Thursday, May 29, 2008
Fatah was corrupt, after all -- so that's a good reason to vote for a bunch of child-murdering Jew haters like those in Hamas? Anyway...
Daniel Halper, writing at Contentions, examines Mohamad Bazzi's...contention...that Hamas and Hizballah are different from Al Qaeda, what with their demonstrated democratic constituencies and all...
Arguing for a more "pragmatic" foreign policy, Mohamad Bazzi chastises President Bush for conflating Al Qaeda with Hezbollah and Hamas. Hezbollah and Hamas, he writes, "are political and military movements deeply embedded in their societies." Thus, in his view, since the the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples respectively have continued to grant Hezbollah and Hamas more power, they are legitimate entities, representative of their constituencies...
Halper correctly exposes many of the flaws in the argument, not least of which is that groups like Hamas and Hizballah have about as much in common with the American conception of democracy as did the Fascists of the 1930's.
An acceptance that Hamas and Hizbollah represent the populations in which they live would undermine the cherished view that those populations desire peace. Can't have it both ways.
But what is really remarkable is that any mainstream thinker would be willing to take US policy down a road that would essentially imprison those populations, so that even if they do desire peace they would never again have a chance to express that desire.