Rice Criticizes Carter’s Hamas Meeting

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice criticized former President Jimmy Carter Tuesday for meeting with Hamas leadership over the weekend.

Carter met with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in an attempt to foster peace talks between Meshaal, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

According to Reuters, at a conference on Iraq that is being held in Kuwait Rice told reporters:

The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we certainly told President Carter that we did not think that meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians.

We wanted to make sure there would be no confusion and there would be no sense that Hamas was somehow a party to peace negotiations which Abu Mazen has undertaken with the Israeli prime minister.