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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (11922)	1/28/2006 12:38:19 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 32591

I believe that Hamas received a mandate to eliminate the corruption that was rampant in the Fatah party. How many billions of aid did the gay Arab, Arafat, pocket? After his death, the Palestinians had to give the mother of his child hundreds of millions of dollars to get rid of her. After Arafat's death from aids the new Fatah people just inserted themselves in as the new grafters. Hamas has a chance to transform the region. I hope they find a leader who is up to the challenge. Palestinians have suffered at the hands of their own for too long.

To: michael97123 who wrote (11922)	1/28/2006 6:36:37 PM
From: Scoobah	Respond to of 32591

Why the Hamas Victory is a Good Thing by Steven Plaut Jan 26, '06 / 26 Tevet 5766 E-mail This Print Homepage Perhaps the best indication of the extent to which the world has been Orwellized is the toady news coverage of the Palestinian "election", including in the Israeli media, itself largely the occupied territory of the far-left. For months, the media were all in suspense over whether the victors in the "election" would be the Hamas terrorists or the PLO terrorists. As it turned out, Hamas evidently won the "election" by a huge majority. The first part of the absurdity in the message daily inculcated by the Israeli political elite is that there is any significant difference between the PLO and Hamas. There is not. Both are equally dedicated to unlimited terror and violence, to genocide and the eradication of Israel in any form and in any borders. Both have conducted suicide bombings and in fact, if I am not mistaken, the PLO's terror brigades carried out more such attacks than Hamas did over the past two years. The Kassam rockets are at least as much the initiative of the PLO as they are that of Hamas. The PLO proliferates anti-Semitic propaganda as much as Hamas and is just as allied with the Hizbullah, Syria and Osama Bin-Laden. But the Israeli establishment has been repeating the empty "we have a peace partner in the PLO" mantra for so many years that they managed to fabricate artificial suspense over the Palestinian "election". If the PLO were to win, then "Palestine" would be ruled by moderates, people with whom Israel could strike a deal, could do business - the pragmatists. Nice Nazis. Israel has been awash in speeches by politicians and mindless bumper stickers proclaiming: "We have a peace partner." Now, this may strike you as bizarre, but I have been arguing that the best thing that could happen in the Palestinian Authority "election" would be a strong Hamas victory. Let me explain. A strong Hamas victory is the only thing that stands a chance of forcing Israelis to open their eyes and wake up. As long as the PLO is in charge, the gigantic game of make-pretend continues. When the Hamas is marching about with costumes of suicide bombers and with its swastikas and other paraphernalia, then there can be no delusions about the Nazification of the Palestinians. It is not that the Palestinians would really be any less Nazified with the PLO in charge. It is just that the Abu Mazen-type representatives at the Potemkin negotiations, and the make-pretend respectability of the PLO hoodlum chiefs, allow the politicians and the media to continue acting as if there is a peace process. The Hamas victory - and I wish it had been stronger - puts the lie to the game of make-pretend. No longer can any intelligent Israeli pretend that there is any way to deal with the Palestinians other than war. The only way to stop the Kassams and suicide bombers is R&D - Re-Occupation and De-Nazification. And with the Hamas in charge, everyone in Israel is forced to acknowledge this. Well, almost everyone. Haaretz and the far-left have actually been preparing the Israeli public for a Hamas victory in recent months, and they are spreading the new epistle: "We can do business with Hamas." Leftist after leftist proclaims that the solution is to negotiate with Hamas. After all, Hamas is as "genuine" and "representative" of Palestinians as the PLO, and it even wins "elections". Some Hamas officials are encouraging the trend of self-annihilation in Israel by putting out duplicitous statements about how Hamas acknowledges that Israel exists (as an empirical reality that needs to be corrected, that is). Such statements recall Yasser Arafat's duplicitous words. So, get ready for new calls to enter into negotiations with Hamas. We can try to persuade them to have a salad bar on the cattle cars transporting Israeli Jews, and perhaps institute recycling and free tuition at the concentration camps Hamas is seeking to build. Israeli professors will soon be wearing their Hamas lapel pins. Hamas poetry will soon be taught to Israeli schoolchildren. Israeli schools will be screening films celebrating the heroism of Palestinian suicide bombers (like the University of Haifa screened Paradise Now this week). And Second Shoah Now will be the fastest growing movement in Israeli society, holding mass demonstrations for peace in Rabin Square.

To: michael97123 who wrote (11922)	1/28/2006 7:31:10 PM
From: Scoobah	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

After Hamas win, a somber Davos confab sees two-state vision fading By Associated Press January 27, 2006 Far from tumultuous events back home, a group of Israelis and Palestinians -- along with passionate observers of their conflict -- convened in the Swiss ski resort of Davos to grapple with the stunning Hamas election victory. News that the militant Islamic group Hamas had won Wednesday's Palestinian legislative elections electrified the World Economic Forum, with attending government and business leaders struggling to work out what it might mean for business, and for the business of peace. Thursday's pre-scheduled discussion was entitled "A turning point for Palestinian statehood?" -- but few at the somber gathering seemed to expect such an outcome anytime soon, given the rise of a group that has been dedicated to Israel's destruction and is widely considered, in Israel and the West, to be a terrorist organization. Former U.S. peace negotiator Aaron Miller said Palestinian attitudes reflected "the power of the weak, which is a very formidable power. (It's) the power ... to assume that since we're under Israeli military occupation, we're the weakest party, we can acquiesce to just about any form of behavior including terror and violence." "I see no way, given the circumstances that exist on the ground, that Israel and the Palestinians can negotiate a conflict-ending agreement" anytime soon, said Miller, who is now with the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Several Palestinian participants seemed to understand that Israelis would have trouble negotiating with a group that until last year's cease-fire had claimed credit for scores of deadly suicide bombings. Palestinian Economy Minister Mazen Sinokrot said one way out of the impasse might be for Hamas -- which according to near complete results won 76 of the 132 seats in parliament -- to appoint a government of politically neutral personalities. "My personal advice would be that in the Palestinian Cabinet the majority should be technocrats. This would be a confidence-building measure from the Palestinian leadership and from Hamas as a majority now in the parliament," he said. He blamed the Israeli government for not doing enough to support moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the roughly one year that he has been in power. "It's always easy to look at somebody else's mistakes and to blame somebody else," said Tel Aviv University president Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli diplomat and peace negotiator. "We don't come to Davos for that. Davos is a place where people are looking for fresh ideas." "Everybody committed mistakes -- my government, my people no less than anybody else," Rabinovich said. "I wish many among the Palestinians would do the same, and begin looking at your own mistakes ... trying to learn from mistakes of the past in order to commit less mistakes in the future." Pollster James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, said the vote was a reflection of the failure of the long-dominant Fatah party to provide Palestinians with jobs and personal security, much less peace. "It was anger and despair. It was 'Throw the bums out.' I'll be honest with you: This election doesn't make me happy. It doesn't make me happy at all." He urged Western nations not to withdraw aid from the Palestinian Authority -- "extremism will only be fed" -- and for Abbas not to resign: "It's something very important to maintain at least the opportunity for the world to have someone with whom they can negotiate and with whom they can do business." Michael Tarazi, a Palestinian-American who has been a legal adviser to the Palestinian Authority for several years, saw a silver lining. "Even if you don't like Hamas you should be very happy that they won," he said, seizing the audience's attention. "We should welcome Hamas' victory because they are now ... going to have to be responsible because with power comes responsibility." Tarazi said the peace process had been a sham anyway, and that the United States itself had strengthened Palestinian radicals by favoring Israel. "Anyone who says this is going to destroy the peace process has not been paying attention to the fact that there isn't a peace process to destroy." Tarazi said the time for a two-state solution -- a division of the Holy Land into Israel and Palestine -- had passed, and should be replaced by the vision of a single state -- "a democracy that recognizes the fundamental right of everybody, whether they be Christian, Jewish or Muslim, to live together as equals." That riled Rabinovich, who -- knowing that such a state would likely have an Arab majority in time -- argued that this meant the elimination of Israel. "You're not achieving anything -- you're just creating doubts and skepticism on the Israeli side." Perhaps the most somber note of the evening was struck by Andre Azoulay, a Jewish Moroccan who has been prominent in his country for decades as an adviser to the monarch and an activist for Jewish-Muslim coexistence. "We failed, it is true," he said, his French-accented English suffused with sorrow and regret. "We were not enough committed, all of us, especially in the Arab world. I don't want to mention also the responsibility of the U.S. and the Europeans. I mean, we were spectators, we were just passive." "Today was another electro-shock."