Jimmy Carter does something useful

For a change, he isn’t yelling at Jews.

Former President Carter got in a shouting match Wednesday with Sudanese security officials who blocked him from a town in Darfur where he was trying to meet representatives of ethnic African refugees from the ongoing conflict.

The 83-year-old Carter walked into this highly volatile pro-Sudanese government town to meet refugees too frightened to attend a scheduled meeting at a nearby compound.

Carter was able to make it to a school where he met with one tribal representative and was preparing to go further into the town when Sudanese security services interrupted.

“You can’t go. It’s not on the program!” the local security chief, who only gave his first name as Omar, yelled at Carter, who is in Darfur as part of a delegation of respected international figures known as “The Elders.”

“We’re going to anyway!” an angry Carter retorted, telling security officers they didn’t have the authority to stop him.

Give credit where it’s due. It’s a good thing he bulldozed over the Sudanese. Finally, he’s found a country where he’s on the right side of the issue. He did, however, resort to useless tattling.

As a growing crowd gathered around the former president, Carter’s U.S. security detail and his African Union escort tried to ease tensions. Carter later agreed to a compromise in which tribal representatives would be brought to him at another location later in the day.

“I’ll tell President Bashir about this,” Carter said, referring to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

Yeah, that would be the same man who has stonewalled all attempts by the UN to stop the massacres. Good move there, Jimmy.

The visit by “The Elders,” which is headed by Carter and Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu, is largely a symbolic move by a host of respected figures to push all sides to make peace.

While Tutu led a group to the Otash refugee camp in south Darfur, the U.N. mission in Sudan deemed it too dangerous for Carter to visit a refugee camp.

The former U.S. president instead flew to a World Food Program compound in Kabkabiya, where he was supposed to meet with local community members including some ethnic African refugees, many of whom were chased from their homes by pro-government janjaweed and Sudanese government forces.

It isn’t the refugees they’re worried about. It would be the janjaweed, which the government pretends it can’t control. The populace is completely under their control.

Some ethnic Africans were among those in the crowd that gathered around Carter during the shouting match, but they were too afraid to speak out. Billionaire businessman Richard Branson, who was traveling with Carter, said several had slipped written notes into his pocket to express their feelings to Carter.

The UN Human Rights Council spends most of its time condemning Israel, and ignoring Sudan. But then, the world just ignored a massacre of immense proportions in Burma/Myanmar. It simply boggles my mind that they are unable to muster outrage for thousands of murdered Buddhist monks and nuns, and hundreds of thousands of murdered Sudanese, but the world will united to condemn Israel over a handful of civilian deaths due to a response to terror strikes.

If only the world would get as angry about true atrocities, things like Sudan and Myanmar wouldn’t happen.

darfur, myanmar, israel