The Palestinian Election, Pt 2

RAMON RODRIGUEZ
ph/fax-805-524-5480
Copyright MMVI

Even while the United States, Israel and their allies try laboriously to digest the meaning of last week’s monumental Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, Ayman al-Zawahiri issued his latest pronouncement, gleefully letting it be known that President Bush failed to kill him in Damadola on January 13, even though many "innocents" were killed instead. This Friday the 13th turned out to be an especially bad day for the president, since not only did he fail to kill his quarry, he gave the latter ample ammunition with which to fire back with rhetorical taunts and threats even deadlier than a missile strike launched from a far-off drone.

So both the lion of Islam, Sheik Osama bin Laden, and Dr. Al-Zawahiri have addressed the Islamic masses and the world in less than a fortnight, the effect being to remind us that President Bush has so far failed to bring these two mujahadin to justice, and the message being that both are alive and well and in firm control, that both these Islamic revolutionaries remain relevant and are still giving orders to their dispersed lieutenants around the globe. Both thus remain able to rally their followers, to issue new orders to them, to reinforce or increase their morale, to recruit new followers to their cause. Al-Qaeda continues to win the propaganda war, just as it seems to be achieving victory not just on the battlefield but also in the polling station.

The fact that Messrs. Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri both appeared around the time of the Palestinian parliamentary election, is not entirely happenstance, though to the uninitiated and the unaware there is no connection between the two occurrences. But the fact is that AQ in part justifies its war against the West on the basis of the latter’s treatment of the Palestinians, The Palestinian issue is at the heart of the conflict between the fundamentalists and the US and its allies, including Israel. The failure of the West to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians while Yasser Arafat was still alive and headed the PLO and the Palestinian Authority in part led to the formation of Al Qaeda and in turn led to the attacks of 11 September 2001. That same abysmal failure to deal fairly with the Palestinians led to the earth-shaking victory of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections. The Hamas triumph represents a historic turning point in the Middle East, where the so-called "hard-liners", the feared fundamentalists, are coming to power not necessarily by violent means but mainly through the political process and by peaceful means, a development that seems to be so far the crowning achievement of Mr. Bush’s war in the Middle East.

There is a connection between the Hamas triumph and Al Qaeda, in that both are responses to Western imperialism. Both represent victories of Islamic Fundamentalism, just as the victory of the religious Shiites in the recent parliamentary elections in Iraq represent another such victory, which victory is bringing to power in Iraq the same fundamentalists. In Iran, a secular kind of fundamentalism seems to be taking root and taking power, but a fundamentalism no less inimical to American and Western interests than the religious variety.   So from one end of the Islamic political spectrum to the other, from Teheran to Palestine, the fundamentalists are finally taking power by political means, which is quite ironic, since the United States did so much to give impetus to the fundamentalists in the first place by their continued domination of and machinations in, the Middle East, particularly in the form of the American mistreatment of the Palestinians.