In “Our Terrorists Are Better Than Your Terrorists,” at NRO, the always perceptive Andrew C. McCarthy blisters the Bush Administration’s foolish policy toward Fatah:
President Bush’s stirring post-9/11 message that regimes the world over have to choose between aligning with civilization or with terrorists should officially be interred in war-torn “Palestine.” Seriousness about the doctrine is the only realistic way to defeat our enemies, and now we make a mockery of it. A mockery built on the trifecta-fiction that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is an avatar of peace, that his Fatah faction has aligned with civilization, and that the Palestinian people “” the ones who freely chose to install Hamas as their parliamentary majority and who have trademarked “Intifada” as an instrument of statecraft “” are somehow worth prostituting ourselves over.
In the Palestinian civil war, the Bush administration has unabashedly cast its lot with Fatah. The United States, in the midst of its own global war against Islamic radicalism, is promising additional millions in foreign aid for a cabal which maintains its own jihadist wing, and which is so thoroughly corrupt “” having pocketed much of the foreign aid billions that poured in over the last two decades “” that Palestinians opted for the more transparent Hamas terrorists when given the option.
Fatah is the creation of the late terror master, Yasser Arafat. It is currently led by Abbas, formerly Arafat’s close aid. When last we left Abbas, the administration’s favorite “moderate,” he was laying a wreath at The Great Man’s grave “” the Palestinians, by the way, have turned the site into an Arafat shrine, telling us everything we need to know about them.
Abbas proceeded to urge a throng of 50,000 Palestinians to re-aim their guns at the “occupation” (that would be Israel) instead of turning them on each other: “[W]ith the will and determination of its sons, Fatah has and will continue,” he brayed. “We will not give up our principles and we have said that rifles should be directed against the occupation…. We have a legitimate right to direct our guns against Israeli occupation….”
That was less than six months ago “” despite administration assertions on Monday that Abbas is “a partner who is committed to peace.” And none of it was a surprise. When Abbas was seeking election in 2005, he declared to a cheering mob in Gaza that Palestinian terrorists being sought by Israel were “heroes fighting for freedom.”
Read it all.