Both Palestine Today and Palestine Press Agency report that Egyptian officials invited Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shalah to visit Cairo to meet Jimmy Carter but Shalah refused, saying that Carter is following an "American/Israeli agenda." Shalah has been harshly critical of Khaled Meshaal's planned meeting with Carter.
It would appear that Carter initiated this request to meet with the arch-terrorist. All of the reasons that Carter uses to justify meeting with Hamas - that Hamas has supposedly offered a truce, for example, or that most attacks are not initiated by Hamas - do not apply to Islamic Jihad, yet Carter apparently wants to give legitimacy to Islamic Jihad terrorists anyway.
Meanwhile, Carter plans to meet with a Hamas official in Ramallah and he has already laid a wreath at the grave of his fellow Nobel Prize winner, Yasir Arafat, a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of people who Carter admired greatly.
