No, Not That Sort of Democracy!!
by Jeff Davis
The last time I checked, this week’s excuse for the Iraq War was to bring those poor benighted Arabs the benefits of Western-style “democracy.” Right? Well, so we did. The pro-Iranian Shi’ite fundamentalists cleaned up in the Iraqi elections, and now the Palestinian people had a general election on Wednesday, and the people spoke, loud and clear. Did they ever! In a stunning upset, the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas party won 76 seats in the new Palestinian parliament compared to only 43 won by its long-ruling and thoroughly corrupt rival, the Fatah Party. Hamas remains officially committed to the destruction of Israel, has never formally renounced the use of violence and has borne the brunt of the last six years of armed struggle against the Israelis.
The Palestinian people have tried cooperating with the Israelis in the past. Years of negotiating go by and they find themselves living on a shrinking sliver of land. The great dog and pony show of 2005 involved the Israeli withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. For those unfamiliar with Gaza, it’s the last strip of seaside land that the Palestinians still have for themselves. Their population has been inflated by refugees from Israeli abuse. The Israeli “settlements” in Gaza would be analogous to some Frenchmen buying a few condos in Hong Kong and then claiming Hong Kong for France. There was never any serious chance the Israelis would take Gaza from the Palestinians. By abandoning the ridiculous settlements in Gaza, Ariel Sharon distracted the world’s attention from the Apartheid Wall, which has walled in the Palestinians on the West Back in the world’s largest concentration camps AND which will lead to the theft of a large portion of the West Bank land which is outside the wall.
The election of Hamas is not much different from the Israelis electing and reelecting Ariel Sharon. Sharon mass murdered 69 Arabs in a raid in 1953. He was the commanding general in charge when Israel’s allies were allowed to mass murder Arabs at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon. And Sharon was prime minister when Israeli forces massacred Arabs at Jenin and then refused to allow in UN inspectors to examine the site. Funny how there was no world condemnation of Israel for electing a “terrorist” government headed by Ariel Sharon.
The Hamas victory came despite the expenditure of at least $2 million in American taxpayer’s money (that the administration admits to) in order to boost Fatah, bribe Palestinian voters and rig the election, plus an undisclosed but certainly greater sum of covert CIA funding.
That high-pitched wailing sound you hear is the sound of screams of fear and hysteria, from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn and Washington, DC. Dubya is already telling everyone to simply ignore the vote. “I have made it very clear that a political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which we will not deal,” Bush told reporters. (This makes one wonder what Bush himself would have done had HE officially lost in 2004.) Bush is now threatening to cut off all aid to the Palestinian authority unless the vote is simply ignored.
In other words, democracy means “elect somebody we like or else,” as if we didn’t all know that before. I guess we didn’t want them to be quite THAT “democratic,” eh?