by Mortimer Zuckerman
U.S. News - Feb. 13, 2006
At one time, Mariam Farahat was a mother of six, but, with her encouragement, three of her sons blew themselves up on suicide missions to murder innocent Israeli citizens, so now she's a mother of only three. Farahat is famous in Gaza for a recruitment video in which she shows her 17-year-old son how to kill Israelis in a suicide attack and then tells him not to come back. For her willingness to sacrifice her children in a spiraling culture of death, Farahat became famous as Um Nidal—Mother of the Struggle. Along with several dozen other Hamas terrorists, Farahat was just elected to the new Palestinian Legislative Council.
What better metaphor could there possibly be for the cancer now afflicting the Palestinian body politic than the election of a terrorist group to a majority in the parliament? As one commentator put it, "The Palestinians are the first terrorist people."
This is a stunning setback for Washington–and it bears some of the responsibility. The birth of a Hamas terrorist statelet in the West Bank is not just one disaster but many. It will destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, it will threaten America's regional friends, such as Jordan and Egypt, and it will embolden all of America's enemies in the region—Syria, Iran, the Islamic insurgents in Iraq, al Qaeda, and Hezbollah. Hamastan, as they call it, will become a training ground for terrorism—a sort of Afghanistan lite, if you will.
This is no triumph for democracy. Yes, some of the majority vote for Hamas was a legitimate repudiation of the grotesque incompetence and corruption of Yasser Arafat's Fatah Party, but its genes of hate and violence guarantee that a Hamas "democracy" will mutate into something very different from what we understand a democracy to offer: freedom of religion and assembly, freedom of speech, respect for minorities, equality before the law, and a commitment to the nonviolent resolution of disputes.
These characteristics of democracy have no place in the Hamas polity. What we have instead is an exploitation of the shell of democracy and an explicit commitment to violence and bigotry. As Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar put it, "We will join the Legislative Council with our weapons in our hands." These killers will now be wearing official police and military uniforms. Who in Palestine will dare argue for a peaceful negotiation with Israel? Hamas, which claims the blood of almost 600 innocent Israelis on its hands, could not have been more explicit than it was in a tv advertisement that aired January 17: "We do not recognize the Israeli enemy, nor his right to be our neighbor, nor to stay [on the land], nor his ownership of any inch of land."
Most of the civilized world immediately recoiled from the implications of the Hamas success in the recent balloting, but the evil is so hard to contemplate that there is also a good deal of wishful thinking about how Hamas will mature with responsibility. How can it? Hamas doesn't even pretend to want peace with Israel. Its goals are, quite simply, the annihilation of the Jewish state in favor of an Islamic state throughout the Holy Land—an Islamic regime whose source of authority and laws is Islamic law as codified in the sharia. As Zahar put it, "In the Islamist Palestinian State, every citizen will be required to act in accordance with the codes of Islamic religious law."
To secular western ears, some of this may seem completely bizarre, but Hamas adherents take the words in its covenant totally seriously. Here's one example: "The time [of Muslim unity] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry, 'O, Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come on and kill him.'" In Article 6, the covenant states Hamas's objective clearly: "To raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine . . . Israel will just continue until Islam will eliminate it." The conflict is defined in religious terms: "The Land of Palestine from the river to the sea is considered an Islamic waqf [endowment], and no Muslim has the right to cede any part of it."
A two-state solution? "Never!" How will Hamas accomplish the obliteration of Israel? Article 13 states: "There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad; initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are but a waste of time." A former Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, spelled it out: "We will not leave one Jew in Palestine." The current Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal, reiterated the threat at a post-election press conference in Damascus. Hamas will not disarm; it will not even recognize Israel's 1967 borders—never mind the secure and recognized boundaries for Israel called for by U.N. resolutions. A two-state solution? "Never!" vowed Zahar, when asked if Hamas would recognize Israel.
Hamas is not just a mortal threat to Israel and all who live in the state. It inhabits an irrational world of paranoid fantasy. Articles 22 and 32 of the covenant, for instance, assert that "the Jews" control the world media, such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting, and the like and have used this power and their wealth to stir revolutions—including the French and the Communist revolutions, wwi, and wwii. "They used their money to establish clandestine organizations such as the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, and the like—all secret organizations . . . that act for the interest of Zionism and under its direction . . . laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The Protocols! Everyone knows they were a clumsy Bolshevik fraud, but to Hamas they are sacred writ.
It all brings to mind Jonathan Swift's observation that it is useless to reason someone out of a position he has not been reasoned into. How can Israelis or anyone else negotiate with such fantasists? And only fantasists can hope that Hamas will soon turn its back on terrorism. Extremist parties of this nature don't become more moderate; they become more extreme—see the record of the Baath Party in Syria under Hafez Assad and in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, as well as Muslims under the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran—not to mention how Arafat's idea of responsibility was starting the second intifada or the wretched behavior of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Hamas may try to play the old word game and put a sheep's clothing on the wolf, as Arafat did. Israeli intelligence has concluded that, in fact, Hamas will do just that, biding its time before it finally strikes. It ought to be clear to everyone that any deal with Hamas will have as much meaning as a deal with Osama bin Laden. Is it really so hard to understand that a group that calls for genocide, extols terrorism, and demands a Taliban-style regime is not about to become moderate?
Contempt for Christianity. Hamas hates Christians as much as it does Jews. Take Bethlehem. It is no longer a Christian city. Muslims now vastly outnumber the departing Christians who are being effectively forced out at a rate where fairly soon the only Christians in Bethlehem will be holiday tourists. Just last year, Hamas won the citywide election, and a city councilor quickly advocated a special tax on non-Muslim residents, as ordained by the Koran for dhimmis, second-class Jews and Christians. The contempt for Christianity was manifest several years earlier when the newly elected radical Muslim mayor of Nazareth gave permission to build a mosque in the parking lot of the Basilica of the Annunciation, which would have overwhelmed the Basilica and made it virtually impossible for Christians to visit. Fortunately, the plan was blocked by the Israelis.
In 2002, President Bush called on the Palestinians to elect a leadership "uncompromised by terror." He has now been directly refuted—and his administration bears a special responsibility for this result in its obsessive pressure to hold elections at any price, and on time. Secretary Condoleezza Rice hazards her credibility when she says that no one foresaw Hamas winning. Hello? The Israelis warned, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked for a postponement and was overruled. In his State of the Union address, the president very properly rejected Hamas, but Washington has already helped create another flashpoint, by imposing on Israel the porous border-control agreement between Gaza and Egypt in Raffah in the belief that the Palestinian Authority, corrupt and inefficient as it was, would do what it promised. Now this border will be taken over by Hamas, which will try to bring in terrorists and weapons, especially rockets with greater range and accuracy. If rockets are deployed to fire on Israeli cities, Israel will have to intervene to protect its citizens.
The Palestinian election reminds us all that the Islamists remain the only organized political force in the Arab world. They are the most effective at capitalizing on popular discontent. We have seen their resurgence in Iraq. If really free elections were held in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood would win; in Algeria, in Saudi Arabia, the same thing would happen—and not because of Israel. Jordan, with its population made up of 70 percent Palestinians, is now at risk, and it is a country whose stability is vital to America's interests.
Sadly, the beneficiary of this turn of events is another heinous power in the region, Iran. For 25 years, Tehran has been steadily giving more and more money to terrorist organizations. It has been the principal sponsor of Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as Hamas, and they all work together. For example, Hamas has been transferring rockets and other materiel to these terrorist organizations so they can launch rocket attacks from Gaza against Israel. A few weeks ago, in Damascus, the extremist Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said publicly to Mashaal, the Hamas leader, that the party's victory in Palestine has become a matter of life and death for the Islamic world.
It is critical, then, not to grant a scrap of legitimacy to Hamas under its present leadership, for to do so would undermine Palestinian moderation, make it harder to forestall the development of terrorist training grounds in the West Bank, and might even produce a defeat for Israeli moderates in the upcoming Israeli election.
The world must not support Hamas simply because it was able to win the vote of a desperate people. The flow of funds from the United States and Europe should cease; it has long been unconscionable that so many millions of dollars have been spent to support terror and hate: Palestinian schools and media have never ceased inculcating hatred, sowing the poison from generation to generation.
Never again should the international community, including America, accept the perfidious notion that Palestinian terrorists are legitimate actors. As the saying goes, "Hell is truth seen too late."
Very, very nicely done!
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