In No Uncertain Terms
How can Europe even begin to think about subsidizing terrorism? That would be the effect of the stealth efforts to keep money flowing to Palestine despite its takeover by Hamas. The quaint notion that this terrorist organization will change its spots doesn't survive even a moment's scrutiny. A video message on the Hamas website proclaims: "We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of the Jews."
But the lust to kill Jews is only part of it. Hamas, like Osama bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has ambitions that threaten us all. Khaled Mashal, Hamas's top leader, spelled them out: "The nation of Islam will sit at the throne of the world ... Muhammad is gaining victory in Palestine [and] in Iraq. ... The Arab and Islamic nation is rising and awakening. ... Tomorrow we will lead the world." Not to be outdone is the Hamas leader in Gaza, Mahmoud al-Zahar: "We are part of the great world plan whose name is the world Islamic movement." According to the Jerusalem Post, the Hamas victory will "lift the morale of the Arab and Islamic world and affect the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq."
Just a few days before the Palestinian election, Ahmadinejad met Mashal and Hamas's other leader-in-exile, Musa Abu Marzuk, in Damascus, along with the leaders of nine other Syria-based terrorist groups. The Palestinian conflict, they concluded, will become a "focal point of the final war" between Islam and the West. Hezbollah has already moved its operational headquarters from Beirut to Gaza; al Qaeda elements are already there.
These are omens of an evil confluence, the formation of a Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah-Gaza axis in which Iran will fund and arm a new front of terrorism with its head in Iran, its body in Iraq and Lebanon, and its feet in Gaza and the West Bank. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's leader, warned that financial aid to the Palestinians would be conditional on continued terror and resistance against Israel.
It is important to understand that what fuels such fanaticism isn't just the existence of a democratic Israel or even U.S. policy. To think this is to underestimate the depth of a set of shared political and religious fantasies. Hamas's election victory, on top of advances by Islamists in Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt, has energized and unified the radicals. This is no longer a political conflict about borders and identity. Militant Islam has declared a religious war in which the destruction of Israel is seen as but the first step in establishing a Muslim caliphate.
It is said that Hamas will have to change because most Palestinians want peace. Would that that were so. In one poll, Hamas's hate-filled platform is supported by 68 percent of Palestinians, with 56 percent in favor of continued suicide bombings of Israeli citizens.
Buying time. This wider jihad against the West will either gather momentum and succeed or be confronted and defeated. America must not follow the European way of "walking softly and carrying a big carrot." We must not be fooled by Hamas's Mr. Nice Guy campaign: Its purpose is simply to buy time to consolidate power.
Washington made a grave error in rejecting Israeli and Fatah warnings about Hamas's participation in the election. But the democratic legitimacy of Hamas does not whitewash the moral illegitimacy of its terrorism. A one-time vote by people acculturated to an ideology of violence, intolerance, and hatred does not make them a force for peace and stability. Hamas and all who support it must accept the consequences of their position--a cessation of aid from the West they want to attack. The clear message must be that terrorism will not pay. This means no more money for roads, water systems, classrooms, health clinics, and community centers. Nor must a cent go to pay administrators and security forces, especially since the latter have been turned over to Hamas by the perpetually weak Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Yes, Hamas presides over social welfare institutions and is relatively free of corruption, but as the New Republic put it: "Are they to be admired because they will murder but will not steal?"
Any humanitarian assistance we might give should be limited to food, water, and medicine. We must be careful to avoid fungibility whereby aid frees money for terrorism. We do not owe this group the means to lock up the entire Palestinian population in an internal prison while it prepares to make war on western civilization.
America must be careful about "democracy." It is not just about elections. It is a system of free and independent institutions. A naive advocacy of democracy without such institutions may open the way to our worst enemies, even though a new regime may replace nasty friends. There is, after all, a difference between a benign tumor and a malignant cancer. At this delicate moment, our policies must not pave the way for totalitarian enemies to replace authoritarian friends.
This story appears in the March 20, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.