You heard it here first: a Hamas leader will win the Nobel Peace
Prize.
Make no mistake, Hamas’s landslide victory in last month’s
Palestinian elections was the first step of a process that will
culminate with a leader of the terrorist group being celebrated by
the international community.
Such a turn of events may sound unlikely right now, because even
many Europeans recognize that Hamas is a terrorist group that is
sworn to the destruction of Israel. But before Yasser Arafat was
awarded the peace prize in 1994, he also had a decades-long record
as a terrorist.
Even though Arafat remained a puppeteer of terror behind the
scenes, he was elevated to the status of a statesman by Western
leaders such as President Bill Clinton who were eager to go down in
history as peacemakers.
There has been a sense of optimism in pro-Israel circles that
the victory of Hamas will force the world to finally recognize that
Israelis do not have a true peace partner. But these supporters of
Israel are kidding themselves.
When violence reignites in the region, the Western media will
once again portray Israel as the aggressor. Israel has been
condemned in the past for its targeted assassinations of Hamas
leaders. How will the world react if Israel were to take such
action against Hamas leaders holding cabinet positions in a
democratically elected government?
In the coming months, the Hamas propaganda machine will begin
churning out stories about their day care centers and hospitals,
which the Western media will gobble up like fine Swiss
chocolate.
In fact, the spin has already begun.
The U.S. and European media were quick to frame the elections as
a response to corruption by the ruling Fatah regime rather than a
call by ordinary Palestinians for a more hostile stance toward
Israel. But elections are rarely decided by one issue, and
terrorism was clearly a huge part of the Hamas platform.
In a television interview Al-Jazeera conducted just before the
elections, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said, “Today we enter the
Legislative Council with the platform of the resistance, which most
of the forces in the Palestinian people agree on, Allah be
praised.”
To excuse Palestinians for voting for Hamas is akin to excusing
Germans for supporting Hitler by saying they did so for economic
reasons. And any Western leaders who applaud Hamas for improving
social services will join the ranks of those who appeased the Nazis
in the 1930s because they were making the trains run on time.
Meanwhile, Hamas leaders have already shown evidence that they
could become as adept as Arafat at making overtures of peace to the
world while maintaining terrorism as a tactic.
In the days leading up to the elections Hamas’s Mahmoud Zahar
said that “negotiation (with Israel) is not a taboo.” But after the
elections, he said that Hamas was “not going to change a single
word” of its charter that calls for the destruction of Israel.
Hamas’s Mashal, exiled in Damascus because he is one of Israel’s
most wanted terrorists, is now already being portrayed as open to
negotiation because of statements such as, “When Israel says that
it will recognize Palestinian rights, and will withdraw from the
West Bank and East Jerusalem, and grant the right of return, stop
settlements and recognize the rights of the Palestinians to
self-determination, then Hamas will be ready to take a serious
step.”
In the past, Hamas leaders have stated that the return to the
1967 borders may be an acceptable intermediate step before the
eventual destruction of Israel and conquest of all of the land from
“the river to the sea.” The “right of return” for Palestinians has
also been used as a ruse to undermine Israel. (Remember how giving
away the Sudetenland was supposed to end Hitler’s territorial
ambitions in Europe?)
Mashal knows that Israel will not negotiate with Hamas for these
and many other reasons, but by bluffing to the Western media that
Hamas is open to peace, he hopes that Israelis will be portrayed as
obstructionists. And if the past is any indication, the strategy
will work.
The first indication of whether Hamas will eventually gain
acceptance by the international community is what happens with aid
to the Palestinians. And on that front, the signs are already
troubling.
At first, even Europeans threatened to cut off aid to Hamas. But
on Friday, France joined Russia’s call for diplomatic talks with
the terrorist group.
In a revealing interview with the Times of London last
month, Hamas’s Zahar made comments that suggest that any talk by
European leaders about cutting off aid will disappear once the dust
clears. “The European people came to me in the last month and they
said within six months they are going to do their best to change
the attitudes of their administration, because they do not accept
Hamas is a terrorist organization,” Zahar said.
So far, President Bush has said the right things about
withholding aid, but his statements have been made carefully enough
to allow for the possibility that U.S. funding would eventually
make it into the Palestinian territories, perhaps through other
channels.
Now is a rare moment of moral clarity for the Western world. The
Palestinian people have created a terror state. Anything short of a
universal rejection of the new government and immediate suspension
of all aid is a capitulation to terrorism, pure and simple.
Making even the tiniest of compromises while the Hamas
government is in its infancy will only set the stage for greater
concessions down the road. Then one day a leader of Hamas will join
the ranks of Teddy Roosevelt, Mother Teresa and Yasser Arafat by
winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
