Iran president urges Hamas leader to stand firm

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged visiting Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on Saturday not to bow to pressure to recognize Israel and to keep fighting the Jewish state, local media reported.

Haniyeh, on a four-day visit to one of the strongest backers of his Hamas government, thanked Iran for its support and vowed not to cede to Western demands that it renounce violence, recognize existing interim peace accords and recognize the Jewish state.

"The Iranian nation will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Palestinian people until Jerusalem is liberated ... And will never fall short in any kind of support," Ahmadinejad told Haniyeh in Tehran, the semi-official ISNA students news agency reported.

Iran's support for the Palestinians has grown more vocal since Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005. The former Revolutionary Guardsman has called the Israeli state a "tumor" which must be "wiped off the map".


http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3337855,00.html

the check is in the mail

look for Hamas to increase it's attacks on Israel

The US and Israel made a mistake to isolate Hamas. By doing so, and withholding funds, Hamas' failure can be chalked about to Western antagonism and Western hypocrisy in not accepting the democratic results of the Palestinian election. US/Israel would have been wiser to allow Hamas to fail on their own, allow the Palestinians to see the cause & effect, and then democratically remove them from power. If their democratic actions are not respected by the rest of the world, what motivation do the Palestinians have of staying with democracy?

.. it could have taken many more years to get to this point. Many more years of the occasional rockets and tunnels and many more years to teach their kids to hate Jews so that when it does collapse they'll have plenty of eager jihadis.

In actuality the money is not great. And the damage they can do with the money is also not significant. If we endured a period of a year or two with somewhat higher violence, in order for the Palestinians to learn that aggression is not the answer, it would be well worth it for a war that has lasted decades.

in order to conclude that agression is not the answer.

Clinton said it best, the Palestinians have lived with a sense of "collective irresonsibility". What he meant was that with Arafat as a self-anointed leader, and Hamas committing much of the violence, the average Palestinian had neither influence over their country's direction nor responsibility for it, as a result. The incentive for democracy was to allow Palestinians for once to dictate their fate and, should they face consequences, they would see them as the direct result of their actions. Polls in the region showed that the average Palestinian wanted peace with Israel. I can't explain how Hamas was elected, but were the West to accept the Palestinian people's democratic decision, the situation would worsen anyway for the Palestinians with Hamas' leadership and the Palestinian people would, for the first time, accept direct responsibility for supporting aggression. But now that the West refused to accept the results, Hamas has failed, but it can always be rationalized that it wasn't Hamas which failed, but the West which thwarted their efforts. A golden opportunity was lost. Thomas Friedman made this point months ago; unfortunately, too few listened.

It's not like Haniyeh is asking to sit down and negotiate a peace agreement with Olmert.

What would constitute Israel accepting Hamas when Hamas does not recognize Israel?

Let's say that Israel were to maintain its policies with the Palestinians during Hamas' tenure. And at the end of their tenure, the Palestinians thought to themselves, "We thought Hamas was good for us. Instead they've brought us more poverty and no progress. And more violence. This isn't Israel's fault or the US's fault. This is our fault for voting for Hamas and believing they would better our lot".

The problem is that though we know Hamas is wrong. However, the Palestinians do not know with certainty. And now that uncertainty will continue.

a society cannot exist if it cannot take resonsability for its own actions....a palestenain society that blames israel for all its failures and use violence and teaching that violence will continue after any kind of 'statehood"...Failed states are not uncommon and lead to increased violence both internal and external.

somewhere along the line...someone in power has to borrow trumans desk sign: the buck stops here

I already answered your question in my previous posts.

the question of if and when the palesteanians will learn to accept responsability is an "open question"....we've had two very powerful arabs speak opposing views on the subject.

the editor of Al jazzera blames israel for everything, including lack of health care in jordan

the hamas speaker puts much of the blame on themselves.....

we hope that in this case "hamas wins"

if Hamas had been allowed to govern, it would have been seen as a point of pride (one the one hand) and nobody would have been satisfied (on the other hand).

Pride, because the Israelis had been twarted and shown to be impotent. But without satisfaction, because the problems facing the Palestinians are long term.

But the dissatisfaction wouldn't have been directed towards their own; some external actor would be blamed--the US, Europe, Israel--no matter how farfetched and implausible the reasoning. But in most regards there could be plausible excuses: Insufficient foreign investment, insufficient foreign support, a lack of land, a lack of water, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

The thing about irresponsibility is that it can always find a scapegoat. And with collective irresponsibility, the scapegoat is always some other collective. So it's been for centuries in that part of the world, and so it is today.

But we don't know. Because this is the first time that the Palestinians have practiced democracy, where people take responsibility for their government's actions- after all, they put them there. So you might be right- they might concoct a new excuse. Or they might own up. Now we'll never know.