How Rice empowered Hamas

An article at Christian Science Monitor by Norman H. Olsen and Matthew N. Olsen contains this description of the idiot Rice’s mess-making in Gaza.

Hamas never called for the elections that put them in power. That was the brainstorm of Secretary Rice and her staff, who had apparently decided they could steer Palestinians into supporting the more-compliant Mahmoud Abbas (the current president of the Palestinian authority) and his Fatah Party through a marketing campaign that was to counter Hamas’s growing popularity—all while ignoring continued Israeli settlement construction, land confiscation, and cantonization of the West Bank.

State Department staffers helped finance and supervise the Fatah campaign, down to the choice of backdrop color for the podium where Mr. Abbas was to proclaim victory. An adviser working for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) explained to incredulous staffers at the Embassy in Tel Aviv how he would finance and direct elements of the campaign, leaving no U.S. fingerprints. USAID teams, meanwhile, struggled to implement projects for which Abbas could claim credit. Once the covert political program cemented Fatah in place, the militia Washington was building for Fatah warlord-wannabee Mohammed Dahlan would destroy Hamas militarily.

Their collective confidence was unbounded. But the Palestinians didn’t get the memo. Rice was reportedly blindsided when she heard the news of Hamas’s victory during her 5 a.m. treadmill workout. But that did not prevent a swift response.

She immediately insisted that the Quartet (the US, European Union, United Nations, and Russia) ban all contact with Hamas and support Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza. The results of her request were mixed, but Palestinian suffering manifestly intensified. The isolation was supposed to turn angry Palestinians against an ineffective Hamas. As if such blockades had not been tried before.

LA writes:

So, Rice advanced a plan that unexpectedly but predictably empowered Hamas and thus forced Israel to treat Gaza worse than before, thus increasing Palestinian suffering and making Israel seem like a nasty bully.

In the same way, the Gaza pullout predictably empowered Hamas to attack Israel which ultimately forced Israel to attack Gaza, thus increasing Palestinian suffering and making Israel seem like a nasty bully.

Does anyone see a pattern here? The more the liberals, in the name of achieving universal peace and equality, deny the existence of enemies and evil, the more empowered become enemies and evil, thus requiring society to use ever greater force to defend itself and to treat people more unequally than before.

As far as Israel is concerned, the ultimate end of this nightmare logic will be when it sets up a Palestinian state.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 14, 2009 11:25 AM | Send