http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn29.html

At least Hamas is open about its evil intentions

January 29, 2006

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

I was at a county fair in New Hampshire last summer and stopped by the
National Guard tent. They had those "Support Our Troops" ribbon
stickers for sale -- one on a Stars-and-Stripes background, one of
them just plain yellow. I've never liked the whole yellow-ribbon
thing: It's too victimological, too passive, too enervated. One of the
distinctive features of that immediate post-9/11 moment of near
national unity was the blessed absence of yellow ribbons. It would
have been the wrong symbol for an America full of righteous anger.

But four years on, and there are "Support Our Troops" yellow ribbons
a-plenty. "What's the idea behind that?" I asked the National
Guardsman manning the display.

"Well," he said, "a lot of people don't support the war and they
aren't comfortable with the flag-colored ribbon but they support the
troops."

It seemed to me unlikely that people who were uncomfortable with the
national flag were likely in any meaningful sense to be supportive of
the national army. But a couple of weeks later, driving past a house
in Hanover, N.H., I saw an even sillier qualification: "Support Our
Troops. Bring Them Home Now" -- so they can sit around the barracks
feeling like losers until they're needed for some hurricane-relief
operation.

Joel Stein (no relation) of the Los Angeles Times took a lot of heat
last week for coming right out with it and saying that he didn't
support the troops and that it was a humbug phrase that he and his
anti-war comrades shouldn't have to use as cover for their position.

Good for him. He's right. It's empty and pusillanimous, the Iraq war's
version of "But some of my best friends are Jewish . . ." If you're
opposed to the mission, if you don't want to see it through, if you're
supporting a position whose success would only demoralize those
serving in Iraq and negate their sacrifice, in what sense do you
"support the troops"? Stein ought to be congratulated for
acknowledging that he doesn't. We armchair warmongers are routinely
derided as "chickenhawks," but Stein is a hawkish chicken, disdaining
the weasel formulation too many anti-war folks take refuge in.

The Palestinian elections were similarly clarifying. The old guard --
Yasser Arafat's Fatah cronies -- had their own take on the "But some
of my best friends are Jewish" routine. For years they insisted, at
least in the presence of Americans and Europeans, that they were in
favor of a "two-state solution" -- Israel and Palestine living side by
side -- at the same time as they supported and glorified and
financially subsidized suicide bombers and other terrorists. Insofar
as their enthusiasm for a two-state solution was genuine, it was as an
intermediate stage en route to a one-state solution.

Hamas, by contrast, takes a Joel Stein view: Why the hell should we
have to go tippy-toeing around some sissy phrase we don't really mean?
Hamas doesn't support a two-state solution, it supports the
liquidation of one state and its replacement by other, and they don't
see why they should have to pretend otherwise. And in last week's
elections for the Palestinian Authority they romped home. It was a
landslide.

As is the way, many in the West rushed to rationalize the victory. The
media have long been reluctant to damn the excitable lads as
terrorists. In 2002 the New York Times published a photograph of
Palestinian suicide bombers all dressed up and ready to blow, and
captioned it "Hamas activists." Take my advice and try not to be
standing too near the Hamas activist when he activates himself.

Oh, no no no, some analysts assured us. The Palestinians didn't vote
for Hamas because of the policy plank about obliterating the state of
Israel but because Fatah is hopelessly corrupt. Which is true: The
European Union's bankrolled the Palestinian Authority since its
creation and Yasser and his buddies salted most of the dough away in
their Swiss bank accounts and used the loose change to fund the
intifada. After 10 years you can't blame the Palestinians for figuring
it's time to give another group of people a chance to siphon off all
that EU booty.

So I'd like to believe this was a vote for getting rid of corruption
rather than getting rid of Jews. But that's hard to square with some
of the newly elected legislators. For example, Mariam Farahat, a
mother of three, was elected in Gaza. She used to be a mother of six
but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against
Israel. She's a household name to Palestinians, known as Um Nidal --
Mother of the Struggle -- and, at the rate she's getting through her
kids, the Struggle's all she'll be Mother of. She's famous for a Hamas
recruitment video in which she shows her 17-year-old son how to kill
Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It's the Hamas version
of 42nd Street: You're going out there a youngster but you've got to
come back in small pieces.

It may be that she stood for parliament because she's got a yen to be
junior transport minister or deputy secretary of fisheries. But it
seems more likely that she and her Hamas colleagues were elected
because this is who the Palestinian people are, this is what they
believe. The Palestinians are the most comprehensively wrecked people
on the face of the earth: After 60 years as U.N. "refugees," they're
now so depraved they're electing candidates on the basis of child
sacrifice. To take two contemporaneous crises, imagine if the
population displacements caused by the end of the Second World War and
by the partition of British India had also been left to the U.N. to
manage and six decades later they were still running the "refugee"
"camps," now full of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, none of
whom had ever lived in any of the places they're supposed to be
refugees from. Would you wish that fate on post-war Central Europe or
the Indian subcontinent?

So what happens now? Either Hamas forms a government and decides that
operating highway departments and sewer systems is what it really
wants to do with itself. Or, like Arafat, it figures that it has no
interest in government except as a useful front for terrorist
operations. If it's the former, all well and good: Many first-rate
terror organizations have managed to convert themselves to third-rate
national-liberation governments. But, if it's the latter, that too is
useful: Hamas is the honest expression of the will of the Palestinian
electorate, and the cold hard truth of that is something Europeans and
Americans will find hard to avoid.

As with Joel Stein, you're always better off knowing what people
honestly think. For decades, the Middle East's dictators justified
themselves to Washington as a restraint on the baser urges of their
citizens, but in the end they only incubated worse pathologies.
Western subsidy of Arafatistan is merely the latest example. Democracy
in the Middle East is not always pretty, but it's better than the
West's sillier illusions.