Scare Quotes Deployed Against. Hamas

I suspect that one of the goals of terrorists like Yasser Arafat is to wear down the civilized opposition with unrelenting savagery. Those of us on the receiving end are to become at once used enough to brutality -- so as not to do anything drastic to oppose such an ordinary thing -- and yet not so used to it that we wouldn't want to end it by accepting the "help" of our prospective overlords in putting a stop to it. In this way, they ultimately get their way.

Speaking for myself, the only thing the "Palestinians" have succeeded in "wearing down" on my part has been whatever sympathy I ever could have possibly felt for them. I still think Israel's decision to withdraw from Hamastan was the wrong one, but it seems to have had the same fortuitous result that caging a pack of rabid dogs would have: It has resulted in them attacking one another. Robert Tracinski has repeatedly stated in his newsletter,. TIA Daily, that "The enemy has problems of its own."

Not that I support anything less than carpet bombing and a total blockade of "Palestine", but feeding this frothing pack may not cost the West victory -- unless we commit the ultimate self-sacrifice and station U.N. peacekeepers there to save the brutes from themselves.

And so, thanks to the good offices of the "Palestinians", we have witnessed, scarcely five years after the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a major news organization using scare quotes to give the appropriate level of irony to the declared intent of a terrorist organization's actions!

The two largest political parties (both involved with terrorism) that run "Palestine", Hamas and Fatah, have been involved in a "power struggle" that has resulted, among other things, in the parliament and cabinet buildings having been burnt down. I guess events such as these are perfectly acceptable to "Palestinians" so long as they are not done by Israel in self-defense. This makes the Israeli withdrawal seem almost devilishly clever.

And so, in the midst of this power jihad, we have the "moderate" (See. I can use scare quotes, too.) Mahmoud Abbas -- who no less than Hamas would like to see Israel destroyed -- fruitlessly (so far) trying to convince the trigger-happy members of Hamas to accept a tactical recognition of Israel's right to exist. This is really a sort of Potemkin recognition, designed to appease the useful idiots in Europe just enough to resume the full flow of aid to the completely non-self-sufficient "Palestinians".

And so we have the following passage from the story that -- had half of this happened in Iraq, the phrase "civil war" would have already covered the entire top half of the first page of the New York Times:

Seeking a way out of the infighting, Abbas last weekend scheduled the referendum on a plan calling for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, implicitly recognizing the Jewish state.

Abbas believes a unified political platform by Palestinian factions would help end crushing international sanctions against the Hamas-led government and allow him to restart peace talks with Israel.

Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, opposes the referendum vote. But it has entered a "dialogue" with Abbas over the plan. The sides were meeting late Monday when violence erupted in the West Bank. [bold added]

Lookee that! The press really can recognize insincerity on the part of a terrorist faction -- if it suits their purposes to do so.

Of course, this is only because Hamas is about to blow it by no longer allowing everyone to pretend that there is still a peace "dialogue" with Israel. This might ultimatetly open the gates to Israel no longer having to limit its self-defense in deference to a "road map" to nowhere. No wonder the AP pointed the "irony gun" at Hamas.

So the scare quotes do not, after all, represent a sign of awakening on the part of the Associated Press. But still, they stood out because they weren't used with the word "terrorist" and they were being used to imply that an Arab faction was being less-than above-board.

False "alarm".

-- CAV