I sent the following letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune. It will be posted on their internet site within the next 24 hours. It was in response to today’s editorial on the Hamas victory at the polls. I’m not sure whether their victory is a good or bad thing. Perhaps it is good in the sense that there is now no doubt about what the official Palestinian position is. It is the Islamist position of the destruction of Israel and creation of an Islamist State to take its place. There can be no more doubt about it. Here now, my comments to the Trib:
The fact that Hamas won such a huge number of votes in the recent Palestinian election says as much about those who voted for them as it does about Hamas itself. Contrary to popular opinion this wasn’t just about rejecting the corruption of the governing Fatah party. Nor was it about the humanitarian infrastructure that Hamas runs in the territories. To be sure that was part of it and perhaps the precipitating factor that made Palestinians vote for Hamas. But it is no secret to any Palestinian that Hamas is responsible for countless murders by suicide bombers.
It is also no secret that there are vast numbers of Palestinians who celebrate every Jewish death at the hands of Hamas. These are same the people who cheered when the World Trade Center came tumbling down! They are all quite aware that Hamas stated goal is the eradication of the Jewish State. It is part of their Islamist theology... right along the same lines as that of Iranian President,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The vast majority of Arab Muslims do not believe that Jews have any right what-so-ever to a state. Even those who will enter into a peace agreement with Israel would do so solely for pragmatic reason and would take Israel back by force if they thought they could. Hamas is merely a military expression of that belief. Moderate Arabs who oppose the violence of Hamas do so only out of pragmatic concerns, not because they believe in Israel’s right to exist. They simply believe that to continue the violence would be counterproductive and has not served them well over the years.
But, Hamas are purists. They don’t care about pragmatics. They are concerned with ideals. To them the ideal is to be pursued at any cost even if it means giving up one’s life as a Shaheed... a suicide bomber.
There is no reason to hope that Hamas will be swayed by pragmatic political considerations. They will not compromise their positions.
This was made clear by one of the candidates interviewed by the media just prior to the election. He made it clear that as long as Israel occupies their land (meaning the entire state of Israel) they will continue their “armed struggle” consisting primarily of suicide bombings.
The only thing that can fight this ideology is an ideology which recognizes those facts and has the military might and the political will to do so. That is why the barrier is so important. It has revented countless suicide bombings. And so has Israeli vigilance in making certain that terrorists don’t have easy access to vulnerable parts of Israel. The measures are harsh and seem unfair to the rest of the world and may exacerbate the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians but Israelis have no choice and the current election results underscore this.
So the Tribune editorial statement about the Hamas victory at the polls, that: “With power comes responsibility. That may lead to profound change in Hamas, and the Middle East, in the coming years.”...is nothing more than wishful thinking.
In fact the first line in that editorial says it all: "Hamas is a radical terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel."
