Hamas voters

Mark Steyn:

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Oh, no no no, some analysts assured us. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because of the policy plank about obliterating the State of Israel but because Fatah is hopelessly corrupt. Which is true: the European Union bankrolled the Palestinian Authority since its creation and Yasser and his buddies salted most of the dough away in their Swiss bank accounts and used the loose change to fund the Intifada. After 10 years, you can't blame the Palestinians for figuring it's time to give another group of people a chance to siphon off all that EU booty.
So I would like to believe this was a vote for getting rid of corruption rather than getting rid of Jews. But that's hard to square with some of the newly elected legislators. For example, Mariam Farahat, a mother of three, was elected in Gaza. She once was a mother of six but three of her sons self-detonated on suicide missions against Israel. She's a household name to Palestinians, known as Um Nidal -- Mother of the Struggle -- and, at the rate she's getting through her kids, the Struggle's all she'll be Mother of. She's famous for a Hamas recruitment video in which she shows her 17-year-old son how to kill Israelis and then tells him not to come back. It's the Hamas version of 42nd Street: You're going out there a youngster but you've got to come back in small pieces.
It may be she stood for parliament because she has a yen to be junior transport minister or deputy secretary of fisheries. But it seems likelier she and her Hamas colleagues were elected because this is who the Palestinian people are, this is what they believe. The Palestinians are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the Earth: after 60 years as U.N. "refugees," they're now so depraved they're electing candidates on the basis of child sacrifice. To take two contemporaneous crises, imagine if the population displacements caused by the end of World War II and by the partition of British India had also been left to the U.N. to manage and six decades later they were still running the "refugee" "camps," now full of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, none of whom ever lived in any of the places they're supposed to be refugees from. Would you wish that fate on post-war Central Europe or the Indian Subcontinent?
So what happens now? Either Hamas forms a government and decides operating highway departments and sewer systems is what it really wants to do with itself. Or, like Arafat, it figures it has no interest in government except as a useful front for terrorist operations. If it's the former, all well and good: many first-rate terror organizations have managed to convert themselves to third-rate national-liberation governments. But, if it's the latter, that too is useful: Hamas is the honest expression of the will of the Palestinian electorate, and the cold hard truth of that is something Europeans and Americans will find hard to avoid.
As with Joel Stein, you're always better off knowing what people honestly think. For decades, Middle East dictators justified themselves to Washington as a restraint on the baser urges of their citizens, but in the end they only incubated worse pathologies. Western subsidy of Arafatistan is merely the latest example. Democracy in the Middle East is not always pretty, but it's better than the West's sillier illusions.