No treating with terror

[barb162]

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/060213/13edit.htm

No treating with terror
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman

2/13/06

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.

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[bemildred]

1. Mort seems to have been upset by all this.

May I suggest that he take a Valium, and consider that in large measure the events of today result from what was done yesterday, and the day before that, and so on, so that if we are not happy with the situtation today, we have the option of changing what we do tomorrow in order to get different results later on. What the election of Hamas is, primarily, is a repudiation of the policy for dealing with Palestinians in the past. So Mort, and all of us, can consider what might be done to improve the Palestinians attitude in the future, thus securing a different and more agreeable result.

[Scurrilous]

2. Well said.

:thumbsup: