Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Feb. 2, 2006
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1138622536769&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

On Thursday, for the second time this week, a group of Palestinian
terrorists took over the European Union’s offices in Gaza. Armed with
rifles, the terrorists demanded an official apology from the Danish
government for caricatures of Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper last
September. At the same time as the EU offices were commandeered, another
group of terrorists in Gaza issued an ultimatum: Either Denmark and the EU
issue formal apologies for the publication of the cartoons by nightfall, or
the terrorists will begin kidnapping Europeans in Gaza.

It is notable that in the wake of Hamas’s electoral victory last week, the
Palestinians have placed themselves alongside al-Qaida as the “guardians” of
Islamic honor. It says a great deal both about who the Palestinians are and
what it is that Israel and the Western world are up against.

At its base, the Muslim furor over the cartoons is part and parcel of their
culture war against the West. The Muslims pushing the issue believe that
non-Muslims ought to behave obsequiously towards all things Islamic, while
the Muslims are free to demonize Jews as monkeys and pigs and accuse
Christians of being idolaters. According to the rules of their culture war,
if Western societies refuse to behave in accordance with their dictates, the
Muslims have the right and duty to attack them.

That is, the culture war that is being waged by the Arabs and Muslims in
response to the Danish cartoons is an assault on the West’s right to live
and govern in accordance with its values. It is an assault on the notions of
freedom and self-determination themselves. That the Palestinians should now
be placing themselves at the head of the charge against freedom and
self-determination should serve as an indicator of who they are and what
they stand for. But alas, it is not.

While, under US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s incompetent gaze, the
Iranians quickly assemble the capability to build nuclear bombs at will,
Hamas is directing its efforts towards building an Iranian enclave in Judea
and Samaria. Due to Rice’s insistence on reenacting her predecessor Colin
Powell’s failed policy of seeking UN backing for American actions in the
Middle East, Iran is being allowed to achieve independent nuclear
capabilities. At the same time, over the long term, Hamas’s Iranian enclave
in Judea and Samaria could well cause Israel’s collapse and thus mitigate
the ayatollahs’ need to destroy Israel with nuclear warheads.

Hamas’s victory at the polls last week was just the beginning of the
jihadist group’s takeover of Judea and Samaria. In the coming weeks and
months, as Western aid continues to flow into the Palestinian Authority’s
coffers, together with supplemental aid from Iran, Hamas will have the means
to gain control of the Western trained and heavily armed Palestinian
security forces. The forces’ loyalty will be bought simply: with the payment
of their salaries. As it secures its control over Judea and Samaria, Hamas
will adopt modes of operation similar to those adopted by their terrorist
colleagues in Fatah, although it will be far more popular than Fatah ever
was.

The main truth that Hamas’s rise to power has exposed is not that
Palestinian society is perhaps the most genocidal society on the face of the
planet. That has been clear for all to see for the past five and a half
years of the enormously popular Palestinian terror war against Israel. What
Hamas’s ascent to power has uncovered is that in everything related to the
Palestinian conflict with Israel, the policies of the US-led international
community, like the policies of the current Israeli government, are
predicated on myths rather than facts.

Hamas’s election last week should have put paid to the US plan to resolve
the Palestinian conflict with Israel by establishing a Palestinian state in
Judea, Samaria and Gaza. After all, in a public relations blitz, Hamas
leaders in Damascus, Khaled Mashal and Musa Abu Marzook, explained in op-eds
in the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers that their goal remains the
destruction of Israel. And yet, the US has just agreed with the EU, Russia
and the UN to continue to transfer funds to the Palestinian Authority.
Moreover, Rice is now pressuring Israel to continue its tax revenue
transfers to the PA.

Indeed, rather than simply cut off all support for the Palestinians, who
daily humiliate them, attack Israel and just voted al-Qaida’s sister
organization into power, the US is negotiating with Hamas. In his State of
the Union address this week, US President George W. Bush laid out conditions
for Hamas to be accepted by America. Bush’s decision to set out conditions
for Hamas to fulfill, rather than simply identifying it as the jihadist
terror group it is, makes clear that far from isolating al-Qaida’s ally,
Bush is bargaining with it.

Essentially, what Bush and his European counterparts are saying is that they
expect Hamas to behave like Fatah – that is with duplicity. For its part,
Hamas has been a willing negotiating partner. While giving no ground to the
Americans and the Europeans on the substance of its aim to destroy Israel,
Hamas leaders are offering “long-term cease-fires” and have adopted Fatah’s
platform of destroying Israel in stages.

THE QUESTION that arises from the US maneuvering with Hamas is why is the
Bush Administration acting as it is? The source of Washington’s awkward
posture towards Hamas is that over the past three years, Bush has allowed
his clear strategy of winning the war on global terror by bringing freedom
to the Arab world to be subverted. In the case of the Palestinians, on June
24, 2002, the president laid out what the Palestinians needed to do in order
to receive US support for statehood. Bush conditioned US support for the
Palestinians on their disavowal of terrorism and destruction of terror
groups; their embrace of liberal values; the conduct of a genuine campaign
to root out corruption; and above all, a genuine Palestinian acceptance of
Israel’s right to exist accompanied by an end of the PA’s indoctrination of
their people to seek Israel’s destruction.

Over succeeding months, Bush’s clear policy was denuded of its substance by
the State Department, the Israeli Left and the EU. In December 2002, Bush
accepted the road map plan for peace in spite of the fact that it flew in
the face of the policy he had laid out in June. Rather than officially break
with his democratization and liberalization policy towards the Palestinians,
Bush pretended that the road map advanced that policy.

Similarly, while during the initial phases of his post-September 11
policymaking, Bush was clear that democratization of the Arab world meant
the embrace of freedom by Arab societies, as the US became bogged down by
the terror war in Iraq, the president pretended that liberalization and the
conduct of open elections were the same thing. That is, he conflated
elections with democracy.

But the open elections that were just held in the Palestinian Authority
proved that the conduct of elections and the establishment of democracy are
two separate things. The Palestinian elections led to Islamization, not
democratization. There will be no freedom for the Palestinians at the end of
this process. And by dictating conditions for Hamas to fulfill, Bush now
ignores the fact that the Palestinians elected Hamas because it is what it
is, not because they want Hamas to be something it is not.

For their part, for 14 years successive Israeli governments have replaced
policymaking with myth-making. While the Americans do this to placate the
Europeans and the Arabs, Israel’s governments build their policies on
fantasies to gain short-term political advantages on the home front.

Today, the Western world is more or less cognizant of the fact that the
Muslim and Arab worlds – or large swathes of them – are waging a war against
the West. It is true that to varying degrees Western societies all lie to
themselves about what the fact that this global jihad is being waged demands
of them. And yet, few leaders deny today that radical Islam is a threat to
Western civilization.

PERVERSELY, WHILE the rest of the West is awake to the threat of jihad,
Israel’s government remains stubbornly asleep. Although all jihadist groups
and societies daily declare that the destruction of Israel is one of the
first aims of their war on the West, the Israeli government itself is
largely in denial of both the fact that Israel is a prime target in a larger
Islamic jihad and of the fact that the Palestinians see themselves as the
flag bearers of global jihad in their war against Israel.

Rather than accept the reality or Israel’s predicament, the current Israeli
government, like its predecessors, insists that the real “root” of the
global jihad being waged against it is the presence of Israeli communities
in Judea and Samaria or the absence of Palestinian statehood in general. So
it was that in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, rather than declare
Israel’s key role in thwarting the aims of the jihadists, Ariel Sharon sent
his foreign minister Shimon Peres to the UN where Peres told a befuddled
world body that the Palestinian jihad against Israel was completely
unrelated to the global jihad. Lecturing the world leaders, Peres waxed
romantically over the need for a Palestinian state to be established and for
a new New World Order, based on nanotechnology and the Internet to be
formed.

Currently, Olmert is ignoring the threat that has crossed Israel’s doorstep
by designing a diversionary campaign – not against Hamas, but against his
fellow Israelis. So it is that rather than contend with the fact that the
international community is moving towards welcoming Hamas as its newest
member, Olmert declared war on the religious Israelis who live in Judea and
Samaria.

Olmert’s decision to send a force of 6,000 policemen to the community of
Amona on Wednesday in order to destroy nine homes was an act of deliberate
provocation. His aim was to divert the attention of Israeli voters from the
Hamas state in Gaza and the Hamas state-in-the-making in Judea and Samaria
by providing them with pictures of settlers battling riot police. This was
necessary because Olmert’s only policy regarding Hamas is to transfer Judea
and Samaria to their control.

In light of this, Olmert and his associates desperately strive for the
Israeli electorate to ignore the fact that the only real issue on the agenda
today is whether Hamas will rule over Judea and Samaria or the Israeli
military will rule over Judea and Samaria. As Israelis learned from 2000 to
2002, when the IDF cedes control over Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians,
life for Israelis becomes impossible. The security of Tel Aviv is dependent
on Israel maintaining control of Jenin, Nablus, Kalkilya and Tulkarm. The
security of Jerusalem is dependent on Israeli control of Bethlehem, Ramallah
and Hebron.

Given the strategic threat that Hamas control of Judea and Samaria poses to
Israel, Olmert’s fervent wish is for them to postpone their takeover until
after the elections, allowing him to continue his diversionary campaign
against his own people unfettered by the weight of reality.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 and is filed under opinion.