Behold but a few gentle excerpts from that Most Merciful of documents, the
Hamas charter, the doctrine of the new rulers of Palestine:
In The Name Of The Most Merciful Allah
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.
There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.
After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.
We did indeed go into the Middle East proclaiming the virtues of democracy, but not with the naive notion being ascribed to us by some (See [amongst many others]: Buchanan, Patrick J.) that we would always be thrilled with the results of the elections we were seeking to have transpire. Democracy means, at times and most unfortunately, the freedom to be as stupid as you want to be.
We certainly see that on rampant parade domestically, both in pockets and nationally, and we have been engaged in this noble experiment for over two hundred years.
Adolf Hitler was nearly elected, and then appointed Chancellor in an act of political conciliation, by a popularly chosen German President Paul von Hindenburg, lest we forget, and this generation's Hitlerian want-to-be, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, culled the most votes in a quintessential example of that hallmark of some democratic actions, the tainted election.
Certainly the Palestinians are allowed even the most egregious of fumbles in this, their first true attempt at self-determination ever.
And this is not a blanket pass or amnesty for democracy, for it is certainly not the be-all and end-all of all systems political. Winston Churchill assessed it thusly; "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
We are, in point of fact, a Constitutional republic (which is the be-all), which is far better than a democracy (precisely why the Founding Fathers, starting from scratch, chose the former rather than the latter).
The difference being that in a democracy, the people vote on all things; in a republic, they vote for people who then vote on all things for them.
This means, of course, that we are setting up what are in actuality republics in Afghanistan and Iraq; regardless, the governments of which they are now in possession are far, far better than the ones that lorded over them prior to our incursionary arrival.
The people now loudly criticizing our attempts at free government in the Middle East, predicated upon the admittedly unfortunate results in the Palestine National Assembly elections, were noticeably silent when Afghanistan and Iraq elected unviolent coalition governing bodies.
Claims that we are hypocritical for now bemoaning the choice of a Hamas majority in the PNA, as if we are supposed to blindly accept all elective results everywhere, are made by those being far more pharisaic for looking the other way when two far more important slates of elections, in nations in which we had far greater and more direct influence, turned out considerably better.
And the Palestinians are certainly a unique and undemonstrative case in the democracy endeavor in the Middle East. In the ongoing game of Arab Muslim Musical Chairs, they are always the first of the last ones standing when the music stops (predicated on music actually being allowed in the respective regions).
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Everyone, Save One, Heaving-Ho West |
This is a people that are parts Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian, and they were long ago thrown under the bus by their Arab League brethren, being used as a collective wedge to shove the Jewish state they all hate into the sea.
The United Nations (another aggregate body that despises Israel) created refugee parameters unique to the Palestinians, where they had to have lived in the land from which they were displaced for as little as two years to qualify. (Displacement that occurred in large part due to the actions of or under pressure from various Muslim states, rather than Israel.)
This greatly increased the number of "refugees" supposedly dislocated from the nascent Jewish state, thereby artificially exacerbating the situation and increasing tremendously the amount of pressure to be applied against it.
In fact, early on in the "refugee crisis", the vast majority of Palestinians thought of themselves as Syrian, and sought only to return there. But, of course, Syria (and Transjordan and Egypt) would have none of it, preferring instead to leave them stranded in a transient no man's land and thereby have the ongoing hammer with which to bash the Israelis.
It was not until the rise to prominence of Yassar Arafat (and Mahmoud Abbas) and their Palestine Liberation Organization, in conjunction with the U.N.'s ridiculously diminished refugee definition, that they suddenly shifted the location of displacement to Israel.
The Palestinians have spent the last forty plus years being robbed blind by Arafat and his Fatah Party. Copious worldwide foreign aid was bled off into Arafat's French and Swiss bank accouts, leaving the Palestinians themselves perpetually destitute.
Arafat then had the audacity to blame this Palestinian poverty, contrasted with his (and his France residing wife's) opulence, on Israel. The United Nations had the moral bankruptcy to continually take this thug at his worthless word whilst simultaneously failing to believe anything Israel had to say. And the Nobel Committee chipped in with a 1994 Peace Prize for this thief, and the Godfather of modern terrorism.
This left the Palestinians themselves with no choice but to nurse on the Hamas teat, a situation this horrific organization utilized to maximum Islamist advantage, ingratiating themselves with a distraught people as a means to their Jihadist end.
Since their 1986 inception, Hamas has provided a great deal of the food, hospitals and rudimentary medical care in the region. The only education the vast majority of Palestinians receive is in Hamas madrassahs, in which they are inculcated with little but the Islamofascist hatred for Israel (the United States, and all Infidels, everywhere) that we saw exhibited in the voting booths last Wednesday, and on Tel Aviv school buses and in Jerusalem pizzerias every day.
Children as young as five are taught of the holiness of martyrdom, and told of the now notorious 72 virgins awaiting those who give themselves violently up, so long as they take as many Jews as possible with them.
We are now well into the second generation of this murderous indoctrination cycle; parents today willingly hand over their children to Hamas for their homicidal use, to glorify Allah and slaughter Jews.
After four decades of this horrendous treatment, the pronounced impecuniousness, and the poisoning of so many minds, is it any wonder they voted, think and act as they do?
Palestine as currently constituted, therefore, is decidedly not the Middle East democracy test case, and we should not write off the necessary attempt to spread our Noble Experiment eastward based solely on their ballotory choices of the week past.
But neither should we allow their terrible elective decisions to stand unchallenged. We must express in no uncertain terms that Palestinian statehood will never be forthcoming so long as they continue to decide things as they just have.
Israel should be allowed to unilaterally walk away from, and not receive any pressure to return to, any further attempts at the ongoing inanity that is blissfully referred to by the Leftist world community as the "peace process" until the Palestinians choose worthwhile representatives to join them at the table (this precludes merely a return to Fatah).
We should have long ago halted funding to the PNA; that we are only doing so now puts us and it into the category of better-late-than-never.
Most importantly of all, we must continue to press forward with our efforts at spreading democracy (with all its limitations), looking instead to our imperfect but unquestionable progress in Afghanistan and Iraq as heartening indicators and guideposts.
That a single election in an ideological backwater over which we held little sway went awry is barely consequential to the overall integrity of the necessary mission we have undertaken.
