The empty rhetoric about concern for the Palestinians is purely for domestic consumption.… While the mainstream media doesn’t dare challenge the absurd statements made by Bush, Rice and Olmert, regardless of how incongruous they may be, the people of the Middle East have not forgotten the duplicity of the West and Israel, especially since the 2006 elections.
Free elections are not a crime—that is, unless one lives in the Occupied Territories. Then voting for the candidate of one’s choice provides the justification for cutting off food, water, medicine, and financial resources—as well a stepping up a campaign of illegal detentions, destruction of personal property and targeted assassinations.This is what the “Bush Doctrine” looks like in the Gaza Strip today. The occupants of the “most densely populated place on earth” participated in the balloting at insistence of the Bush administration and they’ve been rewarded for their cooperation with a savage boycott and daily brutality.
If Bush didn’t want democracy, then why did he force it on the Palestinians?
Political powerbrokers in the US and Israel immediately rejected the election results and initiated a plan to scuttle Hamas through economic strangulation, persistent harassment and covert warfare. For the last year, the newly “elected” government has shown remarkable restraint under constant assault. Hamas has kept its word and refrained from suicide bombings in Israel even though hundreds of Palestinian civilians have been killed or injured during that same time. In fact, there has NOT BEEN ONE HAMAS-BACKED SUICIDE BOMBING SINCE THE PARTY TOOK OFFICE. (This fact is invariably ignored by the media which is far-more sympathetic to the Israeli position) We should remember that suicide bombing has been used for years as the excuse for putting off “final settlement” negotiations. Now that the bombing has stopped, Israel has invented an entirely new excuse to avoid dialogue, that is, that Hamas “refuses to recognize the state of Israel”.
The fact is that were it not for Hamas, it’s likely that Israel would be dishing out the same treatment to Fatah right now.
The charade is over in Palestine. The farce that tried to pass itself off as a pathway to peace has clearly ended. The ”˜West’ led by Israel and the US has finally begun to show the world the duplicity of their joint criminality as that has most recently been underscored in “Gaza vs. The West Bank.”After Israel illegally seized the Palestinian taxes raised, from the starving and beleaguered Palestinians, to deny those people the means to achieve a functioning state: now in light of the rebellion in Gaza, Israel intends to use that money to blackmail The West Bank, and starve survivors in Gaza. This surpasses what the Nazis did to those they occupied by a factor of at least ten-fold: Given that the Nazi reign lasted only twelve years – while Israel and the US have controlled the people of Palestine for over fifty years.
Perhaps, Arafat wasn’t the “obstacle to peace” after all. Perhaps it was just a PR swindle to avoid real dialogue?
There is one interesting theory as to why Israel so fears Hamas, apart from the obvious one.
However, the Empire has no use for other people’s patriots, we call them terrorists. In fact the still unfinished state of Israel initially used the Irgun, (their own terrorists when they were seeking independence from the Brits). Many of their early leaders were drawn directly from the ranks of their own former “terrorists.” This is probably why the current Israeli leadership is so incensed by Hamas, and what their leadership of the Palestinians might be able to accomplish, should Hamas ever succeed in uniting a real Palestinian state.