january 26, 2006

Palestinians Elect Hamas by Wide Margin

In what can only be seen as a catastrophic development for the so-called Middle East peace process, the terrorist group Hamas has won the Palestinian parliamentary elections by an overwhelming margin. President Bush said today that America's stance on Hamas hasn't changed--as long as the group continues to seek the destruction of Israel, the U.S. will not deal with it. That's obviously sound policy: Hamas is an inherently evil organization that has the blood of countless innocent Israelis (and some Americans) on its hands. As I show here, its hatred for Americais well-documented. Why, then, did the Bush administration push to have the elections now. rather than postpone them? Indeed, all indications pointed to Hamas possibly winning the elections, yet the U.S. insisted on them going on as planned. Here's some insight from Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch:

"Indeed, the Americans did (insist on immediate elections), operating out of the widely held fantasy that free elections are a good thing in themselves, and that voters, out of the natural longing for freedom in every human heart, will always reject tyranny and hatred and fanaticism at the ballot box.
Unfortunately, reality is neither that simple nor that comforting. As I argued here several years ago (my section is "No," starting on page two), as long as the idea that Islamic Sharia is the law of God remains strong in Islamic countries, they will not be interested in exchanging it for laws based on human consensus. And, I might add -- and as today's news shows us -- Muslims who believe this will use their vote to choose Sharia when they have the chance. The fact that this is their democratic choice should not be comforting, for it is a choice for the institutionalized oppression of women and religious minorities."

I'm beginning to believe that, sadly, the more freedoms that are granted to the people of the Islamic Middle East, the more likely they are to vote for radical demagogues who will strip those very freedoms away.

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