Bookworm Room: Minds in synch about Hamas

I blogged the other day about my belief that the virtue of a Hamas election is that evil is out in the open. Don Quixote followed that with a post asking whether the Palestinian people, by voting for Hamas, have officially all become complicit in terrorism (changing their status from "innocents" with terrorists in their midst). Mark Steyn, of course, puts it all together in a column that uses Joel ("I hate the troops") Stein's coming out as the starting point:

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.