Abbas hearts Hamas

Abbas hearts Hamas

David Keyes

Western policy toward the Palestinians for the past two and a half decades can be summed up as follows: Hamas = bad, Fatah = good. Fatah was never perfect, no, but it certainly is better than Hamas. In the name of this simplistic formula, the Palestinian Authority has gotten billions of dollars in aid -- money that was supposed to empower moderates at the expense of radicals like Hamas.

But the joke was always on us. Days ago, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas admitted “[I]n all honesty, there are no disagreements between us” referring to Hamas and Fatah. He emphasized a second time, “[I] don’t think there are any political disagreements between us.”

What was the global reaction to Abbas’ stunning remark? Eh. It is what it is. Defining deviancy down doesn’t do this moment justice. The soft bigotry of low expectations doesn’t even begin to cover the world’s silence.

Apparently there is nothing crazy or radical enough that can be said by a Palestinian leader that will not be cast aside with a casual shrug and total lack of media attention.

To reiterate, the “moderate” leader of the Palestinians (un-elected for years now) just declared that there are no -- none, zip, efes, nada -- differences between his party, Fatah, and the Islamist supremacist terrorist group Hamas whose charter calls for genocide.

The word moderate has been so corrupted and become so relative so as to lose all meaning. We now speak of moderate Taliban -- those who do not throw acid in the face of women trying to study but merely ban them from leaving the house. We talk of moderate elements of Hamas -- those willing to declare a decade long cease-fire before restarting their quest to destroy a member state of the United Nations. Three cheers for moderation!

Language matters. When a “moderate” declares he is a political and ideological copy of a group that shoots rockets from schools and targets dozens of cafes and buses with suicide-bombs, he should never be called a moderate again.

If Abbas is having trouble thinking of political differences between Hamas and Fatah, the West should have trouble thinking of different policies for them too.

Moderates shouldn’t have difficulty differentiating themselves from a group that calls for genocide, uses child-soldiers, imposes tyranny, lauds suicide-terror, advocates destroying a nation-state and laments the death of Osama bin Laden.

Or is that putting the bar too high?

David Keyes is the executive director of Advancing Human Rights and co-founder of CyberDissidents.org. He can be reached at david.keyes@advancinghumanrights.org or on Twitter@DavidMKeyes.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1613