There must be something wrong with the moon

All the lunatics are crawling out of their holes...



http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid
=1070346682319
You have got to hand it to Yossi Beilin. Whatever one thinks of his
political views, or his incessant desire to sell Israel down the river, he
certainly knows how to put on a good show.

Monday's gathering in Switzerland to launch the Geneva Accord had all the
trappings of first-rate political theater: Israelis and Palestinians coming
together amid support from former heads of state, criticism from current
leaders, last-minute glitches, and even an olive tree onstage.
Had it not been such a sad display of ideological weakness, it might
actually have been entertaining.

After all, how often does one get to see people as brilliant as Beilin,
Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Amram Mitzna act so downright foolish?
Despite three years of unrelenting Palestinian violence and terror, despite
898 Israelis killed and 6,003 others injured, despite ongoing incitement in
the Palestinian media, this self-indulgent band of has-beens continues to
cling to their failed vision of caprice, capitulation and cowardice.

Oslo may have collapsed, nearly taking the State of Israel down with it, but
that does not deter our friendly-neighborhood peacemakers, who think they
know better than their own government and their own people. They plunge
ahead, oblivious to the facts, unmindful of the damage they are doing, and
uncaring about the consequences of their actions.

I am sure the psychiatric literature is replete with terms to describe such
a phenomenon, but I prefer a far more conventional explanation: Frankly, I
think these guys are nuts. It is one thing to pursue peace, to love it and
desire it with all one's heart, but it is quite another to toss caution to
the wind, over and over, in its reckless pursuit.

It was therefore especially fitting that Beilin and his colleagues chose to
invite former US president Jimmy Carter to take part in the Geneva ceremony.
More than anyone else, Carter embodies the conceit and failure which so
typify their approach.

Ever since being tossed out of office in 1980, Carter has devoted much of
his time to undermining his own country's foreign policy, coddling its foes
and seeking to impose solutions on it from the outside. Does any of this
sound familiar?
Take, for example, Carter's unauthorized trip to North Korea in 1994, at the
height of a crisis between the Stalinist state and the Clinton
administration over its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

After some polite fawning, in which he described the country's dictator as a
"vigorous and intelligent" man, Carter proceeded to forge a deal without
having any authority or mandate to do so.
He got the North Koreans to promise that they would stop trying to build
nuclear weapons in exchange, essentially, for a bribe from the West, which
included fuel shipments and the construction of two nuclear reactors at US
expense. Clinton, looking for any way out of the confrontation, embraced the
deal, despite its dubious reliance on the word of a dictator.

Eventually, however, the shortsightedness of it became apparent, when the
North Koreans announced in October 2002 that they had been cheating all
along, covertly pursuing their nuclear program even as the West continued to
pour in the cash.

AND SO, thanks to Carter's unwarranted intervention, the US now finds itself
confronting a nuclear-armed madman on the Korean Peninsula. The year 1994
also saw Carter stick his nose into the Yugoslav conflict, again defying his
own government in a bid to intrude on the country's foreign policy.

So rash were his actions, in which he coddled Serbian war-crimes suspects
such as Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, that it led The Washington
Post to editorialize that "Jimmy Carter has used his own personal standing
and negotiating skills and others' pessimism and fatigue to insert himself
into a deadly stalemate in a manner defying order and accountability. He has
only his reputation to lose. Others have much more. It is incredible that he
should have gone so far."

"Jimmy Carter is a man of peace," continued the paper, "He has also all too
often been a loose cannon" (Washington Post, December 21, 1994).
Indeed, Carter has made a career out of subverting his own country's
interests for the sake of furthering his personal agenda. Prior to the 1991
Gulf War, Carter wrote to member states on the UN Security Council, urging
them to vote against US plans to liberate Kuwait. He criticized US President
George W. Bush over the Iraq war last year, and even traveled to Cuba in May
2002, where he defended Fidel Castro against charges of building biological
weapons.

What's more, Carter and Beilin both share an inexplicable liking for the
Palestinian leadership. In his biography of Carter, entitled An Unfinished
Presidency, historian Douglas Brinkley notes that Carter did not hesitate to
serve as an unofficial speechwriter for Yasser Arafat.

Carter, Brinkley says, "felt certain affinities with the Palestinian"
leader, and on one occasion even "drafted on his home computer the strategy
and wording for a generic speech Arafat was to deliver soon for Western
ears."

Who better, then, to stand alongside Beilin and friends in Geneva? Meddling,
after all, is what Beilin, a former academic, and Carter, a former peanut
farmer, are all about.
But rather than fret about it, perhaps it would just be better to ignore
them. The nuts and the peanuts, it seems, make for a perfect mix.

The writer served as deputy director of Communications & Policy Planning in
the Prime Minister's Office under former premier Binyamin Netanyahu.