[Mb-civic] Hamas victory is good news - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  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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