Freed from his politically correct overseers at the New York Times, Joel Brinkley provides an honest assessment of Hamas. While President Bush and other Western leaders stumble over each other as they scramble to embrace Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, the leaders of Hamas are locked away in their new Gaza kingdom. Within days, tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid will begin sluicing into Fatah bank accounts -- while little more than emergency assistance trickles into Gaza. Israel is still debating whether to resume deliveries of gasoline. The Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, said it best early last week: "'The Palestinians have come close to putting, by themselves, the last nail in the coffin of the Palestinian cause." That's a time-worn truism about the Palestinians, but the way events developed through the week, it seemed to fit Hamas best.
Where does the global human rights movement stand in the seventh year of the 21st century? If the first year of the United Nations Human Rights Council is any indication, it's grown sick and cynical -- partly because of the fecklessness and flexible morality of some of the very governments and groups that claim to be most committed to democratic values.
This is progress. Maybe the Hamas slaughter of Fatah in Gaza has been clarifying.
Ed Lasky adds:
Brinkley is a former NYT reporter responsible for covering the Middle East until he left the paper a short time ago. He clearly felt these views during that period, but refrained from expressing them in the New York Times. The paper not only reported positively about Hamas (the social service" angle that allowed the paper to whitewash Hamas) the paper allowed Hamas leaders and their supporters to publish op-eds that spun the image of Hamas; meanwhile, the paper all but ignored the extremism that was and is rife within Hamas. What does this say about "free speech" at the Times, journalistic credibility, editorial oversight and control, and the paper's ideologically driven agenda towards Israel?
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