All Terrorists Are Doves

One of the things that made left-right "debate" so frustrating during the Cold War was that our very success in deterring a Soviet attack was seized upon by libs as evidence that the Russians' "peaceful intentions." Since they hadn't attacked, in other words, ipso facto they weren't going to. And, extrapolated peaceniks and detente-ists, since they weren't going to, we had no need of all our nuclear weaponry and vast military capabilities, which, if anything, were "provocative" of the USSR's "justifiable" defensive mentality. We were the warmongers, in other words, and if we would just disarm and stop trying to "intimidate" the poor commies, an era of everlasting, Kumbayah-drenched utopian harmony was at hand.

It was the kind of delusion that only freedom and prosperity could spawn. It ignored the clear and repeated lessons of history. But it could only be conclusively relegated from the realm of the debatable after it had been proven - which, of course, would be too late, and for all of us.

In the global war against Islamic Fundamentalism, that relegation took place on September 11, 2001. Yet lefties persist with the same mindset and the same arguments. And never more so and in more widespread fashion than in the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian war, and the Hamas chapter it has just entered:

A lone point of consensus following Hamas' victory in last week's elections, which [former president Jimmy] Carter monitored with a group of observers, was that the international community would suspend funding to the new Palestinian government until it forswore violence and recognized the existence of Israel. Against this approach, Carter took it upon himself to make the case for Hamas. This was no easy task. American law expressly prohibits the provision of aid to a terrorist organization and European countries have, reluctantly but firmly, adopted a de facto ban.

Not to worry, though, for Carter had a plan. In an interview this weekend with the New York Times, Carter explained that that the U.S. and Europe should, as the Times put it, "redirect their relief aid to United Nations organizations and nongovernmental organizations to skirt legal restrictions." Thus did the erstwhile leader of the free world advocate criminal action on behalf of a terrorist group. [emphasis added]

And this is the same man that denounces George Bush as a "criminal," among other things. What justification could Mr. Peanut possibly have for this advocation of lawless sedition?

What else? His unquenchable moral supremacism and its accompanying armor of stupendous conceit:

"It may well be that Hamas can change," he explained. As evidence, he adduced the supposed moderation - under his influence - of Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. In Carter's version of the history, Arafat and the PLO, inspired by his rousing vision for peace, agreed to renounce terrorism and acknowledge Israel's right to exist.

And they did, you know. Aside from two Intifadas, rejection of everything Arafat claimed to want in September 2000, the Fatah maps that erased Israel from the face of the globe, the virulently anti-Semetic rhetoric Arafat spewed to Arab audiences, and the mafia-esque corruption that all the previous Western assistance larded upon the PLO spawned - and which Hamas apologists like Carter latched onto as the REAL reason for Hamas' victory, rather than the Islamist warmongering that they still will not renounce.

In Jimmy Carter's world, wishing makes it so. And if you question that, you're a warmongering....infidel.

A few days later the self-appointed Goober Plenopotentiary was laying the same delusional rap on Lucky Larry King (h/t CQ):

Hamas deserves to be recognized by the international community, and despite the group's militant history, there is a chance the soon-to-be Palestinian leaders could turn away from violence, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday.

Carter, who monitored last week's Palestinian elections in which Hamas handily toppled the ruling Fatah, added that the United States should not cut off aid to the Palestinian people, but rather funnel it through third parties like the U.N.

"If you sponsor an election or promote democracy and freedom around the world, then when people make their own decision about their leaders, I think that all the governments should recognize that administration and let them form their government," Carter said.

Note the disorder of the Squire of Plains' argument. Despite Hamas' "militant history," we should recognize them because they might "turn away from violence." This stands rationality itself on its head. If Hamas rose to power in the Palestinian territories on the strength of its militant history, what possible incentive can they be offered to abandon the philosophy that so clearly got them there?

And what other practical leverage does the "international community" have to coerce a "turning away from violence" than diplomatic recognition and the financial support that comes with it? Yes, the Palestinian people have made their decision about their leaders - and they chose bloodthirst murdering berserkers. The only obligation that creates is for the Palesintians themselves to live with the consequences of that decision; it imposes no requirement upon the international community to approve of and subsidize it.

But tell a lib that s/he shouldn't subsidze something unequivocally evil and you might as well have stepped on his/her kitten. And, not to be outdone in the "most outrageous and dangerous ex-president" department, You-Know-Who jumped into the mass Hamas-fellating with both, er, feet:

Ex-president Bill Clinton is urging the Unired States to establish a dialogue with Hamas in the wake of its upset victory in last week's Palestinian parliamentary elections, saying it would be wrong to cut off contact with the terror group just because they may have killed people "in a way that we hate."

Has anybody ever complained about the way that Isloamist terrorists kill people? Is Mr. Bill suggesting that all Hamas has to do is exterminate Jews one at a time with lethal injections and everything will be hunky-dory? That's akin to getting your kid to mow the lawn by bending each grass blade back and forth until it breaks off. The raison d'etere of terrorists is mass murder, and Hamas hasn't renounced a damn thing about it.

"You've got to find a way to at least open doors," Clinton told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Saturday. "And I don't see how we can do it without more contact."

Note the venue, and thus the audience. As is his want, Sick Willie tailored his message to his audience, and was telling the assembled Mensheviks exactly what they wanted to hear. Not unlike the way Yassir Arafat used to do it. No wonder those two got along so well.

Still, the reason you keep doors closed is to keep out people you don't want to get in. Especially people who have declared in word and carried out in deed their intention to kill you. "More contact" just gives them more opportunities to do it.

Willy couldn't resist the urge to put his own imprint on the pro-Hamas spin:

Addressing complaints that Hamas has vowed to destroy Israel, Clinton explained: "We need to be practical here. ... It took the Palestinian Authority years before they took [the same vow] out of their charter." [Which isn't true, BTW - Arafat made public, by which I mean West-directed, statements to that effect, but the PLO charter itself never changed one jot or tittle. What, did you think it possible for this man to give a speech and not include at least one whopper?]

In comments reported by Agence France Press, the former president said there was a good chance, instead, that Hamas "may wind up like the IRA and Sinn Fein."

What a pregnant parallel, seeing as how the Good Friday Accords that Clinton and Tony Blair co-brokered proved to be a joke, the IRA never abided by them, never disarmed, and never stopped its terror war in Northern Ireland.

What it reveals is the inherent affinity for terrorists and "insurgents" that finds fertile soil in the innards of every liberal heart. It explains why Jimmy Carter has embraced tinpots and dictators from Yugoslavia's Tito to Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu, from North Korea's Kim Il Sung to Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, from Fidel Castro to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, from Arafat to Bashar Assad, and how Clinton could actively aid terrorist networks from Sinn Fein/IRA to the Kosovo Liberation Army, and spend most of a decade running away from Osama bin Laden.

And I do mean, "every" liberal heart. The Washington Post gave el primo op-ed space to one Mousa Abu Marzook, billed as "deputy political bureau chief of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). He has a U.S. doctorate in engineering and was indicted in the United States in 2004 as a co-conspirator on racketeering and money-laundering charges in connection with activities on behalf of Hamas dating to the early 1990s, before the organization was placed on the list of terrorist groups. He was deported to Jordan in 1997." Not surprisingly, Marzook echoed the sentiments of the two living ex-Donk presidents.

Meanwhile, in a seeming vacuum created by all this fantasist flacking, Hamas itself remains as defiantly unrepentant and "militant" - and diabolically clever - as ever:

Defying international pressure, the militant Islamic group Hamas said on Friday it will never recognize Israel but might be willing to negotiate terms for a temporary truce with the Jewish state.

Khaled Meshaal, the top leader of Hamas which won last week's Palestinian parliamentary election by a landslide, made the offer to Israel via a column titled "To whom it may concern," published in the al-Hayat al-Jadida newspaper.

"We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist state that was established on our land," Meshaal, the Damascus-based head of the political and military wings of the militant Islamic group, wrote in the column. ...

They have said they might heed a truce with Israel as an interim measure that could include the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank, but would not abandon a long-term goal to destroy Israel.

"If you (Israel) are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce then we will be ready to negotiate with you over the conditions of such a truce," Meshaal wrote.

Okay, so it doesn't sound all the clever to anybody in the true "reality-based community." It amounts to, "We still hate you and we're still going to destroy you, but you need to give us time and resources to do it, so give us a truce." Rather like demanding that your victim run backwards into your butcher knife seventeen times so you can claim the murder was an "accident."

But you have to remember Meshaal's true audience: Western leftists like Carter, Clinton, and the diplomatic establishments of America and Europe, where such "hudna" offers are almost always embraced:

[Expect] an approximate repeat performance of the pressure on Arafat in 1982-88 to renounce terrorism. But Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an acute observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict, doubts that Hamas will be compelled even to match Arafat’s concessions back then.

I also expect that, despite bold statements how it will not change, Hamas will play along with the verbal demands on it. Feeling a financial pinch and diplomatic pressure, its leaders will adopt Arafat’s habit of delivering opaque hints and saying one thing in English and another in Arabic. Like Arafat, they might even “renounce” terrorism or pretend to change their Protocols-laced covenant.

Indeed, what Yossi Klein Halevi calls “the era of the wink and the hint” has already begun, with Hamas largely desisting from terrorism against Israel during its declared tahdiya (calming down) in 2005, then somewhat moderating its rhetoric in recent weeks; for example, it proposed a 15-year truce with Israel. The makeover shows signs of success: former U.S. president Bill Clinton, often an opinion bellwether, has just urged the Bush Administration to consider dealing with Hamas. [emphasis added]

How's that for squaring the circle? And our State Department will do it, too, no matter what the Bush White House decides. It is simply the nature of pampered, cloistered, self-styled "intellectualoids" to play around with other peoples' territory like geopolitics was a gigantic board game, just so long as it doesn't directly affect them. That's why it's always been easy for the "diplocracy," sitting in the vast bureaucratic reaches of Foggy Bottom, to demand that a tiny sliver of a country the approximate size of Delaware gut itself of its only strategic high ground without which it cannot defend itself (the pre-1967 Israeli border left the country nine miles wide at its base - or about the length of my current daily commute). And when these striped-pants whiz kids turned out to be wrong yet again, and Israel was driven into the sea? Well, they could always go to the UN (which tacitly endorsed the Hamas position just a couple of months back) and lobby the Security Council to "impose sanctions" on the Pals. As if that would ever happen.

As a post script, one interested party that does have a goreable ox in the fate of "Hamastan" is Mubarek's Egypt, which is the intermediate Islamist target. Imagine how drastically the balance of power in the Middle East would shift if President Mubarek were to "have an accident," and Egypt fell to the Iran-Syria axis of which Hamas is a principle catspaw. The U.S. would be regionally outflanked and Israel would once again be surrounded, only this time by enemies possessing Iranian nuclear weapons. Small wonder that Cairo didn't waste any time wool-gathering, telling Hamas leaders to sit down, shut up, recognize Israel and abide by previous agreements, the implication clearly being that otherwise they can't expect to see one thin dime from the Arab League. Amazing how close proximity and having something to lose focuses the mind, isn't it?

The aforelinked Daniel Pipes doesn't think it'll be enough:

I predict Palestinian-Israeli negotiations will resume their glorious record of bringing goodwill, harmony, and tranquility, with Israel this time facing a far more etermined and clever foe than the blighted Arafat or the hapless Mahmoud Abbas.

And the same "peace brokers," in the midst of a supposedly separate and distinct "war on terror," twisting their arms clear out of their sockets to "make peace at any price" - as long as it's the Jews who get stuck with the bloody "bill."