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Contributors
Daniel Pipes- Contributor
Daniel
Pipes is director of the Middle
East Forum, a member of the
presidentially-appointed board of the U.S.
Institute of Peace,
and a prize-winning columnist for the New York Sun and The
Jerusalem Post. His most recent book, Miniatures:
Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics (Transaction
Publishers) appeared in late 2003. His website, DanielPipes.org,
the single most accessed source of information specifically
on
the Middle East and Islam, offers an archive and a chance
to sign-up to receive his new materials as they appear. [go
to Pipes index]
 Sharing
Jokes with Hamas
Please Don't Call It Terrorism...
[Daniel Pipes] 4/26/05
Shortly after
Yusra Azzami, 20, strolled with her fiancé and her sister on
the beach in Gaza last week, the vigilantes
from Hamas formed suspicions that she was engaged in "immoral
behavior." They followed her, shot her dead as she sat in her
fiancé's car, dragged her corpse out and mutilated it savagely
with clubs and iron bars.
This atrocity
follows on Hamas having murdered
over four hundred Israelis going about their daily business
since 2000. Unsurprisingly, the American and other governments
consider Hamas as a terrorist organization.
But how do
they deal with such an organization? Two very different approaches
exist, and President George W. Bush has articulated them both.
In June 2003, he stated that "the
free world, those who love freedom and peace, must deal harshly
with Hamas" and specified that "Hamas
must be dismantled." Last month, however, he offered
Hezbollah a chance to prove it's not a terrorist organization
and redeem itself "by laying down arms and not threatening
peace."
This alarming
second view builds on an outlook with growing support within
the U.S. government. Many diplomats and intelligence officials
believe, for example, that engaging the Muslim Brethren in
Egypt (in the Washington
Post's description) "offers an opportunity for political
engagement that could help isolate violent jihadists." And
Arabic-language news sources report that American officials
in Egypt recently met with Muslim Brethren leaders.
To forward
this wrong-headed idea, an organization called the Conflicts
Forum was founded in December 2004. It has the immodest goal
of not just changing policy toward radical Islamic terrorist
groups, but changing how Westerners see radical Islam itself.
Conflicts Forum wants to challenge "the prevailing western
orthodoxy that perceives Islamism as an ideology that is hostile
to the agenda for global democracy and good governance."
Conflicts
Forum has several advantages, starting with the fact that what
it terms the "prevailing Western orthodoxy" is as noted above quite
soft. The group's founder and leader, Alastair Crooke, 55,
was a ranking figure in both British intelligence and European
Union diplomacy, someone who hobnobs with insiders, gives upbeat
speeches at premier venues ("It
is Essential to Negotiate with Terrorists" at the London
School of Economics," "Can
Hamas Be A Political Partner?" at the Council on Foreign
Relations), and enjoys
a fawning press.
But Crooke's
true identity came out in a clandestine meeting he held with
the Hamas leadership in June 2002, at a time when he still
represented the European Union. We have an
account of the meeting prepared by Hamas (which Crooke claims
is inaccurate). It deserves reading in full for an insight
into Crooke's amoral, craven, appeasing, and dhimmi-like, mentality.
- He recounts
to Hamas having insisted to two high-ranking European politicians
that "the status of Europe in the eyes of the Palestinians
has started to deteriorate" because Europe did not adequately
support the Palestinians.
- "The main
problem [in the Middle East] is the Israeli occupation," which
is music to Hamas ears.
- "As for
terrorism, I hate that word," he tells leaders of a leading
terrorist organization, going on to imply that he instead
sees Hamas operatives as "freedom fighters."
This last
fits Crooke's routine public dismissal of terrorism as a threat.
The West, he
says, faces not "terrorism" (his quote marks) but a distinctly
less nasty "sophisticated, asymmetrical, broad-based and irregular
insurgency." And his Conflicts Forum, dubbed
by journalist Patrick Seale "a club of disaffected diplomats
and intelligence officers," engages in a pleasant form of personal
diplomacy that diminishes the horror of Islamist terrorism.
Thus, at
a Conflicts Forum meeting last month in Beirut with the leadership
of four Islamist terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hizbullah,
the mood and the food were too good to allow this inconvenient
subject to intrude. Stephen Grey, a journalist covering the
event, later reflected
on it: "Invited to dinner with the participants in the
Beirut talks, and sharing jokes with the Hamas men over tiger
prawns, avocado, pasta and cherry tomatoes, I wondered privately
how one would explain all this intimacy to the mother of a
child killed by a suicide bomber."
Conflicts
Forum offers a seductive alternative to the hard business of
waging and winning a war. Unfortunately, its wrong-headed,
defeatist, and doomed approach amounts to preemptively losing
the war. Its counsel deserves a round rejection. tRO
This piece first appeared in Jerusalem
Post
copyright
2005 Daniel Pipes
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