No treating with terror
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."
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