Sunday, January 29, 2006
Exactly right.
Jacoby: Hamas victory is good news
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...
...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...
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, p.44
I actually think that Jacoby is too optimistic. The world doesn't care or want to know what Hamas is really "all about", because that would interfere with the agenda it has decided to adopt (Israel is always wrong, and is an illegitimate creation"). Hamas says that it wants Israel destroyed and its Jewish occupants liquidated, and it elicits barely a page 10 article in your local newspaper. I can guarantee you that if an Israeli leader were to issue a statement calling for the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza, there would be a special session of the U.N. Security Council held within 24 hours, followed by the inevitable condemnations, calls for sanctions, boycotts, etc.
Ultimately, the West doesn't really care what Hamas is like.
Any result which involves more, rather than less, transparency is probably the best that can be hoped for given the milieu in question. Winning the election places them front and center and while they will continue to recieve some favorable spin from notable sectors in the MSM, it will now be more difficult to shade and shadow what is occurring. Bare minimum, more transparency will tend to result in fewer members of the public being naive or ignorant (in the simple, uninformed, sense of the term) about what is occurring there: cynical and brutish forms of machiavellian manipulation and cooptation to such a thorough-going degree that it defies most writers' descriptive powers, or at least their willingness to apply those descriptive powers.
If I was a Palestinian voter, and I knew that the deceased head of Fatah, Arafat, died owning a billion (more or less?)dollars of money that had been earmarked to aid the common people, then the hell with politics, I would have voted for Hamas just out of anger.
That is the election in a nutshell.
No question that the corruption issue was huge -- and you're a few billion short in your estimate -- but to imagine that it was the only issue, and that a large portion of the Arab population don't buy into the rest of Hamas's agenda just fine would not be correct, either I think.