Catering to Terrorists (Again)

President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have both extended a welcoming hand to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (NYT, WP, WT). In their meeting at the White House today, Bush and Olmert both agreed to cooperate with the Palestinian leader (not just cooperate, but also fund a supply.)

Bush said of Abbas he is the "the president of all the Palestinians" and "a reasonable voice amongst the extremists."

Once again the Administration runs into the lesser of two evils. But condemning Hamas by cooperating with another terrorist supporter is just like the US funding the Taliban in the 1990s, and then turning around and supporting the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban.

Let us not forget that Abbas is himself an Islamic extremist. He published a book back in 1983 stating that 6 million as the total number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust was "peddled" by the Jews, and that in fact "the Jewish victims may number six million or be far fewer, even fewer than one million." He has a long history of terrorism, including participation in the Munich Olympics massacre.

The Wall Street Journal wrote a serious critique of Abbas here.

"But if Americans and Europeans are genuinely interested in promoting Palestinian-Israeli peace, it is time for them to take a realistic look at [Abbas'] record ... His outright refusal to confront and disarm terrorists, in violation of the Road Map, hardly registers anymore in the Western media and where it does, it is usually excused and attributed to his relative political weakness ... the Palestinian Authority continues to glorify terrorists."

Ironically just last year Bush praised the "democratic" elections in Palestine, regardless of the result. But just because a leader is democratically elected doesn't mean that he will be good. In fact, the US should learn an important lesson from this recent Palestinian civil war. (Can it be a civil war if the Palestinians don't have a state to separate over?)

James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation states it well, "The rise of "Hamastan" in Gaza is also a sharp indictment of the Bush Administration's policy of supporting rapid democratization of a society that lacked the necessary civil and political culture to sustain a pluralist democracy."