The Bad Cop Fulfills His Role

Hamas is certainly holding up its end of the ultimate Palestinian "triangle offense." Indeed, they seem to be losing themselves in the part:

Hamas on Saturday condemned a decision by Arab powers to endorse next week's U.S.-hosted Israeli-Palestinian peace conference, saying the talks would favor the Jewish state's policies rather than Palestinian demands.

Islamist Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel and broke with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after seizing control of the Gaza Strip in a June civil war, is excluded from the November 27 conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

Arab League ministers agreed on Friday to attend the conference in the hope of promoting the creation of a Palestinian state and pushing for Israel to return the occupied Golan Heights to Syria as part of a regional peace process.

Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri called the announcement "a great shock for Palestinians because it opened the door for direct normalization with the occupation (Israel) amid (its) continued escalation and aggression."

"The Palestinian people had awaited an Arab consensus for breaking the siege," Abu Zuhri said in a statement, referring to a Western aid embargo and Israeli military crackdowns on Gaza since Hamas swept to power in 2006 elections.

"This meeting will only achieve more failure and more harm to the Palestinian cause and to Arab and Palestinian rights."

Fascinating, isn't it? The Israeli regime of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and its Bushie patron are so eager to get "moderate" Arab regimes to this latest so-called "peace" conference that they're pre-emptively offering Fatah the entire West Bank, East Jerusalem, and even conceding sovereignty over the Temple Mount itself just to get their enemies to Annapolis at all. Olmert has also expressed eagerness to cough up the strategically vital Golan Heights back to Bashar Assad. Indeed, about the only concession that Israel hasn't offered up without a fight before even arriving at the table is the "right of return" of "Palestinian" "refugees, which would inundate the Jewish state beneath an overpowering influx of Arab emigres that would demographically destroy it without a single suicide bomber having to blow up a single additional pizza parlor or cross-town bus.

And yet Hamastanis actually believe that this conference will favor Israel? The country that, never let it be forgotten, handed the Gaza Strip over to them, lock stock & barrel, over two years ago?

Perhaps. Or maybe they're just playing their part as psychotic court jesters to make their "moderate" comrades look "reasonable" and "responsible" by comparison. You know, the sort of people to whom lavish concessions should be given in the interests of "peace".

Indeed, given that the big-picture angle under which Secretary of State Condi Rice is pursuing this umpteenth detour down the "peace process" dead end - building a Cold War-like "anti-Iran coalition" to "contain" the mullahgarchy (rather than attacking and destroying it, liberating the Iranian people and the entire Middle East from their apocalyptic insanity) - one could argue that the Islamic Republic, and its Hitlerian frontman, are also playing a role in this grand, quasi-Wagnerian escapade.

I won't call it a "vast Muslim conspiracy," if only because conspiracies are the most fragile, least efficient means of accomplishing anything, and how much more so for so fractious a culture as theirs. But if this is all a coincidence, ya gotta admit, it's a fantastically unlikely one.

How fortunate for them that they've got such a slobberingly eager, supremely gullible audience, and the indellibly bloodstained hands of Hamas to do all that waving that distracts our striped-pants-wearing court jesters so well.

UPDATE: So, naturally, how do our diplofools react to Hamas's bellyacheing? By arguing that we need to "engage" our Islamist enemies as well. One wonders how the "realists" would react to a Muslim faction that actually, and genuinely, preached peace and brotherhood with the Jews.

I kid, of course - not that such a group could ever exist (it couldn't) but in that that is, after all, a rhetorical question. Muslim pacifists would be denounced as "dangerous" and "destablizing," and an "enemy of the peace process," because of course, as we all "know," Middle East peace can never be achieved until the most virulently warmongering, anti-Semitic factions (like Hamas) have been engorgingly appeased, and the "source" of the conflict - Israel - erased from the face of the planet.

Sometimes I wonder how it is that Israel and the West have ever survived with such addle-mindedness pervading their governing echelons. Then I wonder how long we can possibly have left to survive given that this suicidal idiocy only ever seems to get worse.