The Monk is on record as one of the first, and seemingly few, who view the election of Hamas by the Palestinians as something other than merely a protest vote against the corruption of Fatah. As I stated, the PA election in Gaza has revealed the true outlook of the Palestinian people: forget peace, destroy Israel and, seemingly, bugger the consequences.
The notion that winning an election will make Hamas responsible politically, if not intellectually, was quashed today when the terrorists' leader called for Israel to remove the two blue stripes from the Israeli flag because it is, to him, a colonial symbol of Israel's intent to obtain all the land from the Euphrates to the Nile -- the two rivers symbolized by those stripes. In reality, the new nation of Israel designed its flag to resemble the striped prayer shawls that Jews wear when they pray.
Thankfully, Secretary of State Rice seems to have her head in the right place -- calling for withholding funding for the PA because Hamas is running its government.
Some clear-eyed thinking also comes from two expected sources. First, Saul Singer of the Jerusalem Post (link in title of this post), who notes that Nazis and Communists (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, etc.) "both took advantage of democratic processes only to eliminate them when they got the chance; there is no reason to trust Islamic fundamentalists not to do so as well." He missed one: Algeria -- where terrorists were elected into power and caused years of a hellacious civil war.
And Singer has no doubts as to who has the burden of proof of Hamas' intent:
Once Hamas, which has evidently won an absolute majority of the Palestinian legislature, takes the reins of government, a terrorist organization becomes a terrorist regime. This must be the presumption of Israel and the world, until proven otherwise.
Mark Steyn is also, as usual, no fool. First, he noted the "message" on the Hugh Hewitt show:
. . . [Palestinians are] saying to hell with that humbug hypocrisy line. Let's vote for the party that says we don't believe in a two-state solution, where what we are, we want to drive every last Jew into the sea. And in that sense, this is a less hypocritical expression of where the Palestinian people are at, than supporting Fatah was. . .
And he noted the reality more forthrightly in his weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times. After noting the extent of Fatah's corruption, he wrote:
. . . I'd like to believe this was a vote for getting rid of corruption rather than getting rid of Jews. But that's hard to square with some of the newly elected legislators. For example, Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, was elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She's a household name to Palestinians, known as Um Nidal -- Mother of the Struggle -- and, at the rate she's getting through her kids, the Struggle's all she'll be Mother of. She's famous for a Hamas recruitment video in which she shows her 17-year-old son how to kill Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It's the Hamas version of 42nd Street: You're going out there a youngster but you've got to come back in small pieces.
But John Podhoretz makes a very valid point:
Fatah is no better than Hamas. It has a comparably monstrous history of Jew-killling, including the murder of Americans. During the last intifada, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade — which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Fatah — stood second to none in its bloodthirsty slaughter of Israelis as they dined in cafes or rode on buses.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
There are two distinctions to be drawn between Hamas and Fatah. First, Fatah has supposedly given up its goal of destroying Israel and has supposedly accepted the principle of a two-state solution. Big deal. The Palestinian educational system created by Fatah preaches Israel's destruction from kindergarten through college, as do the state-run media. Fatah remains philosophically committed to Israel's destruction, even though it has adopted a more pragmatic stance politically.
Second, Hamas has always been a very useful tool for Fatah and its leaders, who garnered support in America and elsewhere (including Israel) on the grounds that, whatever sins Fatah and Arafat might have committed, they at least weren't Hamas. Hamas was said to be infinitely worse than Fatah on the grounds that Hamas was an Islamic movement, whereas Fatah was a secular nationalist Arab movement. All well and good — except that a dead Jew is a dead Jew no matter who kills him.
And a Stalinist like Arafat was never any sort of improvement on an Islamic fundamentalist. Their goals were the same, their aims the same, their tactics equally disgusting.
And of course, Jeff Jacoby is no fool either as he rips the President for adopting the Fatah-was-corrupt rationale to explain the Palestinian vote:
Spare us, Mr. President. If a slate of neo-Nazi skinheads swept to power in a European election, would you say that the voters were seeking "honest government" and "services"? Palestinians are not stupid, and it insults their intelligence to pretend that when they vote to empower a genocidal organization with a platform straight out of "Mein Kampf," what they're really after is better healthcare. Islamist extremism isn't needed to fix Palestinian hospitals any more than fascism was needed to make Italian trains run on time in the 1920s. If Palestinians turned out en masse to elect a party that unapologetically stands for hatred and mass murder, it's a safe bet that hatred and mass murder had something to do with the turnout.
By the same token, Hamas's new duties are not going to turn it into a moderate group of diligent civil servants. When violent Islamists win political power, their brutality and zealotry do not diminish. (See Khomeini, Ayatollah and Taliban, Afghan). The notion that Hamas now has "a choice to make" is just another example of the delusional thinking that is so pervasive when it comes to the Palestinian Authority.
Jacoby thinks that the Hamas election is good because it provokes a reality check and wipes away some of the delusions that render Western states credulous and foolish when dealing with the Palestinians. Based on the President's statement that Jacoby criticized, and the reactions of Israeli PM-for-now Olmert, the two main counterweights to Palestinian terrorism have already enlisted on the side of dreamy-eyed optimism.
I'm hoping only that the Israeli leadership is as honest and clear-eyed as Steyn, Jacoby, J-Pod and Singer. Given its recent performance, that is a high hope indeed.
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