[Mb-civic] Hamas victory is good news - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe
Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Sun Jan 29 06:33:15 PST 2006
Hamas victory is good news
By Jeff Jacoby | January 29, 2006 | The Boston Globe
WESTERN reactions to the outcome of the Palestinian election last week
came in two varieties: highly negative and decidedly undecided.
In the first category was Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who
moaned that the Hamas defeat of Fatah was a ''very, very, very bad
result." In New York, the Anti-Defamation League pronounced the results
''a tremendous setback."
Others insisted that the significance of the election couldn't be known
until Hamas decides whether or not to abandon its foremost objective:
the liquidation of Israel. In the words of FBI Director Robert Mueller,
''Hamas has a choice to make." It was a line echoed everywhere, from the
British Foreign Office to the New York Times editorial page.
Well, put me in a third camp: I think the sweeping Hamas victory is by
far the best result that could have been hoped for.
I say that not because Hamas is anything other than a blood-drenched
terrorist group, but because its lopsided win is an unambiguous reality
check into the nature of Palestinian society. And if there is one thing
that the West badly needs, it is more realism and less delusion about
the Palestinians.
Some of that delusion was on display at the White House on Thursday,
when President Bush painted the Palestinian election as a ''healthy"
exercise in civic reform:
''Obviously, people were not happy with the status quo," Bush explained.
''The people are demanding honest government. The people want services.
They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which
they can get a decent education and they can find healthcare. And so the
elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian
territories. . . . There's something healthy about a system that does that."
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.
In his remarks on Thursday, Bush went on to say that he didn't ''see how
you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a
country as part of your platform" or ''if your party has got an armed
wing" and that Hamas is therefore ''a party with which we will not
deal." If that means that the Bush administration will shun the new
Hamas government as it once shunned Yasser Arafat, well and good. But
why was Mahmoud Abbas treated any differently? Like Hamas, Fatah -- the
PLO faction Abbas and Arafat co-founded 45 years ago -- advocates
Israel's destruction in its basic charter. Like Hamas, Fatah has an
''armed wing" -- the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- that is guilty of
horrific terror attacks. Fatah's emblem shows crossed rifles against a
map of ''Palestine" that depicts all of Israel; on the Hamas emblem, the
map is the same, but the crossed weapons are swords. The only important
difference between the ousted Fatah party and the incoming Hamas
leadership is that for PR purposes the former sometimes pretended to
accept Israel's right to exist, while the latter is openly and
unabashedly committed to Israel's elimination.
Yet that is why the Hamas landslide is good news. It will now be much
harder to wish away the unpleasant fact that after a dozen years of PLO
misrule, Palestinian society is deeply dysfunctional, steeped in hatred
and violence. All but the willfully blind can now see that the
Palestinian Authority is no ''partner in peace." Until it is decisively
defeated and thoroughly detoxified, the Palestinian people will never
enjoy the blessings of liberty and decent governance. Ironically, the
ascendancy of Hamas may have brought that day a little closer.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/29/hamas_victory_is_good_news/
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