There is an unbelievable amount of blindness in the world media about the latest suicide bombing, and Hamas’ response to it. I am absolutely unable to assign a reason for words like these:
There is a sliver of hope that a split might be emerging within Hamas: Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, a relative pragmatist, remained silent after Monday’s attack. But there’s a long road between silence and outspoken courage.
And these:
So why did a spokesman for Hamas — which has observed a ceasefire with Israel for more than a year — rush to defend yesterday’s bombing as an act the Palestinians had “every right†to carry out?
The most depressing, and also the likeliest, explanation is that the authority is afraid of alienating an important section of Palestinian public opinion — indeed, the very people who swept it into power in the first place.
I expect that kind of drivel from a South African paper. But not from USA Today.
When even the BBC recognizes that Hamas praised the suicide bombing, it makes USA Today’s editorial doubly reprehensible.
But there is no sign that Hamas feels in any way chastened.
After the West had delivered all its criticism, interior ministry spokesman Said Seeyam reiterated his government’s view that the Tel Aviv attack constituted self-defence.
The editorial writers are seeing things that are simply not in evidence. Haniyeh kept quiet because he’s playing good cop again. Give him time. He is unable to resist spouting the terrorist line. He will be caught on tape praising the suicide bombing.
USA Today’s editorialists will probably not see it. I’m betting they won’t report it, either.
It is the invariable custom of people in the West to make up imaginary cliques of “moderates” vs “hardliners” projected onto foreign governments. You can read about them arguing the necessity of not driving Hitler into the arms of the “hardliners” before WWII, and the same with Stalin and others. It’s all gammon. Generally the guy in charge is the hardest liner of them all, but the media and Western diplomats never seem to understand that. As you say, if Haniyeh remained silent it’s because the spokesman said whatever he wanted him to. What need for him to belabor the obvious?
And where does he come by this reputation for “pragmatism” anyway? Among a bunch of fanatical murderers what does that represent? The idiocies you critique, Meryl, come to the MSM and Western governments simply from fantasizing and mirror-imaging. Those were lousy guides to policy during the Cold War, and they are worse with terrorists.