The New Terrorist State, Made in the USA

National Review, on the Hamas-led Palestinian state:

Hamas appears to have won more seats than its rival Fatah. Hamas does not fit into any pattern of pluralist democracy. A movement of political Islam, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood like al Qaeda and other terrorists, it infuses nationalism with religious faith. The aim remains the ethnic cleansing or the death of all Israelis, and the incorporation of their land into the new state of Palestine. Suicide bombing is its special means to that end. Hamas leaders have already been quick to say that they will take up their place in the legislative assembly and keep their weapons. Taking that line, Islamists in other Arab countries have shot it out with nationalists, and this sort of strife could befall the Palestinians too.

Hamas appeals primarily because it is against Fatah corruption, and its distribution of funds received from international sponsors to purposes of education and welfare is of course genuinely popular. In the light of the election, Hamas leaders have to decide whether to give priority to the struggle against Israel, or to cementing the social measures that give them every advantage over Fatah.

Rightly President Bush has applied pressure by saying that there can be no question of dealing with Hamas until it gives up terror. For Israel, Ehud Olmert has made the same condition. In practice, there are already Hamas mayors and officials on the West Bank and in Gaza, and Israel has to treat with them over plenty of low-level issues. Common sense suggests that Hamas would enter the government along with Fatah, and try to steer the political process to its benefit, while shaking a fist at Israel for show. That appears to be what Abu Mazen hopes, and he is too weak to do much more than appease Hamas. The Arafat years have left Palestinian society so fractured and lawless that common sense is at a premium, however, and any idea of peace and cooperation may well be wishful thinking. In that case, this election will have added to the baffling Middle East phenomenon that something new has happened but nothing changes.

Yet something big has happened---the puncturing of the myth that the Palestinian people are noble and peace-loving yet cursed with bad leadership. This is clearly not the case, as these election results amply demonstrate. The "good German, bad Nazi" formulation pushed by the Bush and Clinton Administrations is simply false.

At least the masks have dropped, right?

What victory does to Hamas is to put the movement into an impossible position. As preliminary reports emerge, Hamas has already asked Fatah to form a coalition and got a negative response. Prime Minister Abu Ala has resigned with his cabinet, and president Abu Mazen will now appoint Hamas to form the next government. From the shadows of ambiguity, where Hamas could afford — thanks to the moral and intellectual hypocrisy of those in the Western world who dismissed its incendiary rhetoric as tactics — to have the cake and eat it too. Now, no more. Had they won 30-35 percent of the seats, they could have stayed out of power but put enormous limits on the Palestinian Authority’s room to maneuver. By winning, they have to govern, which means they have to tell the world, very soon, a number of things.

They will have to show their true face now: No more masks, no more veils, no more double-speak. If the cooptation theory — favored by the International Crisis Group and by the former British MI-6 turned talking head, Alistair Crooke — were true, this is the time for Hamas to show what hides behind its veil.

As the government of the Palestinian Authority, now they will have to say whether they accept the roadmap.

They will have to take control over security and decide whether they use it to uphold the roadmap or to wage war.

There will be no excuses or ambiguities when Hamas fires rockets on Israel and launches suicide attacks against civilian targets. Until Tuesday, the PA could hide behind the excuse that they were not directly responsible and they could not rein in the "militants." Now the "militants" are the militia of the ruling party. They are one and the same with the Palestinian Authority. If they bomb Israel from Gaza — not under occupation anymore, and is therefore, technically, part of the Palestinian state the PLO proclaimed in Algiers in 1988, but never bothered to take responsibility for — that is an act of war, which can be responded to in kind, under the full cover of the internationally recognized right of self-defense. No more excuses that the Palestinians live under occupation, that the PA is too weak to disarm Hamas, that violence is not the policy of the PA. Hamas and the PA will be the same: What Hamas does is what the PA will stand for.

Continuing to pursue a violent path will automatically switch off all international aid. Perhaps Hamas intends to offset the resulting loss of revenue by hosting Holocaust-denial conferences in Gaza and terrorist training camps in Rafah, but it will still have to explain to the Palestinian public why it’s better to renounce public aid to wage war.

Wrong. International aid will continue to materialize, because of the Palestinians' permanent refugee status in the UN. Moreover, the Europeans will embrace the Hamas-led Palestinian state for two reasons: their own growing anti-Semitism (and urge to quiet Muslim unrest within their borders), and the opportunity to stick it to the U.S. and Israel. The viability of the Palestinian state is an important argument against that dangerous Bush notion of democratization as a stabilizing force in the Middle East. Whatever Hamas does, the EU will excuse it.

Part of the reason that one should expect little change in a Hamas-led Palestinian state versus a Fatah-led Palestinian state is that there isn't much difference between Hamas and Fatah:

As Fatah appears to have lost at the Palestinian polls on Wednesday, it's worth a closer look: Is Hamas that much worse?

Its early years remain murky, because it chose to function in a clandestine fashion. What is known is that in the mid-50s, Yasser Arafat went to Kuwait, where he organized some 20 Palestinians. For this, he drew on the membership of the Union of Palestinian Students, which had been organized by Arafat and his coterie at Cairo University in 1952; the union was affiliated with the radical Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, then in its heyday. One of the cofounders of the group, with Arafat from the beginning, was Mahmoud Abbas, today President of the Palestinian Authority. At first Fatah’s main activities consisted of recruitment and the publishing of a highly politicized magazine called Our Palestine; the first edition appeared in 1959.

A close associate of Arafat’s, Khalil Wazir (a.k.a. Abu Jihad) then went to Algeria to open Fatah’s first office. Algeria had just undergone a revolution, carrying outa war of terror to boot out the French. The ideologue of that revolution was Franz Fanon, who espoused the philosophy that violence was a catharsis for oppressed peoples — an end in itself and not just a means to an end.

There is solid reason to believe that Fatah adopted this as its model: Charles De Gaulle referred to French withdrawal from Algeria and the granting of Algerian independence as “Peace of the brave.” Arafat used that very same phrase frequently. An early Fatah leaflet, entitled “Revolution and Violence, the Path to Victory,” was essentially a collection of quotations from Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth.

By the early 60s, Fatah’s goal was the launching — from Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt-occupied Gaza — of commando raids against Israel. It went public with this in 1965 for a specific reason: The year before, the PLO had been founded with Egyptian support, and had adopted a pan-Arab stance; Fatah opposed its position.

The policy of launching border attacks continued, and escalated, until the Six Day War in 1967. The defeat of Arab armies by Israel left a power vacuum in the PLO — a vacuum that Fatah promptly filled. By 1968, Fatah had gained control of the PLO, and within a year Arafat was at its head, where he remained until his death just over a year ago.

From that time until the present, Fatah has essentially controlled the PLO. When, as a result of the Oslo Accords, the PA was spun off from the PLO, Fatah members controlled this entity as well. (After its founding, the PLO had declared itself the official representative of the Palestinian people, wherever they were, and of their nationalist aspiration. The PA was established as a temporary administrative entity in specific areas in Gaza and the West Bank.)

Yaser Arafat practically invented modern terrorism. We should not be shocked that terrorists have suddenly come to power in the Palestinian territories; they've been in power for decades.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss:

"Hamas By The Numbers" — a fact sheet produced by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — provides a chilling snapshot of the jihadist group formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Since 1989, Hamas has carried out more than 100 major terrorist attacks, killing more than 500.

Hamas has launched more than 300 Qassam rockets at Israeli towns.

84% of Israelis killed in these attacks have been civilians.
27 Americans have been killed in Hamas attacks since 1993.

Hamas has been on the U.S.-terrorist list for the past eight years.

The European Union added Hamas to its terrorist list two years ago.

Hamas receives $3 million a year from Iran.

The most disturbing thing about the Palestinian elections is that it demonstrates once and for all what a fraud the "peace process" was and is.