.
“Follow the Money” is something to keep in mind, too, whenever Jimmy Carter shows up to give his blessing as he did December 1 to this peace accord in Geneva. Yes, Jimmy Carter won a Nobel Peace Prize, as did Yasir Arafat, but this does not mean that either peace or the survival of Israel is his greatest concern.
During his administration – arguably the worst presidency in American history, during which each of us lost the purchasing power of half our life savings because of Carter’s inability to control inflation – we laughed when we learned that his bloated brother Billy was on the payroll of Libyan dictator and terrorism-funder Muammar Qadhafi.
But today Jimmy Carter operates out of the Carter Library and Carter Center in Georgia. Where do these institutions get their millions to send Mr. Carter jet-setting to embrace his dearest friend Fidel in Havana, or his Marxist amigo dictator Hugo Chavez in Caracas, or intervenes to help Yasir Arafat, with whom Carter says he feels “certain affinities,” or Yossi Beilin in Geneva?
The answer, as a Newsmax.com investigation documented, is that much of the money for Jimmy Carter’s institutions has come from Middle Eastern Arabs as well as from Morocco and Jordan.
Many millions in seed money for Carter’s named institutions came largely from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, from the wealthy Jordanian contractor Hasib J. Sabbagh, and from Agha Hasan Abedi, the man later at the heart of the Democrat-linked multi-billion dollar fraud involving Abedi’s Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
Whenever you hear recurrent demands that the United States put more pressure on or cut its support of Israel coming out of Jimmy Carter’s mouth, rest assured that at the same time Arab oil money is going into Jimmy Carter’s pockets.
Scholar Daniel Pipes identified Jimmy Carter as among a handful of ex-Washington officials “paid handsomely” by the Saudis.
And he needs such cash flow, because the Carter Center alone spends at least $30 million every year to burnish and enhance Jimmy’s legacy.
* * *
Carter’s tainted 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, as the Leftist head of the awarding committee acknowledged, was given not so much to honor Carter as to give a “kick in the leg,” to insult, President George W. Bush. The prize committee chair Gunnar Berge, it turned out, was also the man in charge of Norway’s North Sea oil for the government, and Norway stood to make perhaps an extra billion dollars a year in higher prices so long as the U.S. kept Iraq’s Saddam Hussein embargoed but in power. Like so many other Europeans, Berge had his own selfish motive for undermining the United States.
Truth be told, Jimmy Carter may be the least deserving Nobel Peace Prize recipient in history. During his presidency, in the name of the human rights of 3,000 mostly-Marxists in the prisons of the Shah of Iran, Carter withdrew our support from this pro-American, pro-modernization, pro-women’s rights strongman. The Shah was toppled and replaced by the insane medieval theocratic dictatorship the rules today. Among the Ayatollah Khomeini’s first acts was to execute more than 20,000 people, including most of the 3,000 Marxists Carter had been willing to destroy an American ally to help.
Without the Shah to prevent it, war then started between Iran and neighboring Iraq, a war that cost at least 500,000 lives and turned Saddam Hussein’s regime into the planet’s fourth biggest military power, one that used poison gas on both Iranians and its own people.
On Iran’s eastern border, the Soviet Union exploited the situation to invade Afghanistan, killing many more people and creating highly skilled terrorist Muslim “holy warriors,” some of whom had been mobilized into a group called Al Qaeda by a radicalized millionaire Saudi playboy named Osama bin Laden.
The new theocratic regime in Iran inspired and still inspires bin Laden and other fanatics to seek the overthrow of all Muslim nations that are friendly towards the West. The defeat the Soviets suffered in Afghanistan (thanks largely to U.S.-supplied Stinger anti-aircraft missiles) convinced bin Laden and others that both Superpowerrs, the U.S. as well as the U.S.S.R., were paper tigers that could be defeated.
Jimmy Carter, in other words, is responsible for the end of a modernizing pro-American government in Iran. In fact, as Michael Ledeen has noted, a pledge Carter made not to intervene in Iran’s internal affairs to the Ayatollah Khomeini continues to hamstring U.S. policy towards Iran today.
Jimmy Carter is responsible for the bloodbath of the Iran-Iraq War and the rise of Saddam Hussein as a threatening power.
Jimmy Carter is responsible for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the emergence of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and hence for the attack on the Pentagon and destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Former President Carter would tell you he acts to advance human rights, but his concern seems rather selective. “If you live in Marcos’s Philippines, Pinochet’s Chile, or apartheid South Africa, he’s liable to care about you,” writes Nordlinger. “If you live in Communist China, Communist Cuba, Communist Ethiopia, Communist Nicaragua, Communist North Korea, Communist.…: screw you.”
Mr. Carter, indeed, has seemed relentlessly friendly towards Communist dictators and critical of all pro-American leaders.
And now Jimmy Carter, with his love of Leftist snake oil, embraces the freelance, unofficial Geneva Accord to conjure a high-risk “peace” in the Middle East. This is a document you can judge by the former President who praises it.
Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize is drenched in the blood of perhaps a million people or more who died because of his arrogance, ignorance or incompetence….and who continue to die from terrorist attacks almost daily.
In his quest for a place in history, and to advance his own ideology, Jimmy Carter has created horror and turned the Middle East into a place vastly more dangerous than it was prior to his failed presidency – 1000 times more dangerous within six months from now if and when Iran’s lunatic regime acquires nuclear weapons.
Carter since then has repeatedly betrayed his own country’s foreign policy under both Republican and Democratic presidents. He has confused foreigners who do not understand our democracy. “Yasser Arafat,” writes Suellentrop, “once asked Carter to serve as an intermediary with the first Bush administration, not understanding that at the time Carter was tremendously unpopular with Republicans and Democrats alike.”
“Imagine,” writes Suellentrop, “if all five former presidents, Ford and Carter and Reagan and Bush and Clinton, were perpetually jet-setting around the globe, pushing their own foreign policies and urging foreign leaders to oppose the policies put forward by America’s government. That’s the stuff of tin-pot dictators, not mature democracies.”
But this is precisely what “anti-President” Jimmy Carter is doing, while undermining America’s democracy and our people’s right at the ballot box to choose who makes our foreign policy in the process. His megalomania has made this loose cannon a threat to the very world peace he claims to seek. Carter might already have detoured or destroyed America’s effort to build for Israel and the Palestinians a Road to Peace by lending his credibility instead to the freelance Geneva Accord.
“This is not a peace treaty,” wrote the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer. “This is a suicide note – by a private citizen on behalf of a country that has utterly rejected him politically.”
This description could certainly apply to Yossi Beilin, cast out by the voters of Israel. And applies to Jimmy Carter, shatteringly rejected when he ran for a second term in 1980. Both men now behave as if the cause of international peace is more important than the narrow interests of any one nation.
But the kind of peace both nowadays embrace could put their own nations – the nations that rejected them – in mortal danger. For both men, consciously or unconsciously, their poisoned “peace” may taste sweetest when sprinkled with the toxic spice of revenge. For millions of us, what they are offering could become the “peace” of the grave.
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