Conned by Hamas
David Frum
National Post
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Who says terrorism doesn't pay? Russian President Putin has invited the leaders of Hamas to come visit him in Moscow. Direct talks with France and Turkey are likely to begin soon. Hamas representatives are touring the Arab and Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, which promised the United States three years ago to stop funding the Islamic terror group.
What's Putin's game? Since the late 1990s, Russia has become a de facto ally of Iran -- one of the world's last large customers for Russia's shoddy weapons industry. And Hamas is an Iranian client.
It's true, too, that since his proxy defeat in the Ukrainian elections last year, Putin has expressed increasing resentment of Russia's diminished standing in the world -- and making mischief in the Middle East is one of the most ancient Russian gambits for reminding the West to take Russia seriously.
Putin may even imagine that reaching out to Hamas may buy off Saudi and other supporters of the insurgency in Muslim Chechnya.
Hamas likewise is preparing itself to play a cunning double game. While talking grandly of hudna (or truce), it is quietly warning European governments that any abatement of the flow of aid to the Palestinian Authority will inspire a surge of terror attacks against European cities.
It's certainly handy for Hamas that a wave of violent protests against four-month-old Danish cartoons should have materialized at exactly the same moment that they won the Palestinian elections, isn't it?
Some cynics might even wonder if the supposedly "spontaneous" protests that have erupted in police states like Syria and Iran in the week since Hamas's victory might not be quite so spontaneous as they look -- that maybe indeed those police states helped incite the riots.
Iran, for example, may soon find itself called before the UN Security Council to answer for its clandestine nuclear program. Last year, Denmark was elected a rotating member of the UN Security Council for 2005-2006. In June, Denmark assumes the Council's presidency. Iranian endorsement of attacks on Danish interests sends a powerful message to the Danish government: Be careful. Punish us, and we can punish you.
The Syrian secret police at a minimum tolerated the torching of Denmark's Damascus and Beirut embassies. Syria too has business before the Security Council: Resolution 1559, which calls on Syria to evacuate Lebanon.
And it sure would have been inconvenient if the protests had broken out, say, four weeks earlier: At that point, Palestinian voters were still hesitating between Hamas and Fatah. Palestinians depend for their incomes almost entirely on foreign aid. The Scandinavian countries give especially generously. Imam-incited anti-Danish riots might have frightened Palestinian voters back to the less religious Fatah party. So better to wait.
Nor is it just radical governments that have coolly calculated the timing, costs and benefits of this eruption of Islamic rage.
Radical Muslim clerics in the EU cite the cartoon controversy in an effort to persuade member governments to adopt laws banning depictions of Mohammed. British Muslims have hoped to pressure the U.K. Parliament into extending hate-speech laws to cover insults to religions and religious teachings, so far unsuccessfully.
It is a great mistake to assume that because people act in an intemperate or extreme way that they must be irrational or delusional. And it is dangerously naive to believe that emotional outbursts that occur in police states like Syria or Saudi Arabia are spontaneous and unorganized.
And it is perhaps the most dangerous error of all to take things at face value in a shadowy place like the contemporary Middle East.
Naviety is a dangerous error because it leads to dangerous real-world consequences. If you imagine that the Middle East is peopled by emotional mobs ready to explode into spontaneous rage at an offending word ... why then you'll take care not to offend them, won't you? Even appease them -- by, for example, negotiating with Islamic terror groups like Hamas.
But if you turn a more skeptical eye to perceive the sinister rationality that underlies Middle Eastern politics, you will notice that extremists like everyone else respond to incentives and disincentives. If terrorism pays off -- in aid, in diplomatic recognition, in concessions -- then terrorism will proliferate. If terrorism fails -- if terrorists become hunted pariahs and terror states must fear retaliation -- you'll get less of it.
If Putin is left alone with his new pals -- if Hamas is isolated, if its threats are rebuffed and if the new government of the Palestinian Authority is held responsible for any acts of violence on its territory -- then and only then may you see Hamas moderate and soften. But if short-sighted and frightened diplomats persuade Western governments to try to woo Hamas, to coax and cajole and offer bribes and benefits, then the violence of the past two weeks will soon prove a very mild introduction to the horrors to come.
