roachboy, I don't claim to know what every Palestinian is thinking. All I can go by is the evidence of what the conduct of their polity has been. I also read the public opinion polls, which of course are flawed, but it's what we have.
Which leads me to ask Will how he knows the Palis elected Hamas out of desperation. It's not like radical Islamism is exactly unknown in the muslim world the past decade. It's not a fringe phenomenon. Probably not a majority or plurality one, but not fringe by any means. You are assigning motives by projection or inference, which I do understand, but that comes back to assuming that others think the way you do. They don't. Different cultures, different background, different assumptions. In the end you have to evaluate people based on their own words and actions.
I have been having some real difficulty here understanding how nice, educated, enlightened people can possibly think it's ok for the self-proclaimed genocidal murderers of Hamas to lob rockets at civilians and hide behind their own children as human shields -- but be outraged when Israel takes steps to stop it. Or if you
don't think it's ok, you
are silent about it when the rockets are being lobbed but vocal when Israel finally says "enough." As I said before, my family has managed to survive one genocide in the last century, and I don't want it to have to survive another one in this century, which is what is going to happen if Hamas isn't stopped.
And the Palis will be better off when Hamas is overthrown too. Or did you just gloss over the murders and leg-breaking that Hamas has been doing over the last couple of weeks to intimidate its own population? I guess that doesn't count, it's just Arabs killing and maiming other Arabs. The best thing that can happen to the Palestinians is to have the back of the Hamas monster broken for good. If, as I hope, the people here on this site are right, and the Palestinians really do want nothing more than peace, that will be their chance.
Jeffrey Goldberg had it exactly right:
Quote:
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we've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I'll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.
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And so was Golda Meir exactly right:
“We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
"We can forgive you [the Arabs] for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours."