Hamas: Islamo-fascist threat

The Australian editorial 10/4/06 calls for Hamas to "adapt" to Israel. A number of letters to the editor were published in response (11/4/06). This is the full text of one letter . . .

Dear Sir
Your Editorial today ("Hamas must adapt", 10th April) expresses a commendable but sadly unrealistic hope: that Hamas will reinvent itself soon. This won't happen and the time has come to seek other answers for the misery being endured by people of the region, above all the Palestinian Arabs.

Hamas views its political mission as the vanguard of the worldwide Islamic revolution led by its parent movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. Its election win is simply a tactic to establish Islamic rule under Sharia law and will lead, in fact, to the eradication of democracy under its regime. Hitler similarly used democratic means to establish his version of totalitarianism.

History makes it clear that the Arab nations, including the Palestinians, are not really interested in Palestinian statehood at all. They have rejected every single proposal to establish a state, including the 1937 Peel Commission, the 1939 British White Paper, the 1947 UN partition plan, the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace negotiations, and the 1993-2000 Oslo process culminating in Barak's offer. From 1948 to 1967, Israel did not control the West Bank. The Palestinians could have demanded, and the Jordanians could have granted, an independent state, but did not.
The Palestinian humanitarian crisis is caused less by the aspiration to establish a Palestinian state and more by the aspiration to destroy the Jewish state. Your editorial call to abandon this futile mission as a necessary precursor to true peace is right, but unrealistic. It won't happen soon, and certainly not under the leadership of Hamas.

What's needed is for the Arab nations to stop using the Palestinians as political pawns. Under the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) established exclusively and temporarily for Palestinians in 1949, and with a unique definition of the term "refugee", half a million Palestinian refugees of the late 1940s have today become four million-plus. Every other group of refugees over the past 60 years (including over 20 million European refugees of WW2 and 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab nations) under the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), has dwindled in number as people are resettled. The PA has administered Gaza and its eight refugee camps since 1994. Rather than encourage Palestinians to resettle in new locations or assume responsibility for their own lives under the Palestinian Authority, the Arab world, abetted by UNRWA, has actively expanded Palestinian refugee numbers and exacerbated their misery, as a ploy to destroy Israel.

You cannot expect Hamas to lead the Arab world into acceptance of a Jewish neighbour.

Hamas is an Islamo-fascist threat to Israel, Arab democracy, and the whole civilised world. The abandonment of the dream of destroying Israel must start with the truly moderate Arab nations and dawn on the whole Arab world ....

Regards . . .