Abbas's Election

HDS Greenway once again writes on the future of the Middle East "peace process", and once again he gets it wrong. Seeing only what he wants to see and not the reality, he - like many others - sees a "window of hope" in this weekend's Palestinian "election".

His most obnoxious point is that Israel's "hard-liners" are the equivalent of Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

Palestinian and Israeli ultras are the mirror image of each other. Both refuse to compromise, believing that their side should have everything between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Of course, he neglects to mention that no Israeli "hard-liners" have bombed a bus or cafe, and that the vast majority of Israelis do not support killing of innocents, something that can not be said of the Palestinians.

He ends with a quote from Hanan Ashrawi

But, as the oft-time spokeswoman for Palestine, Hanan Ashrawi, told The Jerusalem Post: "The Palestinians' problem is not absence of democracy -- it's absence of freedom."

This can not be described in any other way than bullshit. The Palestinian problem has not been a lack of freedom, it has been their desire to destroy Israel, rather than create their own state.

On the other hand, Charles Krauthammer is someone who does see Abbas for who he really is, Arafat's heir. In today's op/ed piece he takes the world to task for once again not listening to what the Palestinian leader is saying.

Some of the American and Israeli responses to Abbas are enough to make you weep. Spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Israel: "We don't think it is useful to focus on every statement by every official; what's important is the process." Official in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office: "Words don't count in the Middle East; what counts are actions."

Have we learned nothing? In the Middle East, words are actions. Never more so than in an election campaign in which your words define your platform and establish your mandate. Abbas is running practically unopposed, and yet, on the question of both ends and means, he chooses to run as Yasser Arafat.
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In Abbas's first moment of real leadership, his long-anticipated emergence from the shadow of Arafat, he chooses to literally hoist the flag of the terrorist al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.