Sober political analysis from Herb Keinon at the Jerusalem Post:
...Putin's invitation to Hamas Thursday didn't come out of the blue. A week earlier at a mammoth press conference in the Kremlin, he made it clear that Moscow did not view Hamas the same way the US and Europe did.His answer to a question about Hamas was extremely telling. Hamas's victory, he said, "is a big setback, an important setback for American efforts in the Middle East. A very serious setback."
And an American setback in the Middle East is good for Russia; it provides Russia with an opportunity.
Putin's invitation to Hamas was not a jab at Israel, although we will definitely feel the sting, as much as it was a swipe at US regional policies. Putin has identified a place where Russia can play a key position. If everyone else is boycotting Hamas and Russia talks with it, then Russia has just won itself a starring role...
Hamas's victory, he said, "is a big setback, an important setback for American efforts in the Middle East. A very serious setback."
And to think the Cold War is over. Is Russia a little salty as to the outcome of the Cold War?
Maybe just maybe they would like to extract some sort of revenge against the U.S. by coveting a Hamas backed regime.
In Putin's case it is about international legitimacy. Check out this AP article http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/11/AR2006021100695.html
Putin wants Russia to be the 3-4th largest suppiler of oil to the US. What better way than to play mideast spoiler.
So much for "my friend Vladimir". Friendships don't last for long these days, do they?
Putin reminds me of Canada's third party the NDP, even though they are 3rd rate party, they seek ways to always control the party in power, thereby doing great harm to both liberals and conservative parties.
So its all show with Putin, he's a game player.
rather than a stab in the back, maybe Russia is maneouvering itself to be a player in the Mid East.
By acting as a go-between between hamas and israel, the israelis would be ferrying diplomatic messages, seeking intelligence, via MOSCOW rather than Washington D.C.
the israelis simply cannot be seen to be dealing with Hamas directly - that would be political suicide.
similarly, Hamas cant deal with the Israelis publicly - as their core supporter would see that as a sell out.
enter Moscow. the go-between.
i think Putin might have pulled off one of the biggest coups this year so far , in the diplomatic game of chess.
The "setback" is not to American policy, rightly conceived, but to the illusions of that policy, the repeated dreamy idea that mere head-counting "democracy" -- not the real, Western version, with guarantees of individiual rights --could be viewed as either a panacea or a palliative in the Muslm countries. It is neither. There will always be lords of misrule in the Muslim world because Islam encourages the habit of submission to the despot, who can only be opposed not for his despotism (was Muhammad, uswa hasana, known for his Town-Meeting ways?), but because he is insufficiently Muslim, even perhaps an Infidel.
The failure of imagination by those whose duty it is to protect us, all over the Western world, the failure to begin to come to grips with the belief-system of Islam, and how much stronger it is, how complete a system of regulation it is, how difficult it is for those born within it to acquire a modicum of distance from it, so that even the most intelligent, most advanced, most westernized Muslims, the kind who have little use for most of it, will scurry back in defense of the faith if they sense it is being questioned or under attack, and will reveal, in moments of testing -- as with these anodyne cartoons -- that they simply cannot comprehend what Western Man takes for granted about individual rights, and about the need for free speech. It is only when they make that final mental leap to becoming apostates that they gain true freedom, and the ability to see Islam for what it is: not the solace for failure by Muslims to develop for at least the last thousand years, but the source of that very failure. And that is something that filial piety (not wishing to distance oneself from one's own parents, grandparents, more distant relatives) and the need to cling to the myth -- there are more "Dream Palaces" than Fouad Ajami, who is a good example of someone who cannot publicly discuss his own attitude toward Islam, who cannot even locate the source of Middle Eastern disarray in Islam itself, which is not an alternative to those various currents -- Nasserist pan-Arabism, or Ba'athism -- but rather the all-subsuming master narrative and source of all those varying attempts at dealing with Islam (in the case of Michel Aflaq and other non-Muslims or lukewarm Muslims) or in appealing to the same sentiments under a different form. Pan-Arabism was simply a subset of pan-Islamism (i.e. Islam itself), suitable for a time of relative weakness, before the OPEC trilions of dollars, and the millions of Muslims allowed, quite casually and thoughtlessly, to settle in the Lands of the Infidels (i.e. behind what they, the Muslims, regard as enemy lines, a notion of which the Western world did not even begin to realize, and many in that world still do not, for the realization is too disturbing, too painful).
The "setback" could and certainly should be the beginning of the end for all illusions about the permanent, not temporary, and world-wide, not local, menace of the tenets of Islam, and of those who take them seriously. And hundreds of millions of people do. Not to be solved by throwing more Infidel billions in foreign aid that is merely classic Jizyah -- that is a payment by non-Muslims, to Muslims, which is received as if by right, and given as if it must be, lest the recipients become angry and cease to treat the donors as "protected peoples." These ways of looking at the universe do not disappear; the canonical texts of Islam remain both immutable, and unchangeable in their interpretation. No one has yet come forth, in the 1350 years of Islam, to modify or soften its central meaning -- the division of the world between Believers and Infidels, and the right of the Believers to eventually, by whatever means prove most effective (and exclusive concentration on the military means, rather than Da'wa and demographic conquest, is foolish); furthermore, Muslims have a "right" to Infidel property (this is openly discussed by Muslim clerics in Western Europe -- taking things from the Infidels is not theft, but merely approriation of the Jizyah that is naturally do, but that current conditions -- the Muslims as yet still do not dominate -- cannot be enforced.
Nor is it a "handful of extremists." Nor is it people who have "perverted" a "noble religion." Bush and Rice can repeat this nonsense, if the wish, till the cows come home, but they look more foolish every day, and unless they show the mental flexibility, the ability to acquire new information about Islam, and not from the usual apologists or false "reallists" whose realism has so far consisted in not wanting to recognize, and never having given any signs of understanding, the nature of Islam. It has been those "realists" -- Brzezinski who with Carter did nothing to prevent the coming to power of Khomeini; their incredible incompetence, on the one hand the sentimentalist Carter who thought of Khomeini as a "fellow man of faith" (apparently the exact nature of that faith, the things that Khomeini had been on record as saying since 1942, had escaped Carter; as for Brzezinski, his visceral hatred of the Soviet Union led him to see Islam only as a "bulwark against Communism." And then there was that advisor on Iran, Gary Sick, whose long series of misundrstandings, of meretriciousness (his book making false charges against the Reagan Administration required a Congressional inquiry to undo, at the cost of tens of millions), and who is even today brought on by Charlie Rose as a guest without the show's undoubtedly naive and young bookers apparently knowing who Sick is, and why his apologetics - he's now in the saving-Iran-from-attack mode -- need to be examined in light of his long history of having been wrong, about the Islamic Republic of Iran.
No more reliance on these "Light Unto the Muslim Nations" schemes. Out of Iraq right away, for attempting to construct an "Iraqi" army and an "Iraqi" police force out of a population that is riven by ethnic and sectarian divides, is an impossibility. And even if here and there a few such units can be created, that means nothing -- that's a Potemkin army. The Americans should not be sacrificing their lives (for they risk them, remaining in Iraq where as Infidels they may either be attacked outright, or kept on for whatever usefulness, and more goodies and money, they will provide, but in the end, when they leave, and whenever they leave, the great good they did, beginning but not ending with the removal of an entire monstrous regime, will promptly be forgotten. The fact that a handful of the most enlightened "Iraqis" will not forget is slim consolation for several hundred billion dollars, spent since the initial overthrow of the regime.
The Hamas victory should have been a surrpise only in one sense: one may have assumed that the corrupt followers of Arafat (where are those billions? Why does Sura Arafat continue to hold onto hundreds of millions herself, and recevive $22 million a year from American and European taxpayers? Do you get $22 million a year for nothing? Do you object to helping contribute to Sura Arafat?) would have manipulated the electin better. Alas for them, they had these pesky international observers, including Jimmy Carter, Arafat's old friend and volunteer public-relations adviser (see Brinkley's biography of Carter). But Islam will always win: it would win,in a walk, in a democratic election in Jordan, and the Hashemites finally be put out of their misery. The "real" Muslims would come to power in Syria, if the Alawite military caste were foolish enought to allow such a thing. Even in Lebanon, the only thing preserving what power the Christains have is the old arrangement, the pre-assigned distribution of power, and assigned posts, according to confession. Were that to go, the Christians could only rely on themselves, their weaponry, Israel, and the West if it werre to come to its senses. They have nothing else, and the overbreeding of the Shi'a Muslims (as in Iraq, it is fascinating to see that just as Muslims far outbreed non-Muslims, within Islam the Shi'a, who were kept down in both Lebanan and Iraq, have had their demographic revenge).
Iraq is not a "model" of anything, except for the Slow Learning Curve of American policynmakers. Why, it was just yesterday that they began to discover that these words
"Sunni" and "Shi'a" really stood for something, a divide that was not temporary, not something caused by Saddam Hussein that would end with his removal, but rather something much older. Relying on Bernard Lewis, who seriously proposed the possibliity of a monarch, and not merely a monarch but a Sunni Hashemite monarch (in other words, without namiing him, Lewis was offering an endorsement to his host and patron Prince Hassan) -- represented the low point of this political incomprehension not merely by Lewis, or by Woolsey (another enthusaist for sticking around and making Iraq a Light Unto the Muslim Nations).
This kind of thing, if it continues, will make the world safe for the kind of appeasers, those who will draw the wrong conclusions, and decide, from the tarbaby of Iraq, that nothing should be none -- no destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities, no need to check, here and there and everywhere, the various instruments of the Jihad. No, if the Adminitration does not soon forcefully become unstuck from the tarbaby of Iraq, it may leave as its legacy an American government whose comprehension of what is going on, and the need to deal with it, is even less successful, even more wrong-headed.
The best way to deal with Islam is not to deal with it, but rather to encourage education of Infidels so that they grasp far better than they do what is in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, understand the various ways that Islam is misrepresented by apologists who have crept into every relevant nook and sinister cranny -- the U.N., the BBC, the supposedly disinterested departments and centers of higher education, where it is almost impossible to begin to treat of Islam truthfully, in a way that Schacht, Abel, Margoliouth, Lammens, Snouck Hurgronje, K. S. Lal, or a hundred other scholars of Islam, so carefully removed from the up-to-date apologists' syllabus, would recognize. Instead we get sanitized (because bowdlerized) Qur'ans ("Approaching the Qur'an" by Michael Sells), and the defenders of such (Carl Ernst), and the whole departments that simply avoid Islam altogether (where, in all the offerings by Columbia's MEALAC, can one study the Hadith and the Sira -- or for that matter the history of Islamic conquest? Surely this is the subject of greatest signficance. Without such study of Islam, students cannot possibly understand anything that is going on today, or a hundred, or five hundred years ago, in the Middle East, in North Africa, or for that matter, in places where Muslims are present today, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is the biggest untold story -- not told, or told in a way that has nothing to do with rerality -- and this is true all over much of the Western world. There are, here and there, places where a single professor or two has held the line. Think of Walid Phares at his university. There are places where dismay at MESA Nostra is growing, and recognition of just how bad the problem of such apologists -- including the non-Muslim kind -- has become, but has not yet been publicly addressed, as it will have to be, by scholars with tenure who cannot be retaliated against.
What Putin sees as a "setback" to American policy should be seen as something else. The Hamas win is possibilty the best thing to have happened, for it forces a reconsideration, not merely of that whole Lesser Jihad against Israel (hint: there is nothing Israel can do, no further withrdawal, no words, no aid, that will ever make Believers all over the Muslim word accept an Infidel nation-state. If you understand this, you should not be thrown into despair, for "Darura" or the doctrine of Necessity, can be invoked by Muslims to justify inaction. Where the Infidel enemy is not only too strong, but seen as such so that the people of a ruler unwilling to go to war will not hold such inaction against him, then a kind of long-term peace -- not the "hudna" which Muslims offer only in order to break it, as they are required to, whenever they feel strong enough to do so -- can be established.
In 1960, or even 1970, or even 1980, who would have thought that within a short time the mighty Soviet Union would have collapsed, not because of an invasion, or an introdcution of "democracy" by the Americans, but rather becasue too many intelligent people within the Communist Party itself (Gorbachev) and advisors (Alexander Yakovlev) realized that on its own terms, Soviet Communism was a failure, an economic failure, a political failure, a moral failure.
Islam is much stronger; its hold much deeper. But it has internal divisions that are not the products of the outside world, and need no encouragement to work their own way. Despite the $10 trillion dollars received so far, the largest transfer of wealth in human history, from OPEC revenues, the Arab and Muslim oil states have failed everywhere to create modern economies (save for Turkey, which owes its development to the development, under Kemalism, of a secular class of entrepreneurs, and Malaysia, where the Chinese and Hindus who form nearly 50% of the population, are harnessed for the good of the Malaysian Muslims, who take out their Jizyah in disguised form, through the Bumpiputra system which transfers jobs and wealth, by law, from non-Muslims to Muslims).
That "setback" -- if it lets scales fall from eyes all over official Washington -- would be no setback at all. It would be the beginning of wisdom. It would be a godsend.
Counter to the US postion.Counter to sound judgment as well.Beyond Pres.Bush soul search of Putin,Russia has contering objectives in the Mideast.Russia is playing a double game,in the mideast oppose US objectives where possiable,Talk the talk the west likes to here.But Russias objectives-Interests remain little changed.Basically, minus the hope of spreading Soviet Idalologie.Many of the same policies from the coldwar era are creeping back to the overall Kremlin Global polcies.Either Isreal can recongnize Russias support of Hamas,and by that support Russias taset if not implied support of the Hamas goals.As well as Irans.Russias poor Moral Judgment in polcie in the mideast is sure to cause incresing conflict.But what else could Russia do,Support the US, Isreal, Denuonce Syria,Iran,Hamas,Hizzbolla etc..Ya right.The Bear is left with little other options then what there polcies are now.For good or for Ill.The Bear is still the Bear.
It's back to the good old bad days of the cold war, it seems - But let Russia imbibe the scabrous brew of Hamas, and the "Palestinian" cause, and in so doing, let them drink deeply from the Islamist cup -- let them slake their Russian lust for prestige in the world, and let them become drunk on Islamic Jihad... Let Russia become the darlings of Islam, the party without which no peace is suposedly possible -- Americans are tired of playing this sorrowful hopeless role on the world stage -- tired of waiting for the Muslims to deliver one tiny dram of good faith in the search for ME peace...
Red Rover! Red Rover!
Let Russia take over!
The Russians are fools to continue this gambit with the same enemy we will all face one day. Russian Orthodox must side with the West against the same common enemy.
I't's insane on their part to supprt HAMMAS given HAMAS views on Chechnia and other ex-soviet republics on which they would love to see a Taliban like regime installed!
But then again Russian goverments jhave never to smart to begin with.
Another signal that Doomsday is upon us...
Oh well!
Let the Russians have go at that whole mess. Let them send their rubles to the wonderful state that Hamas will set up now that they have been democratically elected. And, let them enjoy the gratitude of the Palestinians when the Russians find Palestinian "freedom fighters" helping their fellow Muslims in the killing fields of Chechnya. Good luck..and with that said, can American taxpayers now close our national checkbook to Hamas and their supporters in Gaza?
Some prurient insight from Russia with love. America's problem is a sexually frustrated Secretary of State.
From Pravda; "Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, has won the respectable reputation of an iron lady in world politics. Condoleezza Rice does not think twice to start a vigorous fight against all manifestations of evil and injustice, which she may notice in the world. “Condoleezza Rice is a very cruel, offended woman who lacks men's attention. She needs to be taken to a company of soldiers and it would be just fine," Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky believes." Read more http://english.pravda.ru/topic/Condoleezza_Rice-1
I agree Russia should unite with the West and fight Islam, but I think it is the West and not Russia keeping this from happening. The west still supports Chechnya. The US and Europe are hell bent on giving kosovo independance from Serbia. Jack straw has made some strong pro turkish comments lately about cyprus. I think the West must stop seeing Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediteranean as a sacrificial lamb to appease Islam. If Putin thinks that the Muslim world is his friend then he is a fool. If he is just sticking it too the americans I almost cant blame him.
I said it many times before here on JihadWatch
that the Cold War is NOT over.
These events plus Russia's helping Iran with nuke
should make people open their eyes and stop engaging in wishful thinking.
Part of America's problem in that we have great confidence in accomplishments which at times makes us blind until it hits us in the butt.
Arafat was a pawn of Russia and they know that terrorism is the only they can attack us without getting attacked by us.
Putin is KGB and once KGB always KGB!
As an Israeli I'm saying this.
Putin is a two timing whore for doing this.
Hamas is a terror organization. there is no negotioation with terror (or islamic ppl).
The hell with that two timing whore.