Apropos Of Nothing

Gosh, it’s been a while. How are you, gentle readers? I’ve been away from the blog for several reasons — preoccupation with the babies (they’re starting to crawl!), back trouble that’s made sitting at the computer an impossibility, and a new reluctance to obsess about things I can’t do anything about.

But you know me. A couple of things have happened in close succession that I don’t think I can stay silent about. I’m late out of the gate on both of them, but I can’t resist getting a thought or two off my chest.

Two things are on my mind: the killing by Palestinians of the three young sons of a political rival, and the publication of Jimmy Carter’s book labeling us an apartheid state. What drives me crazy about the horrific story about the killing of the kids (aged three, six and nine), aside from the the crime itself (which must surely be a new low even for them), is the way the media have painted it a botched assassination attempt. These guys picked up their automatic weapons and went to the boys’ elementary school, where they lay in wait and then opened fire on the car in full knowledge that — indeed, because – it contained the guy’s children. Murdering your rival’s children in an attempt to psychologically destroy said rival is a thug’s technique that we might hope went out with Titus Andronicus, but that is obviously alive and well among the Palestinians. The object was to kill the kids. If their father had been in the car, that would have been a bonus. Let’s cut the crap.

The disgustingness of this particular crime was brought into even greater relief for me by the almost concurrent furore that erupted over Carter’s ridiculous book. He seems to have made a prize jackass of himself this time, which is all to the good — he plagiarized maps from Dennis Ross’s book and apparently littered his text with so many lies and errors and bald inventions that the first executive director of the Carter Center and founder of its Middle East program can no longer stand to be associated with his name. What amazes me about the book is the spectacular chutzpah Carter demonstrates by daring to lecture us, or anyone, for that matter, on how to fix the Middle East. Jimmy Carter, with his supine response to the Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in 1979, is directly responsible for the emboldening of Islamist fanaticism. He is directly responsible for convincing the world’s Islamists that the U.S. is a paper tiger. He is directly responsible for the steady escalation of Islamist terror against the U.S. and all Western interests. I don’t know — his views on how to solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem lack weight somehow.

We’ve all always known about Carter’s bias, but it’s exceptionally vivid in view of his complete silence about Palestinian crimes even against each other. They can do no wrong in his eyes, and we can do no right. He even goes so far as to defend the snatching of Gilad Shalit by Palestinian terrorists, which is a bridge too far even for the most established Israel-bashers. He’s filled with horror at the wall, of course, and the way it interferes with the raising of Palestinian olives, but has nothing to say about the help it’s providing in the raising of Israeli children. An untold number of Israelis are breathing today, and I may be one of them, because the wall exists. It was obvious to all of us that the building of the wall would bring mountains of remonstrations down on our heads, but when the options are to put up with the sanctimonious pontifications of armchair geopolitical scientists with thin grasps on history, facts, or even reality or to go to lots and lots of funerals, the choice is easy. Jimmy Carter’s sensibilities notwithstanding, that wall needs to stand until we can have some reasonable assurance that the people on the other side of it are civilized human beings. As things stand now, when they can’t get at our kids, they kill each other’s. As Shania Twain says, that don’t impress me much.

Hurrah! Much to my surprise and relief, the two Fox News journalists have been freed by their Palestinian captors. Michelle Malkin has a thorough roundup on the story, from which I learned that a) the culprits were known to the authorities in the Palestinian Authority almost immediately after the snatchings, and b) they are the same people who killed three Americans in a roadside bombing in 2003. They got clean away with those murders and will obviously get away with these abductions as well.

I hate to quibble — the important thing is that these guys are safe; I realize that — but I can’t help it. Two things rankle about this.

One: It made my skin crawl slightly that one of the two captives, after describing the experience of being abducted, hooded, tied up, thrown on a concrete floor, held captive for two weeks by people who are perfectly capable of murder, forced to mouth the offensive words of the “militants” onto videotape, and then forced at gunpoint to convert to Islam, still felt it necessary to sugar-coat the nightmare with a comment about what a swell religion Islam is. Yep — those terribly sensitive Muslim sensibilities are the real story here, not the kidnapping and terrorizing of two Western journalists by jihadist thugs.

And Two: Would those journalists have been given the option of converting to Islam to save their skins if they had been Jewish?

Just asking.

The extremely interesting writer Michael Totten (c.f. Daniel’s post in praise of Totten’s Mideast blog) has mentioned a theory floating around about the abduction of the two Fox journalists: that it’s the work of Al Qaeda operating in Gaza. This is obviously extremely ominous, and it makes a number of inconsistencies fall into place; primarily, that the hostages were not released within hours or a couple of days, as has always happened in the past when garden-variety Palestinian terrorists have snatched foreign nationals, and that the demand is for the release of US-held Muslims, not Israeli-held Muslims.

We are seeing an increasingly dangerous pattern of outside influence on the already bad behavior of Palestinians in “liberated” Gaza. Another example is the Hezbollah-style abduction of still-missing Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit prior to the Lebanon war. Not only has the withdrawal from Gaza — which I supported — resulted in just the kind of unrelenting missile attacks on Israeli civilians across the border that was anticipated by opponents of the withdrawal, but it has also allowed an apparently festering, freakish jihadism to take root on our doorstep. (And I’ll just remark in passing that if I were a resident of Sderot, I would be wondering why missile attacks on my front yard are tolerable to my government but missile attacks on front yards in Nahariyya are a cassus belli.)

These are disorienting times. When the British foiled the terror plot to blow up multiple airliners last week by using a long-term, patient program of police surveillance and cross-border intelligence-sharing, I had an intensely disconcerting thought: that John Kerry might have actually had a point about something; viz, that terrorists can be effectively combatted by approaching the problem as a police matter. The cesspool of Wild-West chaos and extremist terrorism that Gaza has become since the Israeli withdrawal has made me wonder whether I wasn’t wrong on that one, too.

Now this is an interesting editorial choice. The Jerusalem Post has a story ostensibly about the sham of a meeting the Fatah old-guard cronies are holding in Jordan at which they are pretending to discuss necessary reforms. But graf 2 begins with a truly eye-popping “meanwhile”:

Meanwhile, a radical Islamic group called Hizb al-Tahrir (Liberation Party) is planning to declare the birth of an Islamic caliphate in the Gaza Strip on Friday.

Come again?

Turns out these guys are “more extreme than Hamas” and have been substantially buoyed in popularity by the Hezbollah “victory” over Israel in south Lebanon.

When this group made similar noises in Jordan, this was the response:

Jordanian security forces recently foiled a similar attempt by the party’s followers in the kingdom and arrested most of their leaders. Ramzi Sawalhah, the leader of Hizb al-Tahrir in Jordan, was arrested shortly after he delivered a sermon in a mosque in which he called for replacing the monarchy with an Islamic caliphate.

Abbas is too impotent to do much of anything and the Hamasniks probably love the idea, so I suggest to anyone planning on visiting Gaza in the near future to start either growing a beard or shopping for a burqa, as the case may be.

By the way (I’m posting in haste as my daughter needs to nurse) the abduction of the two Fox journalists over a week ago by Palestinian thugs is boneheaded even by their own elevated standards. Nothing like terrorizing journalists out of coming to broadcast your version of the story to win the day.

Also by the way, the name of that wacky let’s-start-the-Caliphate-in-Gaza gang sounds familiar. Would any of you know whether it’s the same group as the one to which that Guardian terrorist/journalist who made headlines about six months ago belonged?

The Americans have indicated repeatedly that they do not trust Hamas to direct aid money where its donors intend it. In its effort to maintain humanitarian aid for ordinary Palestinians while keeping it out of the hands of the terrorist government, the US is apparently planning to funnel more money through UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency).

That’s a curious piece of logic.

UNRWA is a criminally negligent terrorist enabler that has done everything in its power in its 56 years of existence to promote Palestinian grievance — and violence — against Israel. The UNRWA was supposed to be a temporary organization, the purpose of which was to provide relief to the million or so Palestinians displaced by the Israeli War of Independence. It was distinct, however, from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which is responsible for the world’s refugees, in that its remit did not contain any obligation to actually assist in alleviating the Palestinians’ plight. Such a practical end would not have served its political purpose, which was quite different.

In its early days, while the Palestinians waited in vain for some genuine assistance, the self-designated responsibility of UNRWA was simply to define the term “Palestinian refugee”. Step one was to declare any Arab migrant who had lived in Palestine for two years a Palestinian refugee. Step two — an unprecedented and staggeringly fateful step — was to declare the descendants of refugees as refugees, a definition that the UNHCR has never applied to any other group. As a result of this arbitrary redefinition, the Palestinian refugee population has quadrupled since 1948. As far as I am aware, they are the only refugee population to increase in size with each passing year.

UNRWA’s political bias has been transparent from day one. Its entire ethos is based on the premise of a right of return that is not recognized in international law — thereby stoking a grievance among the refugee population rather than taking steps to improve their lives. The radicalism engendered by this approach is maintained by the UNRWA’s penchant for employing terrorists, an equal-opportunity policy that has resulted in the transformation of UNRWA refugee camps into bomb-manufacturing plants and terrorist-recruitment centers.

A report published by the Israel Resource News Agency and the American Center for Near East Policy Research goes into explicit detail on the UNRWA’s history of complicity with and encouragement of Palestinian terrorism. There are many illuminating passages in the report — about bald corruption, the mistrust many of the refugees themselves feel toward UNRWA, the unapologetic determination of UNRWA to educate generations of Palestinian youngsters to hate Israel, and so on. This last is particularly enlightening about UNRWA’s position and intentions. As the report states,

UNRWA runs one of the largest educational systems in the Arab world–providing schooling for the children of all families registered as refugees. It spends roughly half its budget on education; more than 70% of its staff is concerned with education. But UNRWA does not produce its own textbooks. It is stated UNRWA policy to utilize the textbooks of the host (administrative authority) of an area where a camp is located– Syrian textbooks in camps in Syria, etc.
…
The Committee for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), using UNESCO guidelines, has done a thorough analysis of these books. Findings which can be found in their entirety at www.edume.org include the following:

- Israel’s name does not appear on any of the maps, and several Israeli cities, as well as an archaeological site, a region and mountain are defined as Palestinian.

- Jerusalem is presented as a Palestinian city.

- Peace is not mentioned at all, while war against Israel as a usurper, occupier and aggressor is implicitly encouraged.

- The refugee issue is also mentioned within the context of the destined return to the 1948 homes.

- There is praise of and encouragement for the waging of Jihad–Holy War.

- Jews and Israelis are represented as being cunning and deceitful.

The walls of UNRWA schools are plastered with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP graffiti, maps of Palestine that encompass the entire country of Israel, and violent imagery of machine guns, exploding Israeli boats, burning Israeli Jeeps, exploding grenades, and the like. As the report notes, in 2001 Hamas brought the linkage into the open by holding a conference at a UNRWA junior high school in the Jabalya refugee camp at which Sheik Ahmed Yassin told the students that they were the vanguard of the Palestinian jihad. “This is the generation of liberation and victory”, he said. “The Zionist enemy wants to overpower us and make us give up Palestine, Acre, Haifa, Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa mosque, but this will not happen”. Tellingly, Yassin was followed on the dais by Saheil Alhinadi, representing the UNRWA teaching sector. Alhinadi explicitly praised students who had recently become Hamas suicide bombers. In case the assembled student body missed the point, he went on to state: “The road to Palestine passes through the blood of the fallen, and these fallen have written history with parts of their flesh and their bodies”.

Of the 27,000 people who are employed by UNRWA in the territories, 23,000 of them are themselves Palestinian refugees, and a significant proportion of them are members of terrorist organizations. As IDF Colonel (ret.) Yoni Fighel, a former military governor in the territories, put it, “As long as UNRWA employees are members of Fatah, Hamas, or PFLP, they are going to pursue the interests of their party within the framework of their job… Who‘s going to check up on them to see that they don‘t? UNRWA? They are UNRWA.”

The UNRWA has ensured that its schools, and the refugee camps in general, have become military training camps. The object appears to be an ultimate showdown with Israel. These are the people the US is now entrusting humanitarian aid money to:

In the summer of 2000, it was public knowledge that UNRWA was allowing 25,000 Palestinian Arab youngsters to use their schools as military training camps; children, ages 8 to 16, were trained in the art of preparing Molotov cocktails, roadside bombs and throwing stones during military confrontations with IDF troops.

…each UNRWA camp hosts a local steering committee in charge of distributing the funds received as charitable donations from relief organizations and donor countries around the world. It is that local steering committee which decides how to spend the money at its disposal–whether to provide food or weapons (emphasis mine). The UNRWA website states, “The camp committees in each camp are considered official bodies.” This means it was an official UNRWA body that sanctioned purchase of weapons with charitable donations.

The most extreme example of the transformation of a UNRWA refugee camp into a terrorist installation is Jenin, which was exposed as such during the IDF incursion in 2002. The occupants of Jenin had taken advantage of the Israeli withdrawal from their city eight years before not to turn Jenin into a functioning and healthy city, but to turn it into what Fatah itself described as the “suicide bombers’ capital” (A’simat Al-Istashidin, [in Arabic], Fatah Jenin branch report to Marwan Barghouti, September 25, 2001). As is well known, the response of the UN and UNRWA to the revelation of the extent of the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure in Jenin was to ignore it completely and offer blind support to revolting Palestinian lies about Israeli conduct during the operation. Though the Palestinian version of the operation has been thoroughly discredited, no retractions have ever been offered by anyone at the UN or UNRWA to any of the falsehoods that they so eagerly promoted. More importantly, no effort whatsoever has been made to flush out or even to acknowledge the terrorist character of the UNRWA refugee camp in Jenin.

Any one of the Israeli victims of the 28 (yes, 28) terrorist attacks committed by residents of Jenin might have been able to offer some enlightenment on that point, but unfortunately they were not available for consultation. UNRWA bears considerable responsibility for their deaths, and for the general degeneration of the situation between the two peoples over the past half century. Today’s mess is largely of UNRWA’s making. It’s hard to imagine anything more foolish than relying on it to keep aid money out of terrorists’ hands.

ADDENDUM: Since posting this item I found an article by Honest Reporting that lists a few instances of UNRWA/terrorist activity:

? May 2004: Armed Palestinians are filmed using UNRWA ambulances to transport terrorists and, possibly, remains of fallen Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

? Sept. 2003: After the Israeli military court convicts three UNRWA employees for terrorist activities (such as throwing firebombs at a public bus), Israel detains at least 16 other UNRWA staff members for various security-related matters.

? Dec. 2002: A Shin Bet report indicates that numerous UNRWA facilities in the West Bank and Gaza had been used by Palestinian terrorists as meeting grounds and for weapons storage.

? Sept. 2002: Nahd Attala, a senior official of UNRWA in Gaza, reveals that in June-July 2002, he used his UNRWA car for the transportation of armed members of Fatah who were on their way to carry out a missile attack against Jewish settlements. In addition, Nahd admits he used an UNRWA car to transport a 12 kg explosive charge for his brother-in-law, a Fatah member.

? August 2002: Nidal Nazzal, a Hamas member and ambulance driver employed by UNRWA, confesses to transporting weapons and explosives in an UNRWA ambulance, and that he had taken advantage of the freedom of movement he enjoyed to transmit messages among Hamas members in various Palestinian towns.

? February 2002: Alaa Muhammad Ali Hassan, a Tanzim member, confesses during interrogation that he had carried out a sniper shooting from the school run by UNRWA in the al-Ayn refugee camp near Nablus. He also told his interrogators that bombs intended for terrorist attacks were being manufactured inside the UNRWA school’s facilities (emphases mine).

Palestinians took a few moments during Israel’s election day yesterday to launch three Katyusha rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. One of them landed south of Ashkelon but fortunately did not explode.

This event is significant because it is the first time they have launched Katyushas rather than Qassams. Katyushas have a much longer range than Qassams and put many more Israelis within striking distance. The incident seems to be a dare of sorts. Palestinians have been trying and failing for years to get Katyushas into the Strip (Arafat tried to bring in a huge stash on the Karine A). They have now obviously succeeded. The rocket south of Ashkelon might as well have had a message painted on it in neon: “Mazeltov on the win, Olmert. What are you going to do about this?”

The army is now trying to determine whether the rocket came from Iran (a near certainty). This event represents a serious escalation of the Palestinian war on Israel and will have to be dealt with hard and fast. This is a good moment for Olmert to earn some Sharon-esque credibility, if he can pull it off. The Jericho prison operation went smoothly; let’s hope he can take similarly effective and swift action in this case.

This incident bolsters those on the right who warned that disengagement from Gaza would result in an escalation of Palestinian firepower from the area. It also, however, bolsters those who support the principle of unilateral disengagement (and thus a further disengagement from the West Bank): pull out on our own terms, let the Palestinians do what they’re going to do, and then respond to their aggression with greater legitimacy. It remains to be seen whether Kadima’s relatively unimpressive showing in the election, and its consequent lack of much room for maneuver, will prevent it from reacting appropriately. If this attack is permitted to evaporate into the next news cycle without a response, we should expect a lot more of the same, and soon.

My apologies for the quiet: I had an ailing child at home all last week, which dropped computer time way down on the priority list. I’m very glad to say he is fully restored and back at gan (nursery school).

The most striking event of the past week was the — how shall I put it? — transitioning of the murderers of Israeli MK Rehavam Ze’evi from a Palestinian prison in Jericho, from which they were about to be sprung, into Israeli custody, where they belong. It’s an interesting story on many levels — the strikingly abrupt departure by the British and American monitors who finally lost patience with the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to uphold its obligation to protect them; the hissy fit thrown by Mahmoud Abbas, which was chutzpadik even for him (accusing the Brits and Americans of reneging on a deal he’d been reneging on since it was inked); the remarkably good timing of the IDF action from the point of view of Olmert’s Kadima party (which begs the question whether the monitors’ departure really was quite as strikingly abrupt as it seemed from the outside); the candy-ass response of the murderers’ PFLP buddies back in the territories (running around grabbing foreigners, making dopey comments to the media, releasing the foreigners and then fading instantly back into the woodwork); the non-response of Hamas to the PFLP mayhem (perhaps an homage to the uselessness of the Fatah police in the days when it was Hamasniks running amok), and more. As I say, I was too involved with nursing my little one to blog about this, but Daniel has a good comprehensive piece on it that should fill in the blanks for you.

Meanwhile, it’s business as usual in Gaza. Masked Palestinian gunmen today murdered 25-year-old Palestinian Ahmed Naseem for the alleged crime of collaboration. (As we have seen, that term is used blanketly by Palestinians to whack their brethren for a wide variety of other reasons, so who knows why this poor kid is dead.) Six other Palestinians were wounded today by roving gunmen who shot up the Gaza City police station and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (these “miitants” were expressing frustration at late paychecks, apparently). More shooting took place on the north-south Gaza highway, at a power station and at a military hospital.

The Hamas election wasn’t only ominous news for the Jews in the neighborhood. It is also making life distinctly uncomfortable for Palestinian Christians.

This is a group that has to walk a tightrope: as citizens of the Palestinian Authority rather than of Israel, their allegiance is expected to be to Palestine, but Palestine has just made its Islamic (indeed, Islamist) character abundantly clear. This is no time to rely on lip service to a separation between Palestinian mosque and state; to Hamas, which was expressing a desire even before the ballots had closed not only to introduce sharia law into Palestine but to use it to replace existing law, the two are intimately entwined. Palestinian Christians are both insiders and outsiders. With Hamas in power, they have a life of dhimmitude to look forward to, which is likely to be both inherently frustrating and dangerous and also galling, after their long struggle with Israel.

Muslim fundamentalists are pretty clear about their views toward Christians. (Recall, for example — and there are myriad examples of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world — the recent beheading of Indonesian schoolgirls for the crime of being Christian.) In our local case, the community may be entirely Palestinian, but some Palestinians are considered by the new administration to be more Palestinian than others. As the Post article says,

With fear of government-supported religious coercion on the rise since Hamas’s unexpected win in January’s Palestinian elections, Christians across the West Bank and Gaza Strip are keeping a low profile, with eyes wide open.

…If Hamas follows on its founders’ path to fight Israel and install strict Islamic religious rule, Palestinian Christians stand to become a legally subjugated minority inside Palestinian society.

The article goes on to discuss the expected Hamas clampdown on the consuption of alcohol, and the already festering problems between Christians and Muslims in the territories — problems of property theft (Muslims steal from Christians and rely on Christian reluctance to report the crime), assault, even rape. Christian holy places in the territories are being attacked without consequence by young Muslim men (there’s that demographic again). Women, of course, are being murdered; a Muslim woman allegedly having an affair with a Christian man was killed by her own family, and the man’s family was set upon by Muslims.

The Christian community in the territories, small in number and smaller in power, is extremely reluctant to represent such violence as indications of a Muslim-Christian problem. (Their hesitant responses to repeated assaults are reminiscent of the behavior of Jews abroad over the centuries, who have behaved, in the face of mounting provocation and discrimination, like guests in their own countries who must be careful not to rock the boat.) Their plight will probably be mitigated in the short term by Hamas’s need to fake a generally moderate stance in order to secure desperately needed aid money, but the squeeze will be on once Hamas is financially secure.

It should be noted that Muslim Fatah gunmen — always to be relied upon to make an appearance in touchy situations — descended on Palestinian Christian churches during the cartoon jihad and were immediately slapped down by Hamas, which voiced its solidarity with the Christians. This was almost certainly a message of power over the vanquished Fatah rather than a genuine message of unity with Christians, but it does suggest that the Christians will have a grace period of sorts. Still, provided Hamas remains in power and they receive promised infusions from Iran and Europe, a day of reckoning will come. We’ll have a battle on our hands over here, of course, but so too will Palestinian Christians — as will the moderate Muslim community in Palestine, if it still exists.

You know that blood libel that various people have been hurling at us from time immemorial? You know the one: that Jews like to drink non-Jewish blood. (You can regularly see cartoon images of this in the Arab press, where there is so much concern for religious sensitivity.)

Well, it turns out that Hamasniks, at least, are connoisseurs on the subject. Herewith an excerpt from a new videotape just released on Hamas’s website:

We are a blood-drinking people and we know that there is no better blood than Jewish blood.

We will not leave you alone until we quench ourselves with your blood and we will quench the thirst of our children with your blood. We will not rest until you leave the lands of the Muslims.

That’s a suicide bomber talking, shortly before heading out to pulverize the Karni crossing in 2004. The site shows another clip, this one a touching scene of a Palestinian mother helping her son to strap on his explosives belt. This is what that shaheed had to say:

By the life of Allah, we will destroy you. We will blow you up. We will take our revenge on you. We will purify our land of you, pigs, who have defiled our land. By the life of Allah, we will take our vengeance. We are carrying out this operation as harsh revenge against the sons of monkeys and pigs.

(Hey, I didn’t elect them.)

In the Jewish religion, you know, pigs are a big no-no. I think I can live with the monkey part, but calling me a pig — I don’t know. Might have to burn me a couple of embassies over that one.

Jonah Goldberg and I seem to be of one mind about the Palestinian elections (please see my post of 28 January). Here are some excerpts from his piece in yesterday’s National Review Online, in which he draws an apposite analogy:

Three of Maryam Farahat’s children died in the process of murdering Israelis. In a recently released video she exhorted her youngest living son, Mohammed, 17, not to come back alive from a mission against the Jews. Indeed, she hopes all three of her remaining sons will die in the process of slaughtering Jews.

Farahat isn’t merely an unconventional stay-at-home mom. She has a day job. She’s one of the Hamas delegates swept into power by an electoral landslide in the Palestinian territories.
…

In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote a hugely controversial book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The thesis was straightforward: The German people were in on the Holocaust; German culture and history harbored and nurtured an “exterminationist” version of anti-Semitism that simply awaited ignition from Nazism’s torch…Goldhagen’s book was immensely controversial in Germany, where an odd cult of victimhood had settled in. According to the victimhood view, Germany was in effect “occupied” by the Nazis, and the German people were victims, too…

But variations of the don’t-blame-the-people thesis have been around for a long time far outside of Germany. Democracy can be wonderful, but some of its boosters across the ideological spectrum assume that all democratic outcomes are good outcomes, and that’s nonsense. The Left historically has located political morality in the interests and desires of the masses, therefore pronouncing it heretical to blame “the people” for evil deeds. In order to be evil, it seems, causes must be “hijacked” by small cabals of bad guys.
…

Today, various pragmatists, optimists, and apologists for the Palestinians say they weren’t voting for mass murder and terror, but for honest government and efficient social services. Fatah, the “party” of that terrorist carbuncle Yasser Arafat, was corrupt and incompetent while Hamas has successfully delivered much-needed social services. Hamas ran on “change and reform,” proclaim the apologists, not terrorism. Fine, but that was equally true of the Nazis, who traded soup kitchens for indoctrination. Fascist movements have always gained popularity by delivering for the needy, the forgotten, and the left-out…

There are serious differences between German or Italian fascism and Hamas’s Islamism. But these are largely intellectual and academic distinctions. As a social phenomenon, the Palestinians voted for politicians such as Mrs. Farahat. She belongs to a brutal, terroristic, irredentist, militant organization dedicated to restoring national pride at the expense of exterminating millions of people, who just happen to be Jews. This was no secret, and it is a form of condescension bordering on infantilism to assert that the Palestinians didn’t know what they were voting for. If the new government had the means, it would be Palestine’s willing executioners. (Emphasis added.)

Well worth a read. Have a look. (Via Claire.)